RESIST: “Finish him!”

By Patrick Burger, 1st Place, Non-Fiction

           After elementary, I moved and started from scratch in Grade 7 in a high school where I knew absolutely no one.  But Grade 7 wasn’t that bad, especially since I took the chance to re-make myself.  I became outspoken in class and a bit of a clown.  Everything changed in Grade 8, though.

            I think the first thing that was a bad omen about Grade 8 was the fact that I had to get glasses.  That was a major hit to my confidence, and I never really recovered from it until I got my contact lenses in Grade 10.  I went from smart mouth in class to quiet loner.  To make matters worse, a kid in Grade 7 (!) — the tallest kid, taller than me — Chris S. — started bullying me.  He lived several blocks from my house and was already on the city bus when I got on.  He would call out my name with disgusting burpy sounds, and he and his friends would giggle while my ears burned and I pretended I couldn’t hear them.  At school he would mock me in the halls or bodycheck me if no teachers were looking.  He would threaten to beat me up in the bathroom, so going to the bathroom became an exercise in terror.  If I saw Chris, I went the other way.  It was starting to feel like elementary school all over again — but I was determined to continue to participate in things the other kids did, like playing hockey on the local outdoor rink a few blocks from my house.   Of course, that was also the rink Chris went to, and he showed up one evening while I was there with my friend Patrice and a few other guys from our high school.  One of them was Kenny New, a big redhead, a great hockey player, and generally acknowledged as the toughest kid in my grade.  For some reason Kenny had never picked on me — (redhead solidarity, maybe?) — and so I was welcome to play.

            The game on the ice was quite chippy, with Chris taking whacks at me and running me into the boards every chance he got.  I would just get up again and get back into the play, but it was clear that the game Chris was playing wasn’t hockey — it was getting me.  At one point he rode me into the boards and grabbed me so that our sticks fell clattering to the ice, as did my glasses.  He got me in a head-lock and started doing noogies on my head with his knuckles, the painful friction of them sweeping my toque off and burning my scalp.

            “Hey everybody!” he called as the game stopped and everybody drifted closer to see what was going on, “Free shots on Burger!”  And as he held me so that the others could start punching me, I saw red and I lost it. 

            I pulled out of his grasp and rose up from my half crouch, fists flailing.  I had on thick, insulated plastic mittens that worked well as boxing gloves, and in my fury my fists were like a windmill flashing upward and smashing repeatedly into his face.

            I heard shouts around me as the others egged the fight on, and I saw the look of pained surprise on Chris’s face as my blows landed tellingly.  He brought up his own mittens to defend his face, but I kept on punching and punched right through them, smashing his face again and again.

            “Go Burger!” I heard a few voices call out around me, and the novelty of someone being on my side was so jarring, I didn’t know what to make of it, except to just keep punching. 

            Chris suddenly collapsed to the ice, turtling, covering his head with his hands and whimpering.  I stood over him, panting, like a conqueror, fist raised to hit him again — that moment was burned into eternity until I heard Kenny New’s distinctive husky voice command: “Finish him!”

            The idea that I could obey Kenny and continue beating Chris until he had to be taken to the hospital was so chilling that the cool flush of that realization washed away the fiery passion that had taken hold of me.  I stood there for another long moment, fist still raised, panting.

            Chris risked a frightened glance up at me — and when he saw that I wasn’t going to hit him again, he scrambled to his feet, crawled over the boards, and ran home, crying.

            I was in shock, even as Patrice and Kenny and a few of the other guys came up to congratulate me.  I remember hearing one of them say to the other, “I didn’t even know what was happening, and when I looked over all I saw was one guy punching the other guy over and over.”  I had won.  It was a major fight, and I had won.  I had resisted my oppressor, and won!  And I had shown mercy, too, which I knew from both the Church and Marvel Comics was a good thing.  The game resumed  and I played the rest of it in an elated, distracted daze.              It turned out that mercy is overrated.  Chris remained a thorn in my side, still mocking me on the bus, crank-calling me on Christmas Eve to insult me in the foulest language imaginable, and threatening me in the halls.  He never dared to lay a hand on me again, though, and when I’d had enough of it, we ended up doing the classic “I’ll meet you outside after school!”  I had no intention of showing up, though, and it turned out that he hadn’t shown up either.  After that anti-climactic moment, the bullying petered out, especially since Chris’s older brother George ended up being part of my group of friends.  I heard, years later, that Chris had become an RCMP officer stationed in a remote First Nations reserve — I felt sorry for those people.  

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