I want to tell you a story. I do not know if it will be considered a nice story by any means, that judgment I will up to you, the reader. My name is Tom, and I was born in the happy 80's.
I grew up in a time when synth-pop, hard-rock and disco were the big music genres and video-games became an industry to be reckoned with. Both those mediums were really important to me during my childhood years and I hold them dear even today. As a kid I had a pretty easy time, growing up in a home with nice parents, awesome friends and a whole lot of video-games. My parents owned an amazing candy shop, where they also were renting out movies and such, a treasure trove for a kid like me. It always felt good when my parents came home with movies and games, before releasing them in store. In other words, there were always some form of entertainment available in my childhood home. Now so far I bet you are thinking: “Wow this guy had it easy during his childhood.”, and I have to admit that while everything was perfect at home, the life with my friends was a completely different story.
As you might have guessed, I was a text-book “nerd” playing video-games and watching movies all day long when at home, as well as with my friends. This was my life as a kid, and I loved it... then first grade in school entered my life. I was seven when I begun in that class and I was as terrified as any kid in that age. I were told by my parents that I was going to learn new things and make new friends. While that was true in every sense, everything came to be... not so simple. I had but one friend in that class from earlier, his name was Jack and we had been friends since we were 4 years old, and while we hung out with each other as normal outside school-time, something started to change between us inside the school-yard. Jack easily found new friends that he spent time with during school hours, the sad part was that the same gang he hung with, also bullied us, the nerds. This made things very confusing for me, cause in our free time we spent time as usual, laughing, gaming and joking around. But in school I was beaten up with a shovel, drowned in toilets and laughed at instead, by my “best friend” and his gang.
One would think that events such as these would make me a pretty grim kid at my current age, I did however just let it happen, suppressing my feelings inside during nine of my school years. During these years I also made some friends however. Christie, Jacob and Sammy were kids that I came to be very close with. While we met in the first grade, we started to hang out for real in the second. We did everything together dining, collecting hockey cards and having sleep overs, we even got a beating together, by the “cool kids”. The funny thing is, I did not stop hanging out with Jack after school, he even played video-games with my me and my newly found friends! So where were my parents in all this? Somehow I had managed to hide the fact that Jack and friends, bullied us. It was easy since I rarely had many visible scars, and when I did... Well, let's just say that I blamed something else. So, when did I snap? During my first sophomore year. This is where it all started.
Jack and his goons had become all the more physical with their bullying over the years, and this specific day, they really took it to far. They pummeled us up real good, it was like they had pent up frustrations inside that were taken our on us. They had no respect for the fact that Christie was a girl, and went at her as hard as any of us. They started my pummeling us in the gut. Once we fell to the floor we tried to shield us from their kicks, but it was when the spitting began that something happened in my brain. I suddenly realized that my so called “best friend” is standing here beating the crap out of me. After the beating they just turned around and started to walk away, leaving us with the words “Grow some balls dweebs”. Those words etched themselves into my brain, it was like I finally understood that I, myself is a human being with integrity. All those years of being walked had finally caught up with me.
I did not go back to school for one week after that, but I did not stay at home either. Me and Sammy secretly met up and skipped school together, discussing what had happened that day. On the Thursday, that very same week, a life-changing dialogue took place between us. This was the day I told Sammy that “I did not want this bullying to go one anymore”. This was the day we swore a pact... a pact that would shape our whole lives. We swore not to take shit anymore, and to get back at Jack for all the years of pain we had to endure, thanks to him. The first day back at school, we managed to meet Jack, alone in the corridor, without his posse. It was just me, Sammy and him. It all happened very fast. Jack tried to threaten us with his big brawn, as usual, calling us things such as: “toilet-lovers, and weak failures”. We did not even possess half the muscle or body-size that he did, which probably was the reason as to why he had selected us as victims. Before he had any time to push us around any further, the knife in my hand pierced his gut, as easily as butter. Me and Sammy stood there for a couple of seconds, pondering what we just did and when Jack fell to the floor in front of us, we started running fast. While running through the brick corridors to the nearest exit, we had no Idea that this was the start of something big.
To Be Continued...
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