Al Steiner - Doing It All Over

He looked at me strangely for a moment and then, finally figuring it was a joke, started laughing.

I didn't laugh back and we walked on in silence. Mike bothered me. I knew the path that he was on but every attempt I made to even talk about steering him off of it had failed. I wanted to help him, to keep him from ending up a thirty-three year old loser living with his parents and never having held a job for more than a year in his life. Didn't he want to marry, have children, raise a family? Didn't he want what everyone else in the world did? Surely the life he would end up with was not what he desired, was it? But I had no idea how to even begin to steer him. His faade was of the tough, independent person, streetwise, never needing advice or help from anyone. How could you reach such a person? Especially when they'd spent their entire life as the superior member of the friendship. I was clueless and hoping that some answer would come to me. But the answer, for the moment, eluded me.

"Well look who's back." Mike said as we approached the school.

I looked where he was indicating and saw Richie Fairview standing with his cronies in their accustomed spot near the bike racks. The same spot where I'd engineered his downfall and his trip to the hospital. Even from this distance I could see he had a bandage on his nose. Though he had a heavy coat on I was reasonably sure that his chest was taped up beneath it. I'd felt a definite crunch when I'd kicked him the other day.

"Well well." I smiled, already turning that way.

"You gonna fuck him up again?" Mike asked, a little fear in his voice, but not as much as before.

"Only if he wants to go the hard way." I said, heading directly for him.

You have to understand that Richie was more than just Richie to me. He was the epitome of bullies, the sum of all large, stupid aggressors that had picked on me since grammar school. He encompassed bullies that would pick on me after Richie would eventually graduate or drop out or whatever. As a shy, easily malleable kid in school I'd been easy fodder for them throughout my school years. And they had left an impression that was deeper than I'd realized until I'd seen Richie on my first day back. Richie represented all bullies that had ever said an unkind word or had laid an unjust hand upon me. By besting him at his own game, I was besting demons that had helped shape my previous life. I intended to make him suffer, to bring him down as far as I could, to expose the lie that all bullies represented; that they were gods, unchallengable.

His friends tittered nervously as I approached, whispering some things to him, him nervously whispering some things back. The very fact that he was standing at the head of them despite his earlier defeat told me a lot. He'd undoubtedly told them that he was going to repay me for the sneak attack on him the first time. They were anxiously awaiting his revenge. I was pretty sure there would be no revenge. The Richies of the world don't generally think things through very carefully.

"Hey Dickwad!" I yelled directly at him when I was close enough. "How was the hospital?"

"Fuck you motherfucker!" He yelled, taking a few steps closer; again telling me volumes about his intentions. Had he been meaning to fight me, he would have waded right in. But he didn't. He took a few steps towards me, obviously hoping I'd cower and back down. When I didn't (and why he thought I would, after our last encounter is a mystery to me), he slowed down, his mind re-evaluating what his strategy was. In that moment I knew I'd won the confrontation.

"That's some pretty insulting shit you're talking." I told him conversationally, walking closer. "I suppose you think that your friends here are impressed by it." I shook my head sadly. "They're not. Talk is cheap faggot, action is where it's at. If you wanna impress your friends and restore your reputation as a badass you're simply gonna have to kick my ass. Isn't that what you told them you were gonna do?"

"I AM gonna kick your fuckin' ass!" He roared, taking a tentative step forward.

I laughed. "Are you now?" I asked. "Well go ahead and do it." I made a 'come-on' gesture with my fingers. "Kick my ass. Let's see you do it."

He stood still, his face fuming, infuriated with shame and anger. He wanted to, that was obvious, but he also remembered what had happened last time.

"I'm waiting." I said impatiently. "When are you gonna kick my ass? It's sitting here right in front of you. Start kicking."

He remained motionless, his body trembling with rage, rage I was oh so pleased to see. This was even more satisfying than besting him in the first place.

"Yeah." He finally said. "So you can rat me out and have me arrested or something."

"Oh please." I scoffed. "Having someone rat you out never bothered you before. Why don't you just admit it? You're scared of me. You wouldn't take a swing at me if I dropped my hands and closed my eyes, would you? It HURTS to get the shit kicked out of you, doesn't it? It's an experience you don't care to repeat, is it? You know that if you take a swing at me, or make any move at all towards me, you're gonna be riding in an ambulance again, don't you?"

"Fuck you!" He yelled, near tears now, on the brink of collapse.

I shook my head again. His friends were staring at him, nervous fear in their faces.

I spat, the wad landing on his shoe. "You fuckin' disgust me." I told him. "If you want to fight you come and find me." I said. "We'll have ourselves a fight. But keep in mind, that if you start any of your 'fuck you' and 'I'm gonna kick your ass' bullshit with me again, I'm not gonna be so generous. Like I said, talk is cheap. If you want some action, look me up.

If you don't want some action, keep your fuckin' mouth closed when you see me."

I turned my back to him and walked into the school, Mike in tow. I knew I had nothing to fear by turning my back to him. I knew it.

Lunchtime. In my previous life I'd always eaten pretty much alone since Mike had a different lunch schedule than I. But now I found myself the center of some attention. People kept coming up to me, just wanting to talk about this and that. I was becoming popular I realized, not sure I liked it. And again, I was thirty-two years old, not fifteen. The conversation I was offered was not terribly stimulating.

After only five minutes the combination of the cold and the endless litany of pussy stories, car stories, or drug stories drove me inside to the cafeteria. The cafeteria was the domain of the preppie students, those college bound overachievers. The air was warm and scented with the aroma of spaghetti. It was filled with the babble of conversations and the clanking of plastic trays on simulated wood grain tables.

I stood near the doorway surveying the scene, seeing the gathering of cliques at various tables, trying to find a place to sit down. Many of the students in there were those that were in my classes. They'd always ignored me since I wasn't quite one of them and I had no desire to strike up friendships with them now. With burrito and soda in hand I scanned around the room and finally locked onto a solitary figure sitting by herself near the back of the room.

It was Nina Blackmore, the future emergency room doctor. Like always, she was by herself, eating out of her tray and reading a book. Nina, in addition to being a high school classmate, had been a junior high and grammar school classmate as well. She'd appeared at our school when I was in the third grade, a new student from somewhere or other. That, in combination with a lisp that she'd had at that time had doomed her to the role of unpopularity. She'd been the butt of jokes since forever, although they'd been particularly bad in grammar school. Third, fourth, and fifth graders can be unusually cruel to kids who were somewhat different.