The Selfish Accelerated Reader

It was noontime and I was 12 years old, and all I really cared about was living a few more months.

See, I had dreamed about my 13th birthday since before I turned 9. Not for the presents, of course— though I had heard through the colloquial grapevine that they're quite good when you turn 13. A neighbor of mine from back in Virginia received an iPhone for his 13th birthday. Engraved under the ubiquitous Apple logo were the words "To Our Young Man With Love."

Forget the phone, I remember thinking. I wanted those words. I wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to join the ranks of the non-childish and command more respect from my peers and my superiors and my parents after I crossed that all-important threshold. People would start to notice how mature I was for my age once I turned 13, or so I figured.

Instead it was noontime and I was 12 years old and in a few hours I would be definitively prevented from turning 13, due to death.

I looked down at my last meal. Great. There was not a single morsel of refined sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to be found in my unassuming red lunch pack. Nothing to take the edge off.

My loving mother would have certainly packed things differently if she'd known about her son's impending demise. Every death row inmate has a right to a Dublin Dr. Pepper, even if their scheduled execution happens to fall on a no-sodas-allowed weekday. And Gushers, too. And a fistfull of the Halloween candy my mom oh-so-wisely rations during the rest of the year.

That would be such a fitting culinary finale: Indulgent, childish and cheap. My achy, busting gut would lead me outside and to my final resting place in the dirt pit next to the swings on the playground. And when the body blows finally stopped, I would die with a half-pound of sugar numbing my frail, broken body.

How sad, I lamented as I jabbed my small, white straw through the foil cap at the top of my Big Kid's Juicy Juice.

No, no, wait. Mom is more than kind, I thought— she's smart. And she loves me. If I had told her about everything at the beginning of the week, she would have definitely hidden a few throwing stars between the slices of ham in my sandwich. I could even picture my quilted napkin stained with an encouraging note.

"I packed you something extra to get you through your fight with Tommy. XOXO, Mom."

But Mom didn't know, so she didn't pack me any weapons, keep me home from school or anything.

I paced my slow, methodical bites with every other tick of the giant black-and-white clock hanging above the lunchroom. I was sitting off by myself because I told my friends that I needed to be alone with my thoughts. They had conceded and dispersed with urgency as to imply that I needed as much time as possible to get my affairs in order. To plan an escape. To save my own ass.

1) There is no escape.
2) This is happening to me for a reason.

I vacillated between these two thoughts for an eternity before the 12:35 bell snapped me out of my melancholic stupor. Guilty and literally alone, I left the lunchroom feeling like I had wasted my only opportunity to solve this problem myself.

~~~

Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that you've been standing in a 4-way intersection, blindfolded, for hours. Cars race by you indiscriminately. You can hear engines everywhere. You can feel them warping the air as they push toward their own respective destinations with no regard as to why there is a blindfolded child standing in the intersection. But you can't see them. And then suddenly, you feel something begin to press on your shoulder. You accept your fate and flinch and hope that the next blow is the conclusive coup de grace.

That's how I flinched when James tapped me on the shoulder after English class. The time was now seconds after 1:35. Less than two hours until my own personal Iwo Jima. My body was electrically tense.

"Whoa there," James rebounded. "Didn't mean to scare you."

I tried to casually turn my head and acknowledge my well-meaning friend, but instead my head bobbled and jerked like a crazy person. I was giving him the Sideways Stare by the time I finally made eye contact.

"He-ey," I said flatly, trudging along as James stepped alongside me.

"Dude, come on," he began immediately. James was about to try and cheer me up. "You know this isn't like, the end. All the guys I've talked to think you're being downright melodramatic about this fight with Tommy."

"James," I began, "while I appreciate what you're doing, there is no way for me to convey to you the isolation and hopelessness I'm feeling right now. If I could, you would understand why downplaying the situation certainly will not cheer me up."

"Hmmph." He motioned toward the goth kids clustered at the end of the corridor, playing some trading card game. "You think they know your pain?"

I grinned. God damn, he's good. There goes my veil of melancholy. It's a lot easier to deal with people when they think you're a sad pile. That, definitely, the goth kids would understand.

"You're retarded," I countered with age-appropriate instinct. We pushed through the heavy fire doors at the end of the hall. The change in lighting and scenery seemed like a good opportunity to also shift the conversation a little bit. "What made Tommy so violent, anyways?"

He looked at me like, duh, we all know what you did. He didn't have to say anything for me to get the point.

"No, no no," I continued. "Like, Tommy is a pure sociopath. He's the guy everyone warned me about when I moved here. What makes him so— "

"Fucking evil? A natural psychopath?" James energetically shrugged with a smile.

"Exactly."

James' smile turned to a glare and he didn't say anything but walked by my side as I approached my locker.

"Look, you need get one thing straight," he then started once I popped the locker open. "Your frustration with this situation that you caused is absolutely separate from Tommy's nature as a human being."

"That's absolutely not true," I retaliated, confused as to why my own friend would want to argue about such a seemingly cut-and-dry matter right now.

I mean, I'm about to die, I thought. If anything, I wanted him to lie to me, to tell me that Tommy's an animal-torturing nutjob living with an emotionally-abusive, alcoholic, ex-cop grandparent. I wanted to hear how said grandparent methodically recounted gruesome, violent crimes to his grandson every night before bed. Tell me that's why I'm about to die, I wished.

"You are being punished for committing a very popular crime of passion that has been met with similar consequences for centuries. Just think of Tommy as a very effective executor of said consequences."

"You're missing the point of my question entirely," I sigh with unfriendly exasperation as I slam my locker shut. "You wouldn't break every bone in my body if I'd done the same thing to you."

"If you did the same thing to me," James snapped back, "I would torture you. I would manipulate and ruin you in ways that lumbering, remedial, lonely jocks like Tommy simply cannot comprehend."

"Well, I guess that makes me the luckiest guy in the world."

"But you are," James continued coldly. Then, breathlessly and with animated hands shaking near my face, "Your so-called 'torment' will be over in a matter of hours. Every god damn student at this school will consider your punishment to be adequate and the lasting consequence of your reckless and irresponsible actions will be a slight tarnish on your reputation and you don't even care about your reputation or else we would be having a completely different conversation right now."

Bewildered, I asked him what that conversation we should be having.

"If and how you can really make things right with Tommy, instead of taking the easy way out."

There was no one standing around us— the bell had sounded in the midst of James' tirade. Frustrated by my confusion and with no grandiose points left to make, James hurled his heavy messenger bag over his shoulder and began to walk away.

"Well, can I?" I shouted as I inched backward toward my next class.

"I don't think it's in your nature," he shouted back.

~~~

Tommy stood over me like a giant, chiseled idol erected by fearful savages of an era passed. It was now or never. I'd spent the last hour reaching through layers of meta-cognition to find the words that would express my guilt and sorrow. And on the other hand, I knew I had to say what I meant and not what he wanted to hear to get out of the situation.

It was now or never.

"Look," I began with a hundred thousand eyes directed down on me. "I've had a lot of time to think about what I've done, and I understand that I must not only accept the retribution you're about to deliver, but that I must actually beg for it with open, upturned hands. I have wrecked whatever notion of love and trust and peace that you had in your life and replaced it with the same lonely, insecure feeling that haunts me on a daily basis and propels me toward my dumbest decisions. But I don't want to be an infectious agent of evil and mistrust in the world. I want to do good. And I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind about beating me up. I'm only trying to make things better. I'm trying to do my part to really, really affect some positive change in your life, so that whatever happens today makes tomorrow better for all of us."

The tears on my face were all that I could feel.

Tommy's patchy, adolescent mustache twitched as his determined sneer turned into a sort of neutral, unfeeling, blank expression. I had no idea what I'd done. Everyone within an earshot of my desperate soliloquy was silent, while those standing upon higher, more distant perches in the distances buzzed with all the confusion of a bloodthirsty, uninformed mob.

"You mean that?" He finally asked after an eternity of unblinking, exasperated fear. I nodded.

He beat me relentlessly, cursing and grunting the entire time.

After the fight was over and the murmur of the crowds faded into every different direction, I rolled over onto my back and just laid there. Everyone was gone. Everyone except James.

"Tuck and roll, man, tuck and roll," he said when he was facing me. He extended his hand and pulled me up.

"Ha ha," I coughed.

"So, how do you feel right now, on a scale from one to ten?" he asked.

"Thirteen," I groaned, and flinched as he patted me on the back.

---
I wrote that during my unemployment downtime, along with lots of unrelated bits and pieces I'll be finishing over the next few months. Stay tuned: I'm not done yet.