[Original Novel] Champion of the Little People, Part 9

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She froze up as Bianca’s voice echoed through the gym just outside. She planted one more on me, then hurried out the way she came. “He’s not in here” I heard Jennifer call out. “I thought for sure if he was gonna hide in the gym he’d be in the closet with all the sports stuff but I dug through all of it. Must be back in class by now.”

My brain was a whirlpool of conflicting thoughts and what I’d learn later on that year to be hormones as I returned to class. I lost some "good behavior points" for being the last to come back from recess but I was beyond caring. I wanted more mouth pressing with Jennifer, poste haste. What I got instead was an hour of geometry.

Not a bad alternative, I absolutely love geometry. Lights up all the right parts of my brain. The lesson on why triangles are used in constructing bridges and domes gave me ideas for the settlement, too. I ached to sketch those ideas but still had no binder. It set me to looking around the room for any sign of it.

This is when I noticed groups of kids in the various clusters passing around pieces of paper, covering their mouths to muffle laughter, then drawing on them. I wondered what was on those pages that could be so funny until I spotted one of them tearing yet more pages out of my open binder.

I motioned as if to object. The teacher admonished me to sit down, so I did. They only snickered more and continued defacing what I suspected were my drawings. These suspicions were confirmed when one of the modified pages was passed to me. Originally it’d been a drawing of myself looming over the developing colony as the little guys built the forge.

They all had pointy ears and funny hats. As did I. They’d also drawn little protruding genitals on all of them, and written “Elf Overlord Dildo Faggins” across the top. I scrunched it into a wad, focusing on showing as little reaction as possible. More sheets were passed to me by snickering ogres, each one more obscene than the last.

When the bell rang, my desk was full of wadded up drawings but still no binder. Only when it looked like I’d complain to the teacher was it dumped at my feet, in passing. Jennifer stayed behind and surveyed the damage with me. “Why did you let them do that to you?” she pleaded. I thought about that one. “You say that as if I’m somebody important.”

On the way out, my path was blocked by Dan. Other kids called him “The Fridge”. How many grades he’d been held back varied depended on who you asked but judging by his muscle mass and the beginnings of facial hair, it was more than a few. To his left and right, Jeremiah and some perpetually weasel faced kid I’d never bothered learning the name of.

“Where you going, Faggins? Do your elf minions need you? Gonna put one up your ass for pleasure?” I tried to get by but was pushed back. I noticed Jennifer just behind me and wondered why she’d not fled. I didn’t particularly want her to see this. Thinking back to the library, I gambled on telling the truth, figuring it might have an unexpectedly good outcome here as well.

They stared, grins growing wider with every sentence until I finished, then exploded into hysterics. “I thought you was just drawing gay shit! I didn’t know you believed it! Holy shit you’re a bigger gaylord than I thought! Why you hanging around this delusional queer Jenny? Anybody but me, is that it? You pig-faced slut.”

I don’t pretend to understand why I put my fist in Dan’s stomach. I didn’t expect it to have any effect, either. Even as I did it I thought it’d bounce off like in a cartoon. There was force behind it I had no idea I could summon and it knocked the life out of him, at least for a moment.

He doubled over, face now low enough I could swing my fist into that too. I heard a crack from his nose, and one of my fingers as my fist smashed into his ugly features as if in slow motion. He fell backwards and the other two with him stepped back in astonishment.

I was overcome with a feeling of surging heat in my chest, face and arms. I felt invincible. But discovered when he got up that I’d simply caught him off guard. Without the aid of surprise, my lack of coordination makes me an easy target. One swing lifted me off my feet, then sent me rolling once I connected with the ground.

Dan laying into me was the cue the other two were waiting for. As he threw one fist, then the other, like twin pistons in an engine, his accomplices got in what kicks to my head and groin they were able to without interrupting the main course. When you’re in this situation often enough, your mind learns tricks for dealing with the pain. Like finding someplace it can go where pain doesn’t reach.

For me that’s the memory of the crone’s hut. The hot chocolate, soup, and warm hugs. I only returned to reality when I heard Jennifer cry out. She’d gotten in the middle of things trying to stop them only to discover Dan had no compunctions about hitting girls. I panicked and struggled to stand. After all these years I thought I’d burned away all of my weak spots, but they’d found a new way to hurt me.

As soon as she fell to the ground next to me, tears streaming down her face, I rolled on top of her and held on tight. Dan struggled to remove me, gave up, and punched me in the sides and head a few more times before wiping his brow and ambling off. The other two got in their final kicks, then scampered after him in a fit of laughter.

I was dimly aware of a circle of other students staring at us, but everything was deathly quiet. I could hear her weakly sobbing. Through the tears, she asked if I was alright. It was agonizing just to sit up. My head throbbed and blood from my nose and a gash in my forehead was caked all over my face. The warm salty flavor in my mouth inclined me to spit, and when I did, a few teeth came out with it.

She was a mess too. Dan must’ve had a ring on or something. A deep cut on her eyebrow was bleeding down the side of her nose and into her mouth as she blubbered. I took off my shirt and used it to wipe the blood away. “I told you”, I muttered. “I can’t protect anyone. Not myself, not you. If I were you, I’d go find someone who can.”

She kissed me. Of all the times to do it. I couldn’t wrap my head around why. It sent ripples of gasps through the crowd of onlookers. Then a teacher arrived to break things up, as close to in the nick of time as they ever are. That’s one of the earliest life lessons I could recall learning. Nobody bigger than you will come to save you. You’ve got to be that person for yourself, and anybody smaller that depends on you.

When my parents arrived it was a hurricane of shouting, mostly at me for getting into another fight, until the principal explained the details. Dan was here instead of a juvenile correction facility as part of an experimental rehabilitation program for minors. He couldn’t be expelled, only suspended. “It takes two to tango”, the principle pointed out, lecturing me for “participating” in the fight instead of “walking away”.

I explained that I couldn’t simply walk away from Dan, but my voice didn’t count for much. I was also suspended for three days. I got an earful on the way home. Even though Mom and Dad sided with me for the most part, Mom suspected that in light of the day’s events, I must’ve been lying the other day when I came home with the scraped knee and told her it wasn’t from fighting.

I think they wanted someone to be mad at, and Dan was inaccessible. He’d picked someplace in a blind spot of the security cameras so it would be my word against his, and of course, he had two ‘witnesses’ willing to corroborate his version of events. I’d cracked but not broken my nose and one finger. I also wound up needing stitches to close the gash in my forehead. Left me looking quite like Frankenstein’s monster.

The days off made me wonder why I couldn’t complete the rest of the year at home. Mom picked up the three days worth of school work for me to complete, and it took me only the first day and the morning of the second to finish it all. The rest was free time without supervision, as Mom and Dad were at work.

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