After roughly nine weeks of daily training, I was ultimately forced to use in school what I had learned in the Company. During break time on an unusually lousy Monday in April, I was on my way to my locker to switch books, when I had to walk past Jack Miller, one of my chief-tormentors and best buddies with Logan. He and one of his bully-buddies were making the moves on a petite freshman girl with ash-brown hair whom I only knew by looks. At least I’m pretty sure they thought they were flirting. The girl’s face and comments showed that she had a distinctly different opinion on that, and would rather be left alone. I hadn’t even decided if I wanted to interfere or not, when Jack noticed me standing there, watching them.
“What you looking at, Tiny Tim?” he mocked me.
I noticed at that moment that Bill was right. Those guys were big and bulky football players, but they were in no way comparable to the men I had been training with for months. I wasn’t even nervous about what he and his friend might try. They must have noticed my attitude and decided that I should receive a reminder of why I once feared them. Jack walked over to me, grabbed my collar with his right hand and forcefully pushed me into the lockers.
“I asked, what you looking at!?” he snarled.
I placed my left hand on the one holding my collar, and, for the moment, just looked at him and my surroundings. Like usual, there were quite a few people stopping when passing us, but nobody cared to do anything. When I still didn’t answer, he started raising his other arm, pulling back his fist. He took so long, I think he simply didn’t expect me to do anything about it anyway. Or he wanted to enjoy the fear he usually saw in my eyes when they advertised the pain I could expect. But not this time.
Quickly, I grabbed the thumb of the hand holding my shirt and pulled and overturned it outwards. This caused him to first lose his grip, and then follow with his torso in the direction I was bending his hand, exposing the entire left side of his neck to me. As I was bending his hand, I quickly raised my right arm to face level, and then slammed my elbow down on his jaw before he could think about what was happening. His head violently jerked clockwise before he fell to the ground like someone cut the strings of a puppet.
When his bully-buddy saw that, he moved in on me. Scowling at me with his torso low, ready to charge like I was an opposing player on the football field he wanted to tackle. When I saw that, I took a quick step to the side away from him, so he had to step over Jack and couldn’t run full force at me. As he did, he looked at his feet for just a split second, to make sure he wouldn’t step on Jack, and I used that moment to attack.
I stopped his advance with a quick and light left jab to his face, throwing him off long enough for me to instantly follow up with a strong right hook to his liver. His body basically shut down and he went down on his knees. Then, my left knee found its way into his face. He fell backwards on top of Jack and just groaned in pain, not moving much. His nose and mouth were a bloody mess. I reached down, grabbed Jack’s arm, and pulled him out from under his friend and onto his left side, like we did at the training session whenever a chokehold was held too long and someone passed out. Then I looked around.
The hallway was filled with gasping faces staring at me, and one of those faces was Logan’s. That fucker looked disappointed at his buddies! My heart was going at roughly 300 beats per minute, but I needed them to think I was unimpressed and ready for whatever they might try next. I wanted them to think I could take them all if they forced me to. I needed them to know, I was no longer their punching bag. And it worked!
The whole confrontation was over quickly. From the moment Jack raised his fist at me, maybe twenty seconds had passed, and yet, two incapacitated football jocks were lying on the ground. It was also brutal and merciless, way above the level of fights any of my fellow students were used to. But most important of all, it was super effective!
Logan and a few other guys looked at the two lying on the floor, unconscious and incapacitated. They clearly wanted to get to them, but Logan’s eyes kept flicking between the two sleeping beauties and me. They were afraid to come near me! I took a closer look at the people surrounding us and saw more than one of my bullies just standing there unmoving.
I didn’t get to relish in my accomplishment, though, since the next thing I knew, Coach Jenkins grabbed me by the arm and all but threw me across the hallway towards the principal’s office. The entire way he was raising hell about me attacking other students and threatening expulsion. When he dragged me in front of the principal’s desk, we noticed that the freshman girl had been following us the entire time.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her, still angry.
“Ah, Sir, he wasn’t attacking nobody! Jack and his friend wouldn’t leave me alone, even after I told them to. When he...” she said, now pointing at me “ ... just walked by and looked at them. Then Jack suddenly grabbed him, pushed him into the lockers and tried to punch him. He was just defending himself!”
This had quickly turned into a quite uncomfortable situation for the school, and it showed on their faces. Not just Coach Jenkin’s, but also the principal’s. Making unwanted advances at a girl, in this day and age?
“That still doesn’t warrant violence! And especially not at THAT level!” the principal commented heatedly. “I’m afraid I will have to call the authorities over this assault, Mr. Brown.”.
“Assault. Is that so.” I said “Tell me, how many times have I been in here, after one of his assholes used me as a punching bag?” I asked, pointing at Coach Jenkins. “And how many times did ANY of you do shit about that!? I TRIED to get help from you and the teachers, but NONE of you could be bothered to do something. But now that I was FORCED to defend myself, NOW he starts threatening me with expulsion and the police!?”
“We told you before, Mr. Brown, there wasn’t much we could do. They always had witnesses placing them somewhere else.”
“And I told you before that I didn’t beat myself up! There would’ve been other things you could’ve done when the complaints about your valued team members piled up. But you didn’t. And now, when those guys get hurt themselves while trying to assault someone else, the victim gets threatened. I’m sure there will be a few people highly interested in that! First of all, my family’s lawyer. So, go ahead, call the police. There is more than enough proof of what’s been going on over the past eight months in my health records. And I’d be surprised if you could point to ANYTHING you did to stop it.”
I tried to keep my voice leveled and steady, though it was hard. This was months of frustration finally breaking loose, and it took everything I had not to lose it completely. Finally the principal and Coach Jenkins exchanged glances and seemed to wordlessly agree on the needed procedure.
They called the counselor and had her take the girl to a different room. Then the principal had me write down my “version of the events”. When the counselor came back ten minutes later, she was holding a paper that looked suspiciously like they gave the girl the exact same assignment. The principal quickly went over both statements, though his mood was not improving. Quite the opposite, in fact.