All that is written in my journal for the year of 2008, my 8th grade year, is this: “Recently we moved from San Jose, California to Meridian, Idaho. Uncle Larry and Uncle Roger live nearby.” Conspicuous below those two sentences are the eleven other blank lines that make up the rest of the page.
That page is empty of the bus ride on my first day of school where someone yelled at me for sitting in his assigned seat, empty of the days I would be sitting next to someone and find my breath so knotted up inside that I couldn’t ask to borrow a pencil or say “I read that book too. It’s good,” empty of the day—a few months later—when a group finally invited me to play a game with them at lunch and empty of how we were immediately surrounded by a much larger group that laughed and jeered at us nerds.
It is particularly empty of a day a little later, in gender-separate PE. The teacher—who had a mohawk which he occasionally dyed green—had us roll out the fat, blue wrestling mats on the gym floor to practice simple takedowns. He separated us into pairs, pitting us against one another in the small white circles on the mats. I was put opposite Adam, and watched carefully as the teacher demonstrated the proper stance. I crouched on my edge of the circle, trying to remember how to stand and what to do, and glanced toward Adam, whose lean build might have seemed like an even match for my scrawny frame if viewed from the proper distance. He was already in position.
As the teacher hollered “Go!” he stayed near the pair of us, as if through some gift of prescience. Adam immediately lunged, arms reaching for me. Faced with the primal instinct of fight or flight, I chose the latter, but found my right leg tripping over his left knee, which had anticipated my reaction. As we toppled together, he twisted, and landed with his other knee right on my chest.
As I lay gasping and crying after Adam rolled off of me, our teacher recommended that I go get a drink to compose myself. But, the tears continued after the drink and even after Adam consoled me with his praise: “The last time I did that to a kid, it broke three of his ribs. You took it like a champ.”
The tears continued even after we had gone to the locker rooms, and all the other kids had changed and left for the next class. It was just the teacher, standing over the huddled mass of my body on the locker room floor, demanding to know why I was crying. I didn’t know. I just sat there, gasping, as the fluid of my fears flowed down my chin.
Even now, when I can look back and count off the factors that led up to that moment—the move, the loneliness, the bullying—I can’t quite express the conglomeration of events that tripped me, using its knee to shatter everything but ribs.