The Scar Boys

“Who the fuck are you?”

An older and much larger boy stood over me, blotting out the sun. “You weren’t god damn here when we chose up the god damn sides.” He was trying on curse words the way a little girl tries on her mother’s shoes.

The boy wasn’t just big, he was cartoon big. He also wasn’t alone. He was one of seven snot-nosed tweens surrounding me like I was in the middle of a football huddle. They had decided to make me a central character in their game of Ringolevio. I had no idea what that word meant, and didn’t have a clue about the rules of the game, but near as I could tell, it was something between hide-and-seek and all-out neighborhood war.

I don’t remember what I was doing just before the “Who the fuck are you?” It’s as if the entire universe came into
being all at once in that exact moment. Earlier memories just don’t exist for me. Strike that. They exist, but they’re buried in a place where I can’t find them. They can only be reconstructed from the outside. (If you’re wondering how this can be, give yourself a pat on the back, because you’re asking a really good question. Read on.)

“Who the fuck are you?” the boy demanded a second time.

A thick haze hung between the sun and Earth like gauze, trying to choke the life out of everything—even the flies and mosquitoes didn’t have any energy. It was the kind of summer afternoon that bred impatience.

“I don’t know,” I muttered back. With no brothers or sisters to properly weave me to the fabric of kid society, I was, at eight years old, mostly overlooked, and only occasionally tolerated by the other children in our neighborhood. I was so lost in the excitement of an older boy actually talking to me, that it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t going so well.

“You don’t know who you are? Are you fucking retarded, shit-for-brains?” The other boys laughed.

“I’m Harry Jones,” I mumbled at my shoes.

“Well then,” the older boy said and puffed out his chest like Patton, “you, Harry Shit Jones, have been caught by the Sharks—that’s our team—and you’re our prisoner.” The other boys stomped their feet in approval. I’d wandered
into the final act of
Lord of the Flies
but was too young to know it. “And what’s worse, you little ass head,” he leaned in close, “you’ve been caught cheating.”

“I wasn’t chea—”

“Shut up.”

“Honest, I wasn’t—”

He punched me, hard, in the shoulder. I was already too scared to cry, and somehow I knew crying would only make it worse.
Maybe if I take my lumps
, I thought,
it’ll all turn out okay
.

“Whaddya think we should do with him?” someone asked.

One of the other kids, a freckled little creep named Timmy, who called me “Shrimp Toast” every time he saw me playing in front of my house, was holding a length of rope, maybe a clothesline, maybe something else. “I think we should put him in
jail
,” he said. This was met with laughs and hoots all around.

The jail was a small but sturdy dogwood tree, its thick green leaves providing shade, but no protection from the heat. According to the rules, I was supposed to keep one hand on the tree at all times until a teammate tagged me free. But I didn’t know the rules, didn’t know rope wasn’t supposed to be part of the game.

I let them tie me to the tree without a struggle, never complaining as they pulled the nylon cord too tight,
wrapping it several times around the trunk, binding me from my shoulders to my knees.

Thick gray clouds soon replaced the summer haze, and the painfully still air started to move. The first drops of rain prompted one mother after another to open her ranch house window and bellow for little Jimmy or Johnny or Danny to get inside. The game started to break as the kids sprinted for home. No one seemed to remember I was there, bound to that tree.

“Guys!” I screamed. “GUYS!”

Childhood, for all its good press, is a time when the human animal explores the dark side of the Force, pushing the limit of the pain it’s willing to inflict on bugs, squirrels, and little neighborhood boys. Most kids outgrow the darker impulses by high school. The ones that don’t spend their teenage years playing football, lacrosse, and, dating the prom queen. (It doesn’t seem fair to me, either, but hey, I don’t make the rules.)

Only one boy, Timmy with the freckles and the rope, heard me. He turned around and we locked eyes. I believed, if only for an instant, that I was saved. By the time I understood why his face was twisting itself into something between a smile and sneer, he was already in a dead run, headed for his own house, probably planning to torture his hamster or sister or something. I heard his door slam shut.