Stone Age

David Eddington Professor Hoke TTH 9:30-10:45 9/21/11 Stone Age I’ve been bullied for as long as I can remember. The first bullies that I can remember having were named Conrad and Daniel. Conrad lived in the house directly behind me, separated by a sewer grate in between our property lines, and Daniel lived across the street from him. They both found it hilarious to pick on me and tease me. There was one time that they put a severed fish head onto the only swing on our rusted, green swing set in the backyard. They decided to do this when I was at my most vulnerable. I was only eight years old and they had almost brought me to suicide.

I walked off of the bus with my head hung low and my feet dragging on the asphalt of the street as I crossed, knowing that they were going to rush up behind me with their rude comments and remarks like they always did. This would have been the millionth time since kindergarten that they had ganged up on me for their amusement. It was a bright, sunny day, but I remember it as an overcast, chilly day, almost resembling twilight. All of my senses seemed to be dulled and repressed so that I could block out the thoughts of what they were planning with me for the day. I had been used to doing this and it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. The sharp comments began dancing around my head as I took the two street walk to my house. The walk itself should have only taken ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity when I knew that they were teasing and taunting me.

They started talking down to me telling me about dead fish and the smell of female sexual organs.

I could smell dead fish and I wanted to get away, so I started to sprint as fast as my twig legs would allow. Suddenly, I heard a loud BOOM and felt the shards of something sharp and cold brush against the 1

back of my exposed calves. I looked back and saw that Daniel had picked a large stone out of one of my neighbor’s yards and had thrown it at me. I stopped for a second to take it all in and then started running again. My backpack thumped hardly against my back as all of my books tried to keep up with me. The scent and taste of the Dogwood trees that were scattered in my neighbor’s yards entered my lungs harshly and quickly as I tried to supercharge my blood with oxygen. The houses and trees blurred together as I sprinted as fast as my eight year old legs could take me. My house seemed to be the only one that I could see clearly. There was a beacon of light over it and I knew that I would be safe from all of this once I was inside. I heard Conrad shout to me as I ran away “Yea, faggot. Run as fast as you can!” I was confused as to what the word faggot meant, but I didn’t have time to stop and think about it so I shoved the thought of the word into my mind so that I could think about it later.

Rocks kept flying at me and I was only about halfway home. The stretch from the left side of the street to the right side, where my house was located, was longer than I had remembered. My feet grew weary from the extra weight of my multiple library books, textbooks, binders and homework folders. I had stopped hearing the rocks crash against the ground and noticed that Daniel had stopped throwing the stones once he saw that I was crossing the street and realized that he should stop in case he was seen by one of the adults on the street. Both Conrad and Daniel kept yelling slurs like “Homo”, “Fag”, and “Gay boy” at me while they walked away chuckling to themselves and high-fiving like they had just won a huge battle. This never made sense to me because these kids, who were two years older than me, were acting like they had just beat up the roughest, toughest guy at school when in reality they had just picked on one of the weakest.

I pushed my body to make the climb up the steep inclined driveway, across the stone path, up the three concrete stairs and through the heavy, blue door. As soon as I slammed the door shut I felt safe. I dropped my backpack, took off my shoes and ran upstairs. The white carpet made me feel at home. It was soft and made me feel comfortable. The walls, equally as white, helped me try to clear my mind from what had just happened. I knew that I was home and that nothing could harm me while I was there.

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I went around the corner into my room, crawled onto the bottom mattress of the red, metal-framed bunk bed and started to bawl my eyes out.

I was so scared that this was going to be happening for the rest of my life and I didn’t want that to be true. Thoughts of suicide raced through my mind as I lay strewn across my bed with my face in my pillow.

“Nobody would miss me anyway. They all hate me.”

“Just go ahead and do it. Obviously nobody cares about you.”

The words that Conrad had shouted at me earlier ran through my mind at a million miles a minute and I couldn’t help but wonder what they meant and why he kept calling me these wretched words. I wanted to know why I was categorized as a “fag” and if I really was one or not. My eight year old mind started to think of what a knife would feel like with my chest as its sheath and what the warm blood would feel like against my cold, seemingly numb body. I started to think of all of the pills that we had downstairs in the wooden medicine cabinet and how easily they could have been swallowed. Thoughts of drowning myself in the bath tub seemed pleasing because the water would finally silence the jeers of Conrad and Daniel that I had put up with for so long and I would finally be at peace.

I sat there and cried for what felt like hours, but in actually was only about ten minutes. I started to think of how I was too scared to tell anybody about what I was thinking and how I was feeling about all of this because I didn’t want Conrad and Daniel to hurt me any more than they already had. I wanted to talk to somebody about this, but sitting on my bed and crying while thinking of dying seemed like a better idea at the time.

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