The vast gaps of blank page between the questions on his exam pulled him in until the white nothingness was all he could see. He was so engulfed by the simplicity of the plain spaces that time ran by unnoticed. The teacher snapped him out of his trance when she announced in her thick Alabaman drawl, “Two minutes left.” He listened to the scribbles around him as his peers rushed to complete the problems, but Michael remained unmoved. This wasn’t his form of passive resistance or an unexpectedly difficult test. This was school as Michael had always known it. Everyone else had all the discipline, the drive, the focus, the whatever-it-may-be that let them excel while he struggled to write down anything more than his name.

The bell rang and he grumbled a curse word under his breath. He wiggled out of the desk and reluctantly handed the test in. It would have been considerate of him to write a big ‘F’ on the top of it. At least it’d give her one less to grade.

Disappointed by his work, Michael frowned the entire route to his next class. He briefly wondered if the crowds he marched through could smell the failure on him. Surely he was reeking as it seeped into his skin like a marinade. His whole life had been marked by failure. His father who abandoned him as a baby was a failure. His mother who overdosed when he was three had failed him. His Papaw and Meemaw were disgraced failures. (Papaw was a former mechanic with a habit of breaking something other than what he was supposed to be fixing, and Meemaw served jail time for stealing from the cash register at the titty bar she used to work at.) Michael knew this lineage of failures should end with him…not like his abstinence was by choice anyway. The fact that none of the kids in school had failed the way he had only served as another reason why he could never fit in with any of them.

As he walked into class, he took a sheet of paper from the teacher. He went to pick a seat and locate where a guy named Tucker was while simultaneously not appearing to be doing so. His eyes ran across the ceiling and using his peripheral vision, he spotted Tucker and his accomplices picking the leaves off a plant in the far back corner by the window. He squeezed himself into the desk in the very center of the room, a safe distance from them and hidden behind the other students.

After the bell rang the teacher closed the door and began addressing the class in Spanish. Michael stared at her with his eyes narrowed in concentration and his mouth slightly agape, trying his hardest to follow along. Once she stopped, Michael had no clue of what to do. He noticed his classmates beginning to write on the sheets of paper, so he flipped his over and found the instructions full of unfamiliar words like infinitive, subjunctive, conjugate, and, of course, the words actually written in another language.

Once he began reading the example, he heard the loud thud of a backpack slamming onto the desk behind him. Denying that it could the one person he tried to avoid the most, he refused to turn around and see who caused the disturbance. The teacher gave whoever it was a disapproving frown and Michael minimized his flinch when he heard Tucker say sorry. With a familiar ache in his abdomen from the anticipation for what was to come, Michael closed his eyes and lowered his head in defeat.

Tucker’s cruelty had always been nuanced, adjusting for the location and number of witnesses. He preferred more subtle ways of harassment at school, such as whispering insults or irritating him with obnoxious but otherwise harmless noises. Outside of school he’d be louder and more vulgar, and occasionally physical. Nevertheless, Michael couldn’t fully trust Tucker to follow these patterns. Once he was so bold as to steal half of Michael’s lunch in the center of the busy cafeteria. Another time he yelled across the hallway that his mother was a prostitute (in more explicit language) before running off. Michael learned that when it came to Tucker, the only guarantee was that he’d always be unpredictable.

Michael tried to continue reading the example when he heard Tucker say in his distinct annoying voice, “Meep.” He sounded as though he had stuck his tongue so far back in his throat that he would choke on it if it went just another millimeter further. Michael hoped that today would be the day it finally did. “Meep.”

Every line Michael read was interrupted by another meep and applauded by Tucker’s entourage’s snickering. After a few minutes Tucker stopped the torment, but only thing left distracting Michael was a spec on his glasses that moved each time he shifted his head. He took off his glasses, held them up to his mouth, and exhaled to make them fog over before rubbing the lenses with his cotton shirt. Tucker said to his friends in a whiny voice to mimic a cliché nerd, “He’s cleaning his glasses.” He topped it off with a snort and his group cracked up.

Michael heard shuffling behind him and a glob of spit dropped down on the back of his hand from above. He spun around and briefly saw a smug grin on Tucker’s face before it morphed into a terrified expression, watching him realize before his eyes that he had finally gone too far.

Michael pushed the backpack to the ground, stood up, and tore the scrawny bully from his desk. He threw him on the floor with so much force that he heard a pop much like when he broke his arm falling out of a tree as a kid, but he hoped it was something more important this time. He hoped it was his skull. He hoped he finally did something that’d literally get through that thick head of his, as his Meemaw and Papaw would call it.

Michael looked down at Tucker as he raised his forearm in the air with one half of it unnaturally flopped over onto itself. As Tucker released a childlike scream and tears began streaming down his face, Michael grabbed his backpack and headed for the principal’s office.

As he passed by rows of lockers and doors throughout the hallway, Michael briefly wondered if the pleasure he felt at Tucker’s expense meant he was a psychopath. He loved the immediate regret on Tucker’s face when he turned around and they locked eyes. The beautiful moment when Tucker realized he would have to pay for those years and years of bullying. His ugly face as he cried and the girly scream he released in front of the whole class pleased Michael. He didn’t regret it one bit, but he reasoned with himself that no one else would if they had to put up with Tucker the way he did.