Fancy a flight or fight?

[amul]

All winter, I've felt this overwhelming need to do something drastic, try a road trip to somewhere new, just get out and shake up my habits and my routine.

Instead, I've spent most of the winter playing online games and cleaning my apartment. Lacunae Diving Bunny comes over and tries to drag me out of my place, but instead I've consistently kept her glued to the television, watching the thousand things I have seen which she has not.

I don't even like television, but the list of things which I watch regularly, despite not having any reception of any kind, is growing. It's not only become easier to talk me into staying in, it's now at the point where I barely encourage going out, out where the wolves are.

I've been thinking a lot about Peter and Hasan, the two big bullies of mine, growing up.

Hasan beat me up in grade school a couple of times, until one day I snapped and attacked him in my futile and unfocused rage. I never did understand why the teachers showed up when I hit him, though they had never shown up when he would hit me. The principal forced us to sit together for a month during lunch, and after a few days of terse silence, I began to talk. He laughed at my jokes, and shared stories with me, and I had frankly been unaware that anyone living below the Upper Middle Class income bracket was even living in our city, much less sharing my school. I didn't think in those terms, of course, not at so young an age. We joked, we laughed, he told me of his brothers and sisters so often that by the end of the month I could recite their names and stories by heart.

Then, as we walked through The Long Hall to the English class on the other side of the construction tarps, he broke my arm on the last day of our punishment. I still don't know why.

Thinking of Peter, of course, brings up memories of Lisa. Lisa was, in my estimation, the third most beautiful girl in school, and only that low because she was into Sports, part of the In Crowd, if such a thing could truly be said to exist. No, it would be truer to say simply that she was a part of the kids at my high school who believed in the value of sports. She played field hockey, basketball and track. She had the most astounding head of red hair, and by far sizes was the most curvaceous of my class - would beat out the other girls in that department even with her breasts bandaged down for sports compared to any set in the most geographically-inclined of small clothes. Because she had a body that called out even to untutored lusts like mine, and because she hung out with the football players, I assumed she was a slut.

(Which, right there, should tell you something about what I was like in high school, for I later discovered that all the girls I thought were Raging Paragons of Virtue turned out to have had more sex in high school than I've yet had, and I've been working pretty hard at catching up.)

I learned one day that this was not the case, that in fact Lisa, who was dating Peter, had Religion, and was Saving Herself For Marriage. So stringent were her rules that boys could not even get to Second Base with her (I still don't know what's on any of the bases between First and Home). But kissing was all you got from Lisa, or so I was informed, and if she ever got so excited as to open her mouth, then it had to end.

Peter, by contrast, was to my mind all that was wretched about sports. He played the roughest games, and made the mild ones rougher. He brought a sense of competition and oneupmanship to everything he did. Not only did he always pick us nerd-boys and theater geeks last in gym class, but he always sneered and made mockery of the teams for having to choose every one of us when the choices had finally narrowed to that pitiful lot.

Tangent: The one time Coach Matyus selected me as team captain, I first began picking all the kids who were never picked first, thinking that was my duty in such a lofty position. When even the coach made fun of me, on the fourth pick, I balled up that tiny spark of rebellion which so many had commented on and I had yet to discover, and asked, Well, what the hell am I supposed to choose by, if not my friends? They always just pick their friends first! So angry, and so completely missing the reason behind it all that we ended up spending the entire class discussing roster selection, sitting on that football field, including a surprisingly lucid discussion by The Coach about the relevance of sports to business success, particularly in regards to Learning The Rules of The Game and how exactly one should Pick Your Team Carefully, that I actually got rather into gym class after that. I even remember Peter agreeing with me that the football kids had an unfair advantage over the unatheletic ones due to their familiarity with each other.

Having heard these rumors about Lisa, and being completely incapable of believing that Peter had ever felt as noble a thing as the unrequited love I had been nurturing for Priceless Pearl all those years, I confronted her about it. Asked her, point blank, in the middle of Poetry Class with The Hawk Man, and after her initial shock, she and I ended up having a neat little conversation about religious morality, ethics and the teen mind of the early 90s.

Not that we thought of it in those terms, you understand.

That day in gym class was wrestling, well, I mean, we'd been doing wrestling all month. That was the same year as my tangent during the section on football, and at one point that day I got paired with Peter. I looked at his sneering, taunting face, so utterly confident that this was the one arena, the one ring, if you'll forgive the pun, in which he reigned superior over me and all the other people that made him feel so utterly worthless in the classroom. He looked forward to gym class, the only thing in school he was good at, and loved the chance to swim victorious in those waters.

Not that he thought of it in those terms, you understand.

We stood in the center of that ring, waiting while the other pairs were assembled, and I'm not really sure what came over me. Peter, I heard that you were dating Lisa? "Yeah, what of it?" He wasn't even looking at me then, watching his friends to see who would get what he no doubtedly thought of as A Good Fight. Well, it's just....I mean, she's got Religion, and I never thought of you as Religious. He knew what I meant, even though I only had the vaguest understanding myself. He became defensive, then, unsure of where I was heading, but suspecting mockery. "No," he mumbled "But I love her."

A moment of silence, then, as I tried to work this into my understanding of him, my first discovery, rather late in life, that boys who seemed only interested in football might, just possibly might be people too. I stuck out my hand then and said I've misjudged you, Peter. I've always assumed that you are less than what you really are, and I owe you an apology for that. I'm sorry, Peter, for my assumptions. He, suspecting a trap still, guardedly shook my hand, wary as a battle-scarred jungle cat finding himself in a city for the first time. I remember that even then I found my use of his name odd and overly-repeated, only later realizing the why of it. Hours later, as I glued together the monstrous beast of Little Shop of Horrors, I suddenly looked up at my friend and said I was emphasizing his humanity.

Two years later, I went to my locker after a late Forensics tournament, and walked in on Peter getting beaten by his father in the hallway for having lost a game. Peter was curled up in the fetal position, and I distinctly remember, all these years later, a thick gooey line of snot running from his nose to the hand he was shielding his face with as he cried and begged for mercy. "I'm sorry, Dad!" I remember the words echoing through the halls. His father only scoffed and informed him that he'd be waiting in the car.

His father walked away, and as the last of the hollow echoes of his footsteps filtered up from the stairwell, Peter saw me, who had been standing by my locker, my hand half-raised to the dial that entire time. With a sudden scream of fury, he leapt toward me and beat my head against my locker until the thing buckled and sprang out of the jamb, cutting a thin scar across his cheek that he still wore on graduation day. I can remember watching the light glint off of it as we stood in our cap and gowns and the Roll was called.

I remember the crunch of his foot on my glasses as he walked away. It took a week to replace them, and I was grateful that I had bought a pair of contact lenses only the month before. I remember that the blood was great but the actual damage to my head turned out to be minimal. I can remember the look on Kipleigh's face when she found me, the only time in six years that she had shown the slightest sympathy to me, though I had crushed on her since the day she first transferred to Lake Forest Junior High.

I remember Ben and the rest of the Player's Club standing in a circle around me, begging me not to tell the principal who had beaten me up, even though we'd already had that conversation. I remember the look on the principal's face as I told him, He only beat me up because I saw his dad hitting him. How can I get him into more trouble?

I remember Jen Dowell holding an ice pack to my head, and how close she came to kissing me out of mercy before I spoke the name of the girl who held my heart, even then, my Priceless Pearl. I remember Peter avoiding me on graduation day.

I remember the strange stillness on the phone as I decided not to tell Priceless Pearl, later that night.

I remember all of that, so clear in my mind's eye that I could almost let the real world fade away and see only memories, no matter which way I might turn my head.

But still, three years later, and I cannot remember Christine's face.