Outcast

It was April of 1992. I was just entering my fourth school in two years, two each for fifth grade and sixth. Oakcrest Elementary in Pensacola, FL, Brevard Elementary in Brevard, NC, Fletcher Elementary in Hendersonville, NC, Hughes Middle School in Greenville, SC. No friends, no roots, no support.

Hughes was the worst. Figures it would be the school I spent more time at than any other in my life. It was a class divided. About half of the kids were the children of successful white business people. The school was less than two miles from the 10^th hardest par golf course in America, Chanticleer. On the other side of the school was a very depressed collection of houses, a place of rotting porches, domestic violence, and frequent house fires. From here came the other half of the school’s population, the poor black kids. They at least had strong community ties and all seemed to be friends, huddling together against the oppressive reminder of inequality.

Right between those two halves was a tiny sliver of outcasts, the poor whites. There were a few of us. We were ostracized by the rich white kids, and therefore easy targets of the aggression of the poor black kids. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they were the only people I could sit with at lunch.

I fucking hated them.

They were constant reminders of my solitude. The only thing we had in common was our place in the caste system. Might as well have been lepers.

One I hated more than the rest was Seth. He was this skinny ginger kid who smelled of fried food and his mom’s cigarettes. He was even lower on the totem pole than me – people didn’t like me, but they didn’t really hate me. Everyone hated Seth, and he seemed kind of okay with it. We rode the same bus, but different stops. Of course all of the pariahs rode my bus, we all lived in the same shitty neighborhood.

One day, Seth pushed me over the line. We were sitting across from each other at the lunch table after we had finished eating. I was reading Stephen King’s Tommyknockers, but was about to put it away to return to class. I looked up at him and our eyes met. He smiled and sneezed right in my face. I was always a fastidious kid, and this was an all out assault. I whipped my thick paperback across his face. Ms. Leiffer only saw that last part and I was given detention for the next day. Seth smiled as he walked behind the teacher and went about his day.

The bus ride home was tense. Randy, the fat kid (every school had one then, there seem to be more now), kept whispering at me, “You gonna take that?” Everyone loved a fight.

I got off at Seth’s stop. He wasn’t smiling anymore. A couple of other kids got off, too, also not their usual stop. It wasn’t a far walk for any of us, totally worth it to witness what they hoped to be an epic ass kicking.

I walked behind the frail little prick, pushing him in his cheap plastic backpack, trying to get him to stop and face me. He was silent. Shit, as they say, had gotten real, and he wasn’t smiling any more. I kept at him, knowing we only had a block until he could escape into his home to hide behind his notoriously litigious mother. I didn’t care if she sued my parents, we had nothing anyway. Finally, I kicked his right foot so that it caught on his left and he tripped. I could vaguely hear whoops from the onlookers, but they faded into the back. I was so mad at his affront. This little shit had the audacity to strike at me, his better. I was lower than basically everyone, but not him. How dare he?

I turned him over and he tried to ball up. I stood over him and did my best to punch him in the head a few times, but I was eleven years old and was not in the habit of punching people. It was pathetic, a thoroughly stoppable force striking a fully moveable object. After some time, hard to say how long, I was satisfied that he looked sufficiently frightened. Then, trying my best to block out the sun, I stood over him and gravely spit in his face. He took it with a sort of depressing aplomb. I turned away to walk home, trying like hell to not cry. It was a while before I heard him getting up. I turned around to walk backwards so I could face him, to stare at him to make the indignity last. He had no expression on his face at all.

Just another day.