When You Ran

You were a scrawny, unathletic, half-Chinese kid, in a place full of white people who privileged football. You paired up with a chubby kid, who represented one of the few weaknesses of adolescence you did not. Liken that to a poker hand, and that had to be good for a four of a kind, or at least a set.

You didn’t realize the stakes you were gambling for until they came from the bushes.

These older boys wore the kind of big rubbery Halloween masks you’d always envied on the shelves at Spencer’s gifts. The impractical kind that were not only expensive, but that you’d heard would get so hot beneath if you wore one for more than a couple minutes.

You were on a walk with your friend. Wrong place. Wrong time. The older boys were lying in wait, but not for you specifically. The walk wasn’t routine or planned, so they must have meant to jump out at whoever appeared. You weren’t the target--not you specifically.

And it was clear they didn’t have much of a plan beyond the scare. Move this incident forward twenty years, and surely someone would have had a smart phone ready to capture the look on your face. Maybe you were the first to walk by and they hadn’t really shaped the plan yet.

They were masked. You were revealed.

A coward.

You ran. Certain of a beating, with an instinctive bent toward flight over fight every time. You were fast. So fast you got away. So fast you left your friend in the dust.

You’re not sure what happened then, because though you abandoned your friend, and though you saw him get shoved between the hands of older boys, you also remember that the two of you were together again before long. Scared together, inching down the sidewalk and stopping every few squares to reevaluate. You knew the best answer was to get back to your friend’s house, and it was well under a quarter mile away, it’s just that getting home meant passing back around the corner where the older boys sprang out the first time, or going the long way around the block, such that there was no telling where these boys would reposition themselves along the way. These boys who might be moving quickly. These boys who, you thought at the time (though it seems absurd now) might have been working a thoroughly designed plan. These boys wouldn’t have any reservations about cutting across other people’s yards, climbing over fences. They’d hear the yells of angry grownups, but wouldn’t stop for them, except maybe to give them the finger.

But backyards were the key. It must have been your friend who thought of it, because you were reticent to ask for help, and all the more so to go into strange houses. He rang the doorbell and the old woman answered. Collectively and out of breath, you explained that you’d been attacked by bullies in masks and that you needed help.

You imagined she might call the police on your behalf, or maybe drive the two of you the absurdly short distance home, which you didn’t like the idea of either because, even if she were an old woman, getting in this stranger’s car couldn’t be the best plan either.

But whether it was she or your friend or the combination of the two while you were paralyzed with a series of flawed options, she let you in, to cut through her house and through her backyard so that there was only one more, unfenced yard to dash through without permission and spit yourselves out across the street from your friend’s house. For years, you would think of that first old woman’s permission as one of the greatest kindnesses--particularly on the part of a stranger--you had ever encountered.

You made it.

Your friend recounted the story to his parents. Saying we got jumped and when they asked what he meant he said, you know, a surprise beat up. You don’t know if they discredited the story based on the fact neither of us had actually been beaten, or if his father surreptitiously called around to other parents in the neighborhood to say what had happened or warn their children, or to warn the bullies directly that if he got a hold of them, they’d pay. You never told your parents a thing.

But still, you had to make the walk home in time for supper that night. And walks to and fro day after day. As if you were going on some very dangerous mission, you promised to call when you made it home safely.

You did make it home safely.

And though you readied yourself to run, and once you had a house key, walked with it threaded between knuckles so that you might get one good swing in if it did come to fighting, the older boys never came after you again—not in masks, and not on the street at least, though they’d still try to trip you on the school bus and threw wadded up balls of paper at you.

By high school, you were less uncool, maybe in part because your friend went to private school then, and so your collective lackings were diffused from the kind of kids bully chased to the kind who largely went ignored.

Still, it haunts you. The shock of an attack. The older, taller, broader masked boys. The knowledge that your first instinct was to run, not fight. Not to stand with your friend.