Stephen Markley - Ohio

But the day didn’t end there. After third period, he was walking through the upstairs hallway, talking to Eric “Whitey” Frye, a sophomore and one of the only black kids in lily-white NCHS. They were pushing through the crowd, talking hoops, feeling the first pre-lunch pangs, Bill explaining how Coach Napier was going to have him play a two guard even though he had height—

And then a hammer landed on his chest, sent him sprawling to his ass before he even realized it was his books and folders flying. They slapped back down to hard hallway carpet as Frye made himself slim against the lockers. Bill looked up to see a shoulder and above it, a delighted smile, both belonging to Todd Beaufort, the football team’s co-captain.

“My bad,” said Beaufort, and Bill had a flyby thought of how this was such a move from some bad teen comedy. The cliché offended him as much as the physical act. “Maybe don’t make treason against your own country? Just a thought.”

Bill hauled himself to his feet, face hot from the whispers and snickers. Beaufort’s girlfriend, Tina Ross, stood a few feet back snickering with delight. For some reason—as Bill stepped toe-to-toe with Beaufort—this is what pissed him off the most. This stupid, pretty girl giggling at her steroidal fuckbag boyfriend, playing the good little Christian virgin while the high school’s football star used her like a blow-up doll. Beaufort was born to be a bully, oversized and stupid. What excuse did she have?

“If you wanna go…” Beaufort mused. He and Bill were about the same height, but the kid probably had thirty pounds of muscle on him. For the first time in high school, he felt the isolation of the easy pickings. He wondered too if Beaufort was acting as Rick’s proxy.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Get moving,” Mr. Clifton said to Beaufort. “And, Bill, come with me.”

Beaufort smirked as Bill was led away, and he saw Tina give him this look like she’d never been more delighted to see someone knocked down a peg. He’d bought her a milk shake at Vicky’s once, and they’d even made out in one of those long-ago grades (Seventh? Eighth? Who remembered?). He hated her more than Beaufort.

“This isn’t you in trouble with me,” Clifton assured him on the way to Principal MacMillan’s office. “This is about your safety.”

“Seems like it’s about censorship.”

Mr. Clifton took a hand from his pants pocket and smoothed his mustache. “I admire your passion, Bill. I always do admire people with passion. But you need to learn the difference between passion and provocation.”

In Principal MacMillan’s office the bureaucratic lump took one look at him and said, “Turn it inside out for today. Then I don’t want to see it again, or it’ll be a suspension.”

That afternoon after classes let out, Bill went to the screen printer in town and had a shirt printed with the quote:

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars

This too landed him in the principal’s office. Mr. Bonheim, the football coach and also a history teacher, spotted him in the hallway.

“We been put on notice about this,” he said, examining the words, trying to ferret out what radical meaning they might possibly contain.

Bill spat it out before he thought it through: “It’s Martin Luther fucking King.”

He entered MacMillan’s office with the rage of the righteous. He was ready to shout. To threaten. To take a stand. He pictured a Supreme Court case. He pictured the New York Times editorializing on the courageous determination of this humble kid from Middle America. He pictured an Oscar-winning biopic.

“You have a choice,” MacMillan told him, hands tented. Bill glared at the way his baldness was happening—a streak of fallow follicles crawling up his scalp from where he parted the limp brown. “Coach Napier tells me you’re a hell of a ballplayer. Either you can keep up this nonsense or you can play basketball this year. You cannot do both.”

Like that, his fury drained. His skin went clammy, the way it will when dread chokes away false courage.

“That’s what he said?” He hated the way his question came out: frightened, childish. Suddenly, his surroundings returned to him. The drab, uncluttered office space of a public school warden. Clichéd inspirational posters making success sound as if it had nothing to do with socioeconomics.

MacMillan nodded. “It’s not his decision anyway. Now, Bill, if you want to get the ACLU involved, be my guest. Meanwhile, you won’t play basketball.”

Bill threw away both shirts that day. Only one person ever acknowledged him for what he’d done. A squirrely outcast named Dakota Exley approached him in the hallway after school, likely when he was sure Bill would be alone. This skinny, scraggly upperclassman with a face like a rhesus monkey, Bill had to look around to make sure it was him the guy was speaking to. “Heard what happened with your shirt. Just wanted to say fuck those dickless cogs,” he said while blinking too much. “Someone should knife ’em all and put ’em in the dirt.”

Though he didn’t really condone the closing sentiment, Bill was so relieved to have anyone side with him that he thanked this hallway apparition, whom he’d never given a second thought to, and who soon stalked off. It was the last thing they’d say to each other until more than a decade later on a summer night the temperature of warm blood. The strictures of high school cliquery were simply too much for another interaction—let alone a friendship—to propagate.

Whatever burgeoning political rage he’d felt, he was also still a child. Precocious, maybe, but a kid who loved the joy of the dribble, the Zen of a ball ripping through a net, and when he saw that this could be taken from him he had that little-kid feeling of wanting to cry down to the bottom of himself. It was a lesson he’d learn over and over again—in college, in activism, with his finicky, conformist parents. Like MacMillan and the clique of teachers and coaches who all went to the same church and barbecued at one another’s houses, much of the country’s small-bore civil servants were itching to do some repressing of their own. Millions of Dick Cheney wannabes swelling the ranks, enjoying their little authoritarian fiefdoms. His disagreements with Rick ebbed and flowed but like storms on a warming planet, grew in ferocity. Maybe his popularity was grandfathered in because he won basketball games with his J, but even when he slipped into a cloak of conformity, his isolation followed him like a hot sweet smoke. What an important lesson for every young person to learn: If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loved you, will be the ones to collect the debt.

Bill watched an owl—possibly imaginary—streak magnificently across the diving darkness. “You hated me?” he asked.

“I wasn’t exactly sitting at the center of the lunchroom.”

He walked slightly behind Dakota, each of them swigging whiskey. Bill’s shirt was baggy enough, but he worried about the bulge on his spine. He stretched his back, the tape stressing skin. He had to get this shit off. But the idea of smoking some green or snorting a rail had wormed too deep.

“You’re down with Jonah Hansen now,” Bill noted. “He was like the social chair back when.”

Dakota had a look of permanent resentment carved into his features, which made him impossible to read. He kept picturing the kid with that clean part right down the middle. The spasming dreadlocks must have been the work of years. “Doesn’t mean we’re tight.”