Create a Story - Week 9

So this one is life experience, from Create a Story page 74. It didn't go the direction I expected and though there are a couple of life experience stories I have that resemble these events, it sorta picks and chooses elements from several to create a whole—which I suppose, if someone was writing my life or creating a screenplay of it, they'd probably end up doing, so I'm not going to feel bad for it. For life experience first person just feels right, so that's what I did. We'll see what comes for next week.

Schoolyard Bully

I didn’t want to be here. Surrounded by Trevor’s goons. That wasn’t my way.

But Eric had taunted them just a little too much. Intention doesn’t really matter, only results. The results were goons surrounding us. And Trevor was someone I couldn’t deal with. I had no influence. Nothing he wanted.

Which just made the waiting feel stupid.

The result was inevitable from the moment Eric had gone too far.

There were too many to run from. Running worked when you had a lead, somewhere to go—somewhere to hide. Without those things, and given a group, as Trevor had and we did not, it became math. Someone was always faster. Between Eric and I, that was Eric. So he ran, darting between then, knowing I couldn’t, and left me to reap the rewards of his behavior.

Their reactions, predictable to a fault, were abandonment by a few to follow the cause of the fiasco. I couldn’t hope that they would catch him. That would be wrong. But some small part of me couldn’t help wishing for consequences that might balance his actions.

To be fair, in effect, he’d reduced the number of people that I had to face. I might appreciate that if there were not still too many. If Trevor, as much a skinny, weak kid as Eric, wasn’t standing behind them, pretending he was a threat as though power was some preordained destiny.

I never much liked Trevor. I didn’t hold much stock in anthropomorphising people into mousy, foxy, built like a horse. But if there was ever a young man who deserved the moniker of weasley—and not in any modern Potteresqe connotation—it was Trevor. 

None of them considered me a threat, of course. I might be big, but I was a gentle giant, the kind that didn’t even like to curse out loud.

Eric had known me long enough to know there was something percolating under the surface. If he’d ever guessed at the many possible things it might be, he’d never said. But he knew there was something. Perhaps I was being generous in thinking that Eric had any thought for something beyond his own safety. He had, after all, left me to face these goons by myself.

No one would mistake me for simple, but many might think me unworldly enough to miss that Trevor was more than a bully. He ran drugs through the school. How serious I could never be sure. Weed certainly. LSD, probably. Other things? Yeah. But I couldn’t be sure what, except it wasn’t heroin. The kids went to the dorms just over the hill to get that.

My parents would probably be appalled that their kid who spent most of his time listening to celtic harp music knew that much about drug culture at school.

The fists started to fly. It didn’t take long. One boy, bloody and screaming on the ground and the rest ran.

Eric was right to worry about what got under my skin.

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This one came in at 500 words, which honestly surprised me, since I was still having trouble at 200 and then BAM, I was wondering how to end it in the word count. Yay me? Anyway, this catches me up, so all I need is to make sure I write one this week to be back on track.