Connor
Iopened my mouth to reveal it all.
The past. The horrors of a kid. The desire to become something that I wasn’t at first but was now so wrapped up in that I didn’t have any other identity.
But then I paused.
“You can’t say a fucking word to anyone about this,” I said. “Not. A. Fucking. Word.”
“I get it—”
“No, I’m fucking serious, Katie,” I said. “I’ve heard that you were the one that liked to gossip. You do you. But if I hear that you gossiped about what I’m going to tell you, I’ll burn down your store myself.”
It was probably too aggressive for someone I liked. It was certainly too much for a date. But the fact that Katie took it in stride, just nodding and asking me to continue, was probably part of the reason I liked her.
“Also, I just need to say, I’m telling you this because you want to know why I’m this way,” I said. “But I don’t really give a fuck about the past. I don’t sit at night and mope about what was or what could have been. It happened, I am who I am, but I’m not going to see a fucking shrink for it.”
“Understood,” Katie said.
That was just an outright lie. Of course it popped to mind from time to time. That was the ruthlessly evil part about the subconscious—it made things come to mind that you did not want to come to mind. It would do so at inconvenient moments. It was one of the few things that I could not control, no matter what.
“All right, fucking hell,” I said. “When I grew up, my father, a military guy, beat me a lot. Abused me. That was fine.”
“Fine?”
“I mean fine in the sense that I quickly learned how to respond to it,” I said. “I didn’t expect him to be anything other than the authoritarian in the house. I didn’t expect love from him. I just knew that if I came home, I was getting my ass beat. Did not fucking matter for what.”
I groaned.
“And usually, those ass beatings occurred because I was out of shape. My father expected me to be like him, if not literally follow in his footsteps. So when I got fat and ate too much, he’d make me run. He’d make me exercise. And when I tried to quit, he’d beat me.”
“Jesus.”
“Like I said, it’s fine,” I said.
But what was to come was not fine.
“So, you have Connor around ten, eleven years old, quiet kid at school who’s fat. He’s starting to notice girls in the classroom and get excited by looking at them, but he’s not an athlete. He’s not outgoing. He’s a fucking loser. But then, in ninth grade or so, something changes. One of the hot girls at our high school starts taking an eye for me.”
My hands were starting to shake as I told this story. I didn’t know if Katie noticed or not, and I didn’t care. The anger this story brought back…boy, it was a fucking nightmare.
“She told me that she thought I was cute. What the fuck was I to think? I was just some pudgy kid who didn’t have any friends. It was like having Jesus come down to tell me I was the chosen one. I was on top of the moon. She said if I asked her to homecoming, she’d say yes. But I had to make a show of it.”
I shook my head. If the objects around me were tables instead of stones, I probably would have driven a fucking fist through them.
“So I did. I fucking got her flowers and everything. I fucking made a fool of myself. I told her at three p.m., after school, I’d ask her out. I did.”
I snorted.
“And?” Katie said.
“And she had all of her fucking bitchy cunt friends with her to laugh at me as she said no.”
“What a fucking bitch.”
I grabbed a nearby pebble and chucked it as far as I could. What I had just done, what I had just told…that was a story that I had done my best to forget for over ten years now. It pissed me off that I could recall it just as much as it did that I was having to retell it.
“I came home, but I wasn’t the crying pussy that I was before,” I said. “Something fucking flipped at that moment. I don’t know what, but I have never cried since that semester at school. I got hard. I vowed that I’d become such a fucking badass that no one would dare to fuck with me.”
