Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  Instilling fear is the most insidious form of bullying, because it makes the target’s own mind turn against itself.

  “You should probably look over your shoulder more,” Theo would say, while his goon friends cackled just over his shoulder. Then he’d throw half a punch toward my face to see if I’d flinch. And I would.

  I imagined elaborate worst-case scenarios. One day, I’d be scared that Theo would shove me down the stairs. The next, that he’d jump me from behind. The next, that he’d stuff me in my locker. This was ridiculous, as the lockers at Hunter are about two feet tall and eight inches wide. Even a car compacter could not stuff me in my locker.

  But I was scared. Every day I was scared. Had I already been beaten up in my life, I wouldn’t have been as scared. Getting punched, while not desirable, isn’t nearly as bad as the fear of getting punched. This is a lesson I unfortunately had to learn later in life. But walking through the hallways, terrified of what may or may not happen—well, I’d rather have been punched.

  Not only was I scared of whatever getting beaten up may or may not feel like, but I also started being scared of being scared. I didn’t want to be a coward. Would I be like this the rest of my life?

  I wanted to stand up for myself. I wanted to tell Tommy that no one thought his notes were funny. I wanted to tell Theo that if he hit me, my older brother would find a way to fit him into one of those lockers. But I couldn’t. Partially because I didn’t have the courage, and partially because I’d be wrong.

  Tommy’s idiot friends thought his notes were masterpieces, and my brother was too busy with his own issues to care about mine. Despite Tommy and Theo both having their teams of flunkies, I was completely on my own.

  What a wonderful buddy cop film Tommy and Theo would have made: Bad Cop, Bad Cop, where the two of them fight crime by annoying bad guys until they give up.

  All it takes to be a bully is to find someone vulnerable and be willing to bully them. Tommy and Theo were a little bigger than me, but not by enough to justify their tyranny. Maybe if I still knew some of the older kids, like I did back in Briarwood, Tommy and Theo would have been the ones who were afraid. The reason Tommy and Theo bullied me was because I appeared vulnerable and alone.

  At Hunter, no one had my back. If they had, there never would have been a note that said STUPID attached to it.

  MY FAVORITE VACUUM

  There’s an old cliché that things get worse before they get better. They can also get better before they get worse.

  I slowly found my niche at Hunter. I was the quiet kid, and I did everything I could to not be noticed. And then one day, someone noticed how good I was at not being noticed.

  Throughout the year, people began pairing off. Being part of a couple made you instantly cool, because someone else had publicly declared you were worth their time. Both members’ social stock rose simultaneously. Dating in high school was like two companies investing in each other.

  The main benefits of pairing off were that you had someone to sit next to at lunch and slow dance with at the parties where the whole class was invited. Those were the only kind I was invited to, since I was so good at not being noticed. Most of the musical program of those parties consisted of fast dancing. But even the strictest parents would let the DJ play one or two slow songs. And that’s when the couples filled the dance floor and put their arms straight out like zombies until their fingertips hardly touched their partner. That didn’t matter—the guys were pretty excited that they were grazing the shoulder of an actual, real live girl.

  I had accepted that I was not going to be part of the coupling ritual. Cool was not my specialty, and I had yet to see interest from any girls. But one day, someone told me that Alexa Howard “liked” me. I assumed, as any me would in that situation, that I was somehow being tricked. I was pretty sure this was how hunters shot their prey. First they’d spread a rumor about a deer liking another deer to lure the deer into some potentially embarrassing situation and then BAM—my head is on a wall in a cabin somewhere. Or stuffed in my locker.

  I did want to be liked. I’d started noticing girls when I was still going to school in Briarwood. Well, I’d always noticed girls; but that was more, “Hey, I notice you’re in the way of me playing baseball. Could you move?” Suddenly, that changed to, “Hey, I notice that you’re in the way of me playing baseball, and that is fine with me because I think you are pretty and thus you can do whatever you want while I awkwardly pretend not to notice you.”

  My first crush was Linh Phan. I had been in school with her since second grade, and Linh was very much in my way in second grade. I was friends with her brother Quang, and whenever I went to his house, Quang’s parents forced us to include Linh. When we wanted to play baseball or video games or baseball video games, Linh was always in the way. Then one day in sixth grade, poof. Linh was not in the way at all.

  I was at Anant’s house playing a baseball video game when I decided to tell him the big news: that I liked a girl. At the time, it was a very big deal and it made me feel extremely cool. Anant had never liked a girl before, and this was my first time. Being the first in your group to admit you liked someone was the prepubescent equivalent of being the first in your group of friends to lose your virginity.

  “Oh man, did you hear?” I imagined my leagues of admiring new fans whispering. “Steve has a one-sided attraction to a girl who doesn’t care. He’s so cool!”

  I told Anant all about it, and he asked what I liked about Linh. I am sure I knew words other than nice, smart, and pretty, but I couldn’t find them that day. Anant shrugged in support and went back to the game. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much Linh and I had in common—after all, we were both nice and we were both smart. And she was pretty, and I liked looking at pretty girls. We were soul mates.

  I finally got the courage to ask Linh out, and I was pretty smooth about it. I told a guy I was kind of friends with to tell a girl Linh was kind of friends with to tell Linh I thought she was pretty. What girl could possibly refuse that display of confidence?

  Linh Phan could refuse that display of confidence. And loudly. When asked if she liked me, Linh said the two letters that would break any boy’s heart. Linh did not say no. That would have been much more compassionate. Linh said “ew.” I wanted to explain to her that it was not a yes-or-no-or-ew question, but I was too busy not speaking to any more girls for a while.

  After Linh’s rejection heard ’round the world, I was more careful to keep who I liked quiet. I spent my first several months at Hunter with a crush on Rory Daniels. But everyone had a crush on Rory Daniels. She was pretty and smiled all the time, and she had these strange things growing from her chest that magnetized our eyes. To have a crush on Rory was almost cliché. But the first several months of Hunter were a pretty derivative time in my life. After all, I was just trying to fit in.

  We sat in assigned seats in math class, and Rory and I were just two desks from each other. And it was in that same class that I learned lots of math skills, like that you can’t divide a number by Rory’s interest in me.

  When you factor in my previous experience with Linh, it’s understandable that when word got back to me that Alexa Howard liked me, I didn’t believe it. I had never been liked before. But the rumor persisted. Over a week, I heard the rumor from five different people. And the rumor was evolving. It started with Alexa liking me. But in a terrible development, I was told that Alexa wanted to know if I liked her back.

  Did I like her back? I was just starting to accept that she liked me. Now I had to react, and publicly? This was all so sudden. Why must she know right away? DON’T CONTROL ME!

  After a week of assuming I was being tricked and a momentary panic when I realized I may not be, I considered the question. Did I like Alexa? I barely knew her. Rory, on the other hand, I knew. I sat kind of near her without speaking to her for months. (Okay, so I didn’t know Rory either.) Maybe I did like Alexa. But what I definitely liked was that Alexa liked me. Or that th
ere was a rumor she liked me. Close enough.

  I let the rumor mill know I was interested. And I waited for several excruciating hours.

  As the lunch period started that day, Alexa approached me in the hallway with a few friends in tow. “I heard you like me,” she declared.

  Oh no. This is where I get shot and stuffed and mounted above a fireplace.

  “Well,” she said, “I like you, too.”

  I wanted to remind her that she had actually liked me first, but I was so relieved this wasn’t a trick that I didn’t mind the semantics.

  “Great,” I said. “Want to come with me to lunch?”

  And she did. That’s how I got my first girlfriend.

  I was so excited to tell my friends. If I thought revealing that I was attracted to women was a big deal, imagine the reaction when I told them that one was attracted to me.

  Over the last two months of school, I did get to know Alexa, and I really did like her. And not because she liked me, but because she was funny and she had opinions on everything, and there was no one she was afraid to talk to. She was bold and confident and witty. She was already the type of person I wanted to be, and she chose to spend her time with me.

  I’m sure Rory didn’t mind. She had plenty of other guys who liked her, and she also didn’t care that I was a person.

  Alexa and I ate lunch together every day, and we zombie danced at obligatory parties, and one day she even kissed me. She lived just a few blocks from Hunter, so she’d walk with me to my yellow bus before she walked home. One day, as we got to the corner, I hugged her goodbye like I always did and before I knew what was happening, her lips were on mine and there was tongue everywhere.

  There were a ton of ooooohs from other students who saw it happen, like they were in the studio audience of a poorly written sitcom. I didn’t care—I was more focused on the extra tongue in my mouth. I was so happy, I’d have skipped all the way to my bus if it hadn’t meant getting my ass kicked for skipping.

  For the rest of the school year (and the first few weeks of the summer), Alexa and I made out whenever possible. We were terrible at it, but that didn’t stop us from trying. We kissed with the passion of soap opera stars and an amount of suction that would have made a vacuum cleaner jealous. I’d never kissed anyone before, so when Alexa tried to suck my tongue clear out of my mouth, I just assumed that was how kissing was supposed to be done.

  The physical feeling of kissing Alexa wasn’t great—but the emotional feeling was fantastic. Not only was I doing something I didn’t think I was cool enough to do, but it also meant that someone liked me enough to kiss me. Or to try to swallow my tongue whole. It was hard to say exactly what Alexa’s intent was. And not just because it’s impossible to speak without a tongue.

  I tried to find us as much privacy as possible. But whether or not we found any, Alexa and I would make out. In Central Park, on the roof of her building, in various corners of our school-yard—we took turns injuring each other’s tongues. Until finally, one day, Alexa had to leave.

  Before Alexa went to summer camp, she made me promise to write to her every day. “Every day?” I asked, skeptically, wondering if that was just a flourish of speech. “Every day,” she said firmly. And so, like many poorly written movie protagonists before me, I stayed true to a romantic gesture that made no actual sense.

  I wrote Alexa letters every day for a month, and at first, she did the same. Our letters were generally boring—a summary of our day and gossip if we had any. Some were a full page, some were a few sentences. Regardless of their length or content, the letters were reminders that we were thinking about each other and that we could weather the brutal ten-week storm of summer camp.

  Because the postal service is as reliable as, well, the postal service, I’d often not get a letter for a few days and then get them all at once. So it was two weeks before I realized Alexa’s letters were getting less frequent. I didn’t think it meant anything nefarious—she warned me that her counselors could sometimes be strict about non-camp activities, and I assumed that letter writing could fall under that. I still wrote every day, because that’s what someone in a poorly written movie would do.

  When you establish a communication pattern with someone you’re dating and there’s a sudden and drastic change to that pattern, there’s always a reason. Occasionally the reason is a change in your significant other’s job or in their family or in their hostage situation. More often than not, a change in communication pattern happens because your significant other has become interested in another other.

  I was heartbroken when I received Alexa’s last letter. The letter explained she’d met someone at camp but wanted to date me again after the summer. I realized what I’d feared from the beginning was right: I was being tricked.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alexa didn’t like me and she never really had. And, home alone without any more letters to write, I had plenty of time to think about it.

  Alexa liked the idea of being in a couple, and she liked the idea of the status it gave her. As all her friends had already coupled up, she figured that if she spread a rumor that she liked the quiet kid, he’d be likely to like her back—every day for most of a summer.

  I was always trying to find a private place for us to kiss, but Alexa didn’t mind if people saw us. She asked me to write her letters every day so she could get mail in front of people. And now she wanted to receive attention from someone else until she couldn’t anymore, at which point she’d go back to receiving it from me. No thank you. Her vacuuming of my tongue had all been a lie. And I wanted no part of it.

  I wrote Alexa one last desperate letter just in case I was wrong—telling her that I was hurt and that if she’d rather date this other guy, then that was her choice, but it would mean breaking up. Alexa didn’t respond—she didn’t need to. She was already getting her attention from someone else.

  As I waited for the letter that never came, I thought about it more. I realized that Alexa had never been particularly nice to me. Most of the time she was nice enough. But sometimes her boldness, her confidence, and her wit came at my expense. My own girlfriend made fun of me in public. And that is not okay no matter how much tongue is involved.

  While we were dating, I justified her insults. She didn’t really mean it—after all, she’d always kiss me in the end. So why risk losing her over my feelings getting hurt occasionally? I had not yet realized that someone who thinks it’s funny to hurt your feelings is not worth keeping.

  I finally heard from Alexa again a month later, after she returned home. I’m not sure why she called me. If it was to apologize or ask for forgiveness, she didn’t get around to doing either.

  When Alexa called, she went on and on about how much she enjoyed summer camp, and she even told me that she and her new boyfriend were the most popular couple in camp. She didn’t mention her failure to respond to my last letter, how she’d broken my heart, or how she clearly didn’t seem hurt at all. Finally, Alexa gave me the chance to speak, when she asked how my summer was.

  How was my summer? Alexa knew damn well how my summer was. My summer was terrible. I spent the first half of it missing her and the second half of it mad at myself for missing her. I was angry and hurt and lonely and confused. But I didn’t vocalize any of that. I was the quiet kid, after all.

  “It wasn’t great,” I said.

  “Well,” she casually responded after a bit of silence, brushing off all responsibility for the non-greatness of my summer. “Life sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I fired back. “So do you.”

  There was no crowd to go wild, no one to give me any high-fives. The only audience to my snarky joke was Alexa, and she certainly didn’t appreciate it. But I hadn’t said it for her benefit. I’d said it for mine.

  Standing up for myself was new to me. And it would be a long time before it became something I was able to do on a regular basis. But in that moment, I was bold and confident and witty. It was just for a m
oment, but I was the person I wanted to be.

  Maybe my summer wasn’t so bad after all.

  DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS

  The first time I went to the nurse’s office, I actually needed to go there. One day in music class, we had a substitute teacher whose idea of teaching was “Don’t let the kids kill each other.” And he came close to failing.

  The poor substitute for a substitute teacher didn’t try to teach or even to distract us. He just let us occupy ourselves however we wanted. Some of the kids pulled their desks together to gossip. Others doodled. Some read. I went to the back of the room to join a few other students who were playing cards.

  Playing cards was one of the ways I was social at Hunter. I was good at it, and you don’t need to be popular or charming to be a solid card player. You don’t even need to speak. If you doubt that statement, watch any hour of the World Series of Poker and you’ll see that misfits are welcome.

  Our game of choice was Ding Pai, a bastardized version of Pai Gow poker where you win by playing all your cards before the other players. I won that day, if you can call getting slapped in the face winning.

  My classmate did not slap me purposely. He was about to play his last cards, and I played mine on the turn right before his. He threw his hands up in anger and disbelief, and the back of one of them crashed into my nose with the ferocity of a drunken monkey taking a driver’s test. Or of someone who had just lost at Ding Pai to the quiet kid.

  I’d had nosebleeds before and was very familiar with the ball-up-tissue-and-plug-your-nose methodology. But if I’d tried that, the school would have been out of tissues. I’d never seen so much blood.

  This nosebleed was different from what I was used to. This was a lot of blood, a lot of pain, and a lot of fear. I wasn’t scared—I was too distracted by the pain and the blood to be scared. But the substitute teacher was terrified.