They used to live in an apartment so small they had to share one bedroom, and now he had his own space. The house was old, smelling like wood and something acrid mixed with floral scents, but it was huge in comparison.
The problem was that Noah was an introvert. He’d rather spend the afternoon with his nose stuck in a book, a comic, or drawing while listening to music than playing with other kids. Apparently, that made him a target when no adults were around.
“Give it back!” Noah jumped to catch his backpack.
“Come here and get it yourself!”
Before Noah reached him, a brown-haired boy threw the bag to one of his friends, and they all laughed.
“Why don’t you grab it? It’s not that high.”
More laughs followed that felt like a punch to the nose. Noah’s eyes stung as he jumped again in a lame attempt to retrieve his things.
He was tired of not having friends, of never being invited to birthday parties, of the trip-ups, of having the wheels of his bike slashed, of being locked in the bathroom at school. It made his heart twist in his chest, a dreadful sensation that wrapped around each one of his organs and limbs, paralyzing him. It’d gotten to the point where he didn’t want to get out of bed most days. But Mom was starting to worry about how withdrawn he’d become, so he pretended to be okay, which was also exhausting.
“You’re an idiot!” Noah shouted as he pushed the kid wearing a basketball jersey, making him lose balance and fall flat on his ass.
It felt as though the world had stopped rotating. He had never done anything like that. And although he feared what could happen now, there was something else running through his body. He felt... empowered.
“How dare you?”
“You’re such a loser!” The brunette boy punched his shoulder while the other two emptied his backpack on the ground.
“I told you to leave me alone!”
“You’re already alone. Nobody wants you or your slutty mom. That’s why your daddy left.”
“Yeah, who’d want a whiny sissy boy?” The tallest kid pulled a strand of Noah’s hair. “Only girls wear it like this, you know?”
“Maybe he wants to be one,” Jersey Boy mocked, tugging the outside corners of his eyes to slant them.
Noah slapped his hand away.
“I bet he regrets making you.”
Noah was pushed from behind.
“Yeah, you half-breed.”
“Shut up!”
Noah didn’t like it when they made fun of him for not having a dad. It wasn’t his fault. He’d asked Mom about him when he was little because he didn’t have a single memory of his father, but he’d always gotten the same answer:We didn’t love each other anymore.
It was confusing. He didn’t comprehend how people could stop loving their family, friends, or that special person the movies mentioned. Feelings didn’t have a switch to turn them on and off. He didn’t think they could fluctuate that much—though it seems they sometimes did.
Eventually, Noah stopped caring about whether or not he had a dad, if he ever thought about him at all. Mom was more than enough, and he hated it when these boys, who didn’t know her, called her a groupie or a slut, although he didn’t fully understand the meaning of those insults. Even years later, after she explained she had, in fact, been adevoted fanwhen she was younger and that he was the product of an affair with the drummer of a Japanese metal band, he hated those derogatory names.
Despite it all, since he could remember, Mom had toiled from sunrise to sunset, twenty-four-seven, to give him the best life she could afford, and she had never, not even for a second, stopped smiling.
“Next time you’ll think before acting!”
Noah didn’t know which boy had said that. He was kneeling in the alley behind the library, where they’d dragged him so no one would see or hear them. It was cold, really cold. The wind was crisp, and his clothes were soaked from the snow melting under him, but there was something else. Something that closely resembled a recurring nightmare where he was standing in the middle of a dark room and didn’t recognize his own face in the mirror. He was alone, achingly so.
With his arms wrapped around his head to protect himself from their kicks, Noah bawled his eyes out. He hated thinking of Grandma living in a nursing home with strangers looking after her, but he’d caught himself more than once wishing she’d go back there so they could return home to Odense. It had only been four months since he started school here and it sucked.
He had tried dodging these kids in every possible way after they began bullying. But it seemed like he couldn’t even go to his favorite place alone without them ruining everything.
Suddenly, the pain ended, and the verbal abuse was replaced bytheircries.
