It was a place that I can’t imagine going back to, sure I’ve been back, and it’s really funny now that I think about it.  I wasn’t laughing at the time.  It was this place I dreaded, you know, in the way that you dread the dentist, a long drive, or the morgue. There was this kid and I mean he was just a kid, like the first grade.  He’s was the toughest kid I knew, at the time anyway, I’ve met tougher since. The first grade is supposed to be a wonderfully comfortable place filled with nurturing and learning.  A place that creates the foundation of your educational experience.  It wasn’t that for me.  I was on the run from Tom West, and the funny thing about it, he looked forward to seeing me everyday.  I didn’t study very hard, never did my homework, I took it for granted.  I knew that eventually I’d pass, whether it was now or later, it didn’t matter to me.

 

We all have bullies in our lives.  I’m not special.  I could point in one direction while in line at the supermarket and find 100 people with worse stories than mine.  But that doesn’t make them better, just different. I was a classic underachiever. Didn’t care about school, learning, math, English, or paying attention.  I was consumed with Steve Austin, and my life revolved around the television show The Six Million Dollar Man. One day I came home from school and told my mother that everyone else in school had a middle name, and I wanted to know why I didn’t? She told me that it never came up when they were giving me my name.  She told me I could have whatever middle name I wanted.  Note to Mom’s the world over, give your kid a middle name, don’t leave it up to them. I wanted mine to be Austin, you know, like Steve Austin.  So be it, my mother said and down to city hall we went to make the change.  

 

Tom West stole all the pencils from everyone before they came back from recess one day. I saw him do it.  I already hated Tom, not for what he did to others, but that he got away with it, and charmed his way around the school by stealing, lying and cheating.  This made me want to shove him off the ladder of the highest slide I could find.   When Ms. Smith, our larger than life teacher came back to the room and asked everyone to get to work I knew I had a chance to make Tom’s life miserable.  She moved like a water buffalo during a drought.  Her eyes bulged while her head and wandering waist moved in separate directions.  Her arms hung by her side looking for something to grab, she usually found someones hair with a little boy attached.

 

Tom had stolen my lunch, him and his brother, everyday for the last two weeks, like clockwork, they would sit down across from me in the lunchroom and take my lunch.  Sometimes right out of my hand. I didn’t like Tom. So a little ripple of excitement ran across my body and sweat moistened my palms as I watched the class go mum. I told Ms. Smith who took the pencils, and when Tom was being dragged from his desk after telling her that he didn’t do it, he looked at me and told me I was dead.  Shock ran across my face and I felt like I’d seen a ghost.  You know that feeling where a cool breeze blows across your stomach and the tips of your fingers tingle.  Some people say the hair stands up on the back of their necks.  This is that moment when you want to dig a hole and pull it in on top of you.  Tom screamed bloody murder from the bathroom while Ms. Smith spanked him with a rolled up newspaper.  I knew what was coming, and I knew it before I got Tom in trouble, but I did it anyway.

 

Later that day during gym class when we were learning how to swim Tom had a friend of his who could swim a little bit better than everyone else come over and tried to drown me.  Tom got out of the pool while his pal was holding me underwater.  I saw what little life I had flash in front of me while the gym teacher reached down and pulled the kid off me by dragging him from the pool by his hair.  When class was over I was one of the last kids to make it to the locker room.  I found my locker empty and everyone standing in the communal bathrooms looking at something in one of the toilets.  It was my clothes.  While I was learning to breath underwater Tom was flushing my clothes down the toilet.  He took the time to shit and piss on them for good measure. I felt a shiver on my back not from the beads of water running off my skin but from a wave of fear that stayed with me for the next six months.  I looked over my shoulder for a long time after that.  As I knew Tom wasn’t done with me yet. 

 

He followed me home one day after he stole my lunch.  He threw rocks at me while I walked in front of him trying to ignore him. Sometimes the small rocks bounced of my head and the pain was so fierce that I had to hold back the hot tears and the furious anger I felt for Tom.  I imagined myself beating him to death with a lead pipe. When I got to my house I went in and found my after school snack and watched from the front window as Tom stood outside staring at my house with my sandwich in his hand.  He threw the sandwich still safely tucked in the zip lock back onto the roof of my house.  As if it mattered where he threw it.  I was safe inside my house, I didn’t care. 

 

A few weeks later I was walking through the library which sat in the middle of our school, classrooms radiated off of it, and the stacks of books themselves became a maze.  I heard a young girl screaming and I followed the sound until I found Tom on top of a girl from our class, holding her down like a cowboy wrestling a calf, her voice grew weaker as he ripped her blue jeans down revealing her tiny panties. I remember the little strawberry pattern and how they glowed under the fluorescent light.  He looked at me for a moment and I saw a crazy hell bent look in his eyes. I was worried he’d turn his attention on me, so I left without saying anything.

 

Not long after that I was hanging out in the park near my house and just across the road from my school when I came across a few dozen Easter eggs.  In a nearby trash can I found a bag and started to fill it up with the hard boiled eggs with all the pretty designs on them.  Far away on the other side of the park I could see a group of people who looked like they were there for an event of some sort.  I thought I could make out Tom’s profile, and I even think I heard his voice.  The group started shouting at me, and after a few minutes I realized they were getting ready for an Easter egg hunt, and there I was collecting the eggs.  I didn’t put them back, I just went home and tried to hide them in our refrigerator.

 

When my parents finally did move we were rolling out of town and I was watching the buildings and streets pass us by.  We stopped at an intersection and while I was waiting for the light to turn green I looked up at an apartment building to the bay window on the second floor.  This building looked like everything else around it, and for no reason I stared at the big picture windows.  It was a beautifully sunny day and the windows were very bright as the sun reflected off the white drapes.  Suddenly the light was broken as Tom stepped onto the ledge between the window and the drapes looking down to me while I sat in my mothers car. This was a random coincidence and in no way did I expect him to pop up like this.  I got scared for a moment but I realized I was leaving town, so the fear left me with a strong self confident attitude that seemed more than logical. His body stood out against the white background, his legs and arms were skinny and his stomach washboard tight.  He was stark naked and holding the middle finger up on each of his hands.  I noticed his penis pressing up against the glass and a clump of pubic hair around it looked like the Brillo pad my mother used to clean dried pasta sauce off of our cast iron frying pan. I read his lips and knew exactly what he was saying, he looked down to me as we pulled away. I could have thrown him the finger, but I just smiled in a way that I hoped would make me look like I didn’t care what happened to him.  I felt the car move forward and I looked to see where we were going and in that moment I realized that I’d never see Tom again.