Here Be The Monsters

William Rivers Pitt @ Truthout - I have a livid scar in the center of the back of my right hand. It is clearly visible, so I see it every day, and every time I see it, I am reminded of how I got it. One day, several boys in my junior high school class grabbed me and pinned me to the floor. They extended my right arm and held my hand flat to the floor. One of them took out a pencil and began violently rubbing it against the skin of that hand, until the skin broke, until little balls of my flesh stuck to the eraser, until the blood poured.

I did not cry, I did not scream, and with four larger boys crushing down on me, I could not fight back. See, that was the thing. They wanted to see how long I could go before I wept or cried out. These boys, and several of their friends, had been attacking me on a daily basis for more than two years at this point, and I had stopped giving them the satisfaction of my tears. They didn't like that, so the eraser was meant to elicit the response they desired. They never got it, so they finally stopped ripping my hand open with the eraser, and the four of them settled for beating me up again.

For five long years, this was my life. It began toward the end of grammar school, when the first stirrings of puberty began to manifest itself within my classmates and me. To this day, I don't know exactly what the catalyst was; one day, I was just another kid in the group, and the next day I was the outcast, the butt of the joke, the loser. I changed schools after sixth grade, opting for a small private boy's school instead of continuing in public school with the same group that had made the last two years of my life a living hell. Within two months at the new school, however, the same pattern of harassment and rejection emerged once again, but with a far harsher edge. Read more.