Later that same year, I took my girlfriend to the park, and yes, you’d think that a nine-year-old homosexual having a girlfriend would be the direction I’m going with this, but it’s actually not, so just get that right out of your head. I was nine years old and she had good clothes and nice hair and agreed to be my girlfriend, so it was absolutely real. Yes, the fact that I didn’t know I was gay yet maybe foretold my lack of simple intuition, but that’s not really the focus here. We were on a kid date. We rode our bikes to the park together, and held hands on the swings, and it would’ve been a perfectly magical afternoon had we not been confronted by a drifting gang of fifth-graders determined to ruin our budding heterosexual romance.

I don’t know why these fifth-graders were so intent on ruining our park date, besides the fact that children are trapped in a Darwinian struggle for a higher place in the playground hierarchy, which makes them unusually vicious and cruel. These children were no exception.

Their leader, a skinny but muscley eleven-year-old named Kyle who I’m pretty sure does meth now, approached me and shouted something like, “AWWW. ARE YOU ON A DATE WITH YOUR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND?!” And I had to be all like, “Um, technically we’re not putting any labels on it right now, we’re just kinda testing things out and exploring our likes and dislikes—” But before I could finish, he started lunging at me like a pimply jaguar pouncing on a portly, defenseless antelope, and I had to react.

Now, this is the point where most humans would mount some semblance of a defense, if not for their safety then at least for their dignity. But I was never taught to fight. My idea of self-defense was to simply avoid danger by never leaving the house. My parents never had to worry about teaching me to defend myself because I was rarely ever in nature long enough to put myself at any reasonable risk. (That being said, I guarantee you neither of my parents can throw a punch.)

So I did the only thing I knew how to do well: I froze. I stood frigid with my hands glued to the sides of my hips like I’d been tied up with invisible rope and waited for impact. When his body collided with mine, I fell to the ground like a toppled tree. And I lay there motionless, with his body on top of mine, hoping that if I remained inanimate long enough, he’d think he’d killed me and would move on to his next target.