|  By the third day, Priscilla's patience had hit its limit. She pushed me, yanked hard on my hair and finally stood in front of me to get me to stop walking. I refused to look her in the face but also refused to look down. I tried to side step her, but she would mimic my move and cut me off.
I couldn't recount verbatim what she told me. I just know that it had something to do with "Don't you think you're special..." in reference to my getting to take a bus to a different school. Other comments on my being white and spoiled played into effect.
It went on for a short while, with her poking me in the chest. I was asked why I wasn't talking back. I continued to refuse to do so. I pressed my lips tightly together and kept my head up, but would not look her in the eye. I stared at a telephone pole just past her shoulder.
Because I wasn't really looking at her, the punch to my nose really caught me off guard. It was fast, it was hard and, unlike her poor aim with the rocks, was delivered with a professional boxer's precision. Tears instantly welled up in my eyes, even though I couldn't have seen them for the stars shooting into the front of my head.
It was then that I finally responded. I crumbled to the ground and began to sob, asking only: "What's wrong with you? Why are you doing this to me? I'm just trying to go home! Leave me alone!"
Priscilla stood and laughed loudly. It was her friends that started to yank on her clothes and tell her that they needed to scram. They left me there on the concrete sidewalk, sobbing and holding my face, blood from my nose pooling into my hands.
When I finally stood and walked the remainder of the way home, I found my dad was home. This wasn't a normal thing. I had a key and my mom would generally return from work about a half hour to an hour after I got home. My dad happened to be working a split shift that day. He was never one to pry and when his questions of "What happened?" went unanswered, he didn't press the issue and instead waited for my mom to get home.
My mom sat down on the end of my bed and pressed me for information until I finally spilled the story about what had been going over the past weeks. She hugged me and rocked me in her arms when I cried. I asked her the questions that I had asked Priscilla. I had yet to reach the double digits in my age when I learned that my childhood was forever over.
"Some people are just mean for no reason," she said. "I wish I could tell you why, but I can't. I just wish you could have found this out when you were older."
I thought about that all night. The fact that there were mean people out in the world, people who just liked to make others miserable perhaps to make their lives feel better. That there would be nothing that I could do to change them. That there would be many more people like Priscilla in my future.
It was in that moment that my childhood died. Realizing that some people are just mean, sometimes for extenuating circumstances, but most of the time for no good reason at all. That no matter how high I held my head and pretended as if I couldn't hear the taunts, they would just push me until they could get me to cry.
As I got older, I became more embittered towards people like this. I used my sense of humor and my intelligence as weapons. Most of the time it worked. For those other times, I employed my uncles' advice for those who chose to gang up on me. "Take out the big one and the followers will split." I'm not proud to say that I got into fights or even that I won every fight I was in subsequent to the day that I was attacked by that ornery girl with the glandular problems. There is really nothing to be proud of in this type of circumstance.
One day Midget will come home crying and I'll have to deliver the news that I heard. I plan on telling her what I learned.
"Never throw the first punch. Take out the big one first. And always keep your head held high."
Because really, that's all any of us can do.
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