Breaking Point
by Liz
~~~~
I see a group of butch men’s men hunkered around the doorway to the bog; I can smell their rank cologne from across the corridor. This early in the morning, I can hardly tell them apart. They cluster together, grunting and chortling and following the scantly clad females like a pack of ravenous wolves. However, these predators are less organized than a wolf pack. There is no hierarchy in this pack, there is no alpha male, no all-powerful voice of reason and justice. This pack—or rather, this gaggle of stupid little boys whose bodies have outgrown their insecure minds—moves with the grace and agility bestowed to an inebriated bum, only with much less tact.
They threw erasers at him during Algebra class. Each little rubber pellet stung as it hit the back of his neck, but he ignored it as best he could, concentrating angrily on the equation laid out before him. He gripped the pen tightly, too tightly; his knuckles were white as bone through his skin.
One, two, three more pellets stung his neck, trying his already stunted patience to the limit. He turned around at last and glared at the monstrosity of a jock who sat behind him. His eyes were dark, but his voice was eerily pleasant as he said:
"Please stop."
" ‘Please stop,’ " sneered the jock and grinned like an ogre. An entire group of them snickered and murmured amongst each other, "stupid fag," "queer."
"I hope you are all paying attention to this, back there," the instructor barked irately. "This is all going to be on the exam."
He never wanted to change clothes during PE. Instead, he sat silently on one of the benches and waited while his masculine schoolmates changed around him. Large male forms moved around him, shouting and guffawing and rough-housing in the locker room. They tripped over him every once in a while, but never apologized. He didn’t care.
When the locker room was empty, save for him of course, he went into an empty bath room stall and changed. He hated being surrounded by mirrors while he undressed; he hated looking at himself in them. His arms were too long and thin to be a man’s arms, his legs more suited to a woman’s physique than to the male form he should have grown into by this point. He closed his eyes tightly as he pulled on his red gym shorts and white shirt so he would not have to look at his body.
Some days he never left the bathroom stall at all. He stayed locked inside and leaned against the door, staring at the chipped blue paint on the walls. He scratched his name into the wood with his fingernails, or wrote desperate pleas for help on the underside of the toilet seat with a sharpie pen:
I think I’m losing my mind.
If anyone reads this, ever, help me.
If not, I don’t think it’ll matter much anyway.
The gym teacher screamed at him when he didn’t practice, but he never listened. His mind was somewhere else, his eyes glassy and disillusioned. On one occasion, the teacher struck him in the face and left a welt on his cheek for the rest of the day. The entire gym class had a good laugh at his expense and when the school day was over, a group of football players jumped him in the parking lot and beat him brutally.
No one helped him as he lay bleeding on the concrete.
His mother called him beautiful and spent the evenings with him tending to his injuries or reading his favorite William Faulkner story to him, A Rose for Emily. His father called him useless and a failure and threatened to send him away to live with his relatives in Europe if he didn’t straighten out and become "normal." His parents fought frequently, exchanging insults that stung him more than they realized. For hours, he locked himself away in his bedroom and lay on his bed, staring at his ceiling fan as it spun in lethargic circles. Round and round it went, never stopping and never slowing and never speeding up.
What’s wrong with me? he wondered in despondence. Why am I this way…
Letters were strewn across his desk, notes from "friends" at school picking apart his body with words he could not bring himself to say. The notes were cruel and degrading, and yet when Mick sent them, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. Mick, who looked beautiful and alluring even as he pummeled his victims into the concrete outside the school.
He sighed wistfully and imagined those lips that spoke such callous insults…
"So what are you anyway, fag?" one sneered into his ear on the soccer field while the other held him still by his arms. He was silent, his eyes dull and distant.
The one holding his arms gave him a rough shove backwards, sending him sprawling out onto the grass. "Answer us, you retard!" it barked.
He could not see them as people any longer, these vicious children who hurt him in ways that could not be seen. When the first cleat struck his side, he closed his eyes and resigned himself to the beating that was to come. Soon, he felt not pain, but distant discomfort, and the warm trickle of blood down the side of his face.
A shrill whistle blew and through the blood that leaked into his eyes, he could see the soccer coach sprinting across the field to break up the fight. He closed his eyes again and smiled faintly.
He woke up in the clinic, a place he frequented each week. This time, he sported a blackened eye and three broken ribs. The nurse looked at his file in the cabinet and frowned. She looked at him, confused, and murmured, "So… are you a guy or girl, kid?"
He murmured, "Who knows?" in a bemused whisper.