by Fred Aceves
I’ve picked up some keys to survival over the years. For instance, you avoid eye contact when entering a room or walking down the hall.
But I haven’t yet mastered the whole “walking-away” thing, though it should be easy. Why do I go up to bullies when they ask me to? I’m hopeful, I guess. As if being a good sport might make them like me better. All I do is prolong the bullying.
“You gotta see this,” Jared tells me, wiping happy tears from his face with the back of his hand. He slumps back into the couch, exhausted.
“I’m tripping hard.” This is from Stacy Rivers, who’s wedged between two cheerleaders on the loveseat. “I can’t believe David actually walked in just now.”
Others shout at me to “Come on” and “For a second,” but I know that trick. Being nice is a trap they set so they can be mean.
Or maybe this time it’s not a trick? Everybody is in total chill-out mode, eyes bloodshot from weed, totally harmless. Just having fun, and I wanna know what the joke is so I can laugh too.
I fix a smile on my face and walk over. “What’s up?”
That’s when the large TV comes into view. I see what’s paused on the screen—me.
When I realize I’m on YouTube, panic clenches my stomach and my heart pounds in my throat. That’s me wearing a PE uniform and about to open my locker. Am I really that skinny? My next question—What the hell is happening?—is answered a millisecond later when I remember the punch. Someone else was there to capture it on video.
No fucking way. No fucking way. No fucking way.
I need to get outta here. Now. No time to tell Karina.
I cut right between the asshole kids and the TV, then walk through the foyer and out the front door, laughter trailing me as I make my escape.
4
EVEN THOUGH it only makes me feel worse, I keep watching the video. I refresh the page on my computer screen, my insides bunching up every time. David Gets Bitchslapped has 8,507 views. Over thirty more since I checked a few minutes ago.
Once again I click play.
00:01: Even after so many viewings, the first image still has the power to shock me. That’s me in the locker room. Calm and unsuspecting boyish face. Stick limbs poking outta a blue-and-gray PE uniform.
00:04: I take off the shirt, revealing the skinniest teenage torso the world has ever seen. That’s when Ricky, edited into a blur, rushes in to swing an arm and land a loud slap across my face. A slap, not a punch. Turns out my weakass got knocked out by an open hand.
00:05: My head whips to face the camera while my T-shirt, barely off and over my head, falls to the floor. My eyes glaze over as I wobble like a stripped Jenga tower. I sway right as if pushed, put my foot down to steady myself, tip forward, and keep stumbling until I end up in the same spot.
00:08: My legs give out and I drop to my knees. My head hangs as if in solemn prayer before I topple forward. My shoulder bounces off the narrow bench before the side of my face thuds against the floor.
00:13: The camera zooms closer to capture my head lifting, eyes struggling to fully open and figure out what happened.
Offscreen, Ricky and his buddy burst out laughing, the sound echoing throughout the empty room.
Then it’s the first frame again, signaling the start of the slow-motion version. I have mercy on myself and click pause.
I’ve reported this video to YouTube, flagged it, and checked the Violent or repulsive option. A message informed me that someone would review my complaint.
Does it even matter though? In the meantime, people keep watching and sharing. Besides, anyone who has downloaded it can upload it again. Soon my fifteen-second clip will be featured on compilations. Best of the month. Best of the year. Any day now I can expect GIFs and memes—I’ll be the joke used for other jokes.
How many times have I laughed at embarrassing videos or shared them? What was wrong with me?
This one beats them all, and not just because of how hilariously goofy I look at every moment of it, from the slap to being dazed on the floor.
It’s also the high quality. Usually these types of videos are shaky, blurry even, recorded from a distance. Not this one. Ricky’s sidekick has a steady hand and a talent for framing shots, could practically work for Steven Spielberg or something.
The whole world will know me: a guy so skinny you can see the contour of every bone. A guy so weak that a slap knocks him out cold.
This shit’s going viral for sure. It has . . . I click to reload the page . . . One hundred more views than minutes ago. 1,843 likes. 1 dislike. Mine.
It might have millions of views by tomorrow!
My throat tightens as I scroll down to look at the comments for the first time.
what a loser
I love how his face wiggles in the slo mo
the stumbling around looks like country line dancing
Comments accompanied by laughing emojis. Heart emojis. The applause emoji.
I remember TrashTalk and feel a cold pang in my heart. I open the TT app on my phone. Wait as the Culler High School page loads.
TT is where you go to comment anonymously about someone’s outfit or new hairstyle or who’s fat or who’s not as pretty or cool as they think. It’s mix of mostly disses and rumors.
The TT logo stops spinning and the Culler High page appears. My video is on there. Plus comments as dickish as the ones on YouTube. It might as well be renamed the Take Shots at Bitchslap David page.
That’s what everybody is calling me. It’s as bad as the YouTube comments but hurt so much more because I will definitely see these “anonymous” people again.
What can I do? How can I ever leave this house? How can I go back to school after the summer? My head buzzes with these and a million different thoughts.
I close TT and go into my other apps. Remove the Facebook account I rarely use. Deactivate my Instagram I always use and then remove that app. I move on to Snapchat and find a message from Miguel.
u ok man? i’m worried and you won’t pick up
I’m not taking any calls. Can’t even talk to Dad, who’s knocked on my door twice to find out why I’m back from the party so early.
I delete Snapchat.
There. No more social media. I’m officially cut off from a big chunk of my life. What next? With nothing left to do I feel useless. My stomach starts to rumble for real. If it’s possible to get physically sick from humiliation, it’s happening to me.
I wanna believe that things aren’t as bad as they seem, but hell no. This isn’t something that will seem teeny-tiny in retrospect. I won’t be laughing about this in months or years. My loser status is fixed. I’m forever Bitchslap David. And I thought the few dozen people calling me “Fuckstick” was bad.
Then I get an idea. What if I change my features? Surgeons give narcos new faces so they can hide in plain sight.
Yeah, right. I’d have to be a narco to afford a surgery like that.
A text lights up my phone: missing u here
Karina is still at the party with the others. The second I got to the car, I texted her to explain why I was leaving and needed to be alone. She’s been checking up on me ever since, downplaying the gravity of my situation, trying to cheer me up.
A selfie comes in. She’s beautiful, her smile bright underneath a lit-up palm tree.
She sends other pictures she took while I was there. In the last one all six of us are on the dance floor, Miguel in mid-jump. Not all of our limbs are visible, but the joy on our faces is clear.
Crazy how fast life can change. There I was, having fun and making friends at the party of the year. Setting up summer plans and, beyond that, my senior year stretching before me. Now I’m at home on a Friday night, counting views on a video that destroyed my life just as I was starting to live it.
So I can forget new friends. Forget my girlfriend too. Though Karina is sweet and awesome, she won’t want me as a boyfriend. She’s Karina of the drama club, Karina the honor roll student. She’s not trying to b
e Karina-who-goes-out-with-Bitchslap.
The greatest thing to ever walk into my life is going to walk right on out. Sprint is more like it, just as soon as she realizes how the slap will affect her.
How am I supposed to face everybody back at Culler High?
I won’t. Dad will have to accept me dropping out. I’d rather work or something. From home. I can’t set foot in public.
I’ll stay safely inside this house forever, ordering groceries and anything else I need online.
But I know that my dad won’t have that. No way. He’s still expecting me to get a scholarship. Even gifted me an SAT prep book this afternoon, a present for my last day of junior year.
Transferring isn’t an option, unless I can somehow find a town without internet. I can’t go to another school and I can’t go to Culler and I don’t know what to do.
I’m used to thoughts rushing one after another. The problem now is that they stay stuck, unable to escape, crowding up my brain.
This must be how people end up in straitjackets.
Video games! Yep, that will take my mind off things.
I click open Call of Duty on my computer. Slouch in my chair and try to loosen up. I shoot down enemy combatants with skill and avoid bullets. But it gets boring after a few minutes.
So I give Mortal Kombat a try. The character chart loads. There they are, twelve muscled fighters to choose from. Even Cassie Cage is crazy buff, her arms thicker than my legs.
I select my guy, Kano with that fierce red eye, and start kicking ass. But I can’t get into this game either. This alternate world isn’t shutting out the real one or soothing my reeling brain.
Although I’m winning, it’s like I’m not even playing. It’s like I’m watching somebody else kick ass.
I thumb the joystick and press the right combination of buttons for the finishing move. Watch as Kano kills off Trooper with a fatality.
Kano won, not me.
I was watching somebody else kick ass. That realization hits me harder than the slap from earlier. In video games I pretend to be all big and tough. That’s how I spend my time. Pretending.
Fuck this. I turn off the monitor and push myself up from the desk in a hot rage. It’s sizzling in my blood, making me pace around my small-ass room, hating myself and wondering what to do about my shit life.
When there’s a knock at the door, I damn near jump outta my skin.
“Come on, mijo,” Dad says, louder than the last two times. “Open up.”
Maybe Dad will know what to do. He is older and wiser. He does live for giving advice. Over an hour after getting home, I’m no less scared or confused than before. I have nothing to lose.
“I know what happened,” he calls in softly.
Yeah, right. He probably figures it was everyday teasing or something. My dad doesn’t go on the internet, doesn’t have a computer or tablet or smartphone. His dumb phone might be older than me.
He gives the door two more light taps. “Your aunt called and said she saw it on the bookface thing.”
Shit. I wonder which asshole cousin discovered and shared it.
I open the door.
There’s a sad worry showing in Dad’s eyes as he steps inside and sits on my bed. He’s wearing sleeping clothes—old shorts over thick calves and a faded gray T-shirt covering up a bit of belly. The rest of his body is muscle even though he’s never set foot in a gym.
“Who hit you? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I start from the beginning, when I walked into the locker room carrying the soccer balls. Every word I speak makes my face burn with more shame, as if I’m living it all over again.
“Basically,” I explain, “the slap was recorded and posted on YouTube. They were watching it at the party. By now, the whole world has seen it.”
He doesn’t understand and will keep insisting so I let him watch the video. I open it on YouTube and turn away.
When the horrible fifteen seconds are over, Dad spins back around at me, his brow creased.
“Pinches malcriados,” he says, breaking his own no-cursing rule. But Ricky is so much worse than a fucking brat.
After shaking his head he says, “You should’ve told your coach or principal what happened.”
I say nothing. I’m waiting for him to get to the point.
“Why don’t you change with everybody else so you aren’t alone?”
What the hell is Dad talking about? I need some help here. A fix-it for my life or at least some clarity. Instead he tells me I should’ve done things differently. I should’ve changed around more people. I should’ve told somebody what happened.
There should be a rule about should’ve. Anyone who says that needs to lend you a time machine so you can zoom into the past to take their advice.
I’m done with Dad.
“I’m tired,” I say, though I’ve never been more awake. “I need to sleep.”
“We’ll talk to the school.” Dad gets up carefully and straightens his back with a groan. “That Ricky kid is going to get kicked out.”
At the doorway he turns back to look at me. His expression has gone sad.
“Listen, mijo,” he says, fixing his gaze on me. “It’s not a big deal.”
He doesn’t say it in that cheering-me-on way. He says it like it truly is not a big deal. Nothing to overcome.
The last bit of hope I had shrivels to nothing.
Why am I surprised? Dad thinks I have everything so easy just because my life is different than his was. He married my mom almost twenty years ago, so his papers are all in order and everything, but he sure had it rough for a while.
At my age he dropped outta high school to cross into this country. He survived the Rio Grande, then the sweltering Texas desert before hitchhiking to Florida. Here he worked construction in the middle of the summer. At night he slept under an I-275 overpass. All so he could support my sick grandmother and his two younger brothers.
And me at seventeen? I’m barely surviving high school.
But I also have struggles I didn’t ask for. He doesn’t know what it’s like to slink through the halls, eyes on the floor, nervous about being spotted by one of the cruel kids. When has he ever been shoved or kicked or slapped in the face?
When it comes to bullies, he’s the one who’s always had it easy.
“You don’t know how lucky you are to be big,” I say.
Dad studies my face. “What do you mean?”
“Remember when the new neighbors moved in last year?”
The burly man next door parked his truck half on our lawn, so his wife’s entire car could fit next to it on their driveway. Dad sent me over to ask the neighbor to move it so it wouldn’t damage our grass, just as it was getting green.
The man’s eyes swept me up and down and then he closed the door in my face. The truck stayed put.
So Dad went himself. From the porch I heard Dad say the words I did minutes before and saw him come back. A moment later the man walked out to park the truck along the curb.
“Remember that?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Dad says slowly, not getting it. I guess some people really don’t know how good they have it.
“You’re lucky that guys never mess with you.”
“You’re smart,” he says. “Your dedication will take you to college and far in life. That’s better than being strong or anything else.”
He’s trying to make me feel better with words because he can’t actually help me.
I sigh. “Whatever.”
He gives me a weak smile. “You’ll be fine, mijo. You’ll see.”
When Dad leaves and I close the door, Van Nelson is staring at me from the back of it. Another lucky man that bullies would never mess with.
On second thought, luck had nothing to do with it. Enzo mentioned earlier that Van Nelson wasn’t even muscular in the movie before Nightchaser. I guess he put in hours at the gym to make it happen.
Why didn’t I start lifting weights long ago? I could be the bigge
st guy in school. Getting respect instead of getting bullied.
I sit at my desk to find out how Van Nelson did it and luck out—there’s a short video online of his six-month transformation.
Holy shit! I can’t believe my eyes! He really was a regular guy. Without these before and after pics side by side like this, how would you know they’re the same person?
In the three months before school starts, I could grow about half as much. Talk about insane. Nobody would ever call me Bitchslap or mess with me ever again.
For a second I think steroids, but then I play his video. He’s in a private gym, talking directly to the camera. As if reading my doubtful mind, he mentions he’s completely steroid-free.
“I got these results by giving my workout one hundred and ten percent. A lot of you have been asking for the exact diet and workouts I did to prepare for my new role. Click below to check it out.”
It’s a calendar PDF, the days marked with a numbered workout. A bunch of exercises I’ve never heard of, including the sets and repetitions, fill several pages. At the very end is a list of muscle-building foods to eat.
The information I need to make this happen is right here! I’m going to join a gym and transform this body!
Dad can’t say no. Why would he?
I search for more transformations. Teen bodybuilders get my attention, especially the results they share after three months. Eye-popping, jaw-dropping results.
Kids at school take way longer to put on size. What’s up with that? They must not be training the right way, like Van Nelson does in the video. They damn sure aren’t eating lean meats, egg whites, oatmeal, and green veggies. They wolf down pizza, nuggets, and vending machine junk like everybody else.
That’s not me anymore. My protein-packed diet will be on point and I’m going beast-mode in the gym, giving each set my all.
I get up and take off my shirt for my before photo. Looking in the mirror, my first thought is that I hate my pathetic body.
That’s okay, I remind myself. I’m finally doing something about it.
I snap away, taking pics from various angles, hitting the same poses as the other guys online.
