More than the impact, Duane felt a strange heat in his ribs and subconsciously tested if he could still take a full breath.
He heard himself wheeze. Not good.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Duane seriously considered running.
A journalist for the school newspaper was in the crowd that day. With camera in hand the journalist unwittingly took a photo of Duane at the exact moment he had decided to fight his bully to the bitter end. The journalist wrote in the caption of his photo that Duane looked “determined and resolute”.
The high school paper’s editor later refused to publish the story because it was against the rules to fight on school grounds. The editor assumed that publishing a story regarding forbidden activities would cause an uproar from the school’s administration. So the journalist was censored and his story would never be seen by anyone else. It would sit saved on one hard drive or another waiting for a time that never comes, like a dream deferred.
Duane raised up his hands like a boxer. Before Duane could take his first step towards his bully, Brandon lunged forward swinging with his left and smashed a fist into Duane’s nose.
The explosion of pain rocked Duane’s mind, his vision blurred and to this day Duane can’t fully recall what happened next.
Suzy, who had a crush on Duane since he started at her school about six months ago, told all her friends the next day that Duane was heroic for standing up to Brandon like that. Suzy was a popular girl so the story spread like wildfire in the school. Besides, the whole school knew that Brandon picked on all the new kids mercilessly. Duane was no exception. The murmur in the halls would be that everyone had a limit and Duane had reached his that day.
What the school didn’t know was that Duane had been expelled from his previous school for fighting and Duane’s mother had cried all night when the police brought him home that day. She had cradled him in her arms and repeated, “My baby, my sweet baby” over and over until her voice cracked and her throat felt raw. Exhausted they had both drifted into a dreamless sleep that night. In the morning Duane's mother had woken first and started packing.
They were moving to another town, in another province, away from what Duane’s mother assumed were his bad friends. As far away as her meager savings could take them. They had promised each other they would start fresh.
Just Samantha and her little man.
Six months and a day later, Duane would walk through the door of their tiny apartment and his mother would break down in tears again.
“You promised!” She would yell, “you promised me you wouldn’t!”
But deep down she knew he would. He was always a fighter; she loved and hated that about him. There was no way to take the fight out of that boy. With hot tears starting to flow, she held her little man so tight it was hard for her to breathe. It dawned on her at that moment while aching with worry and her anxious mind racing. Maybe. Just maybe she didn’t have to take the fight out of him. Maybe he could fight for something, instead of against something.
It hadn’t happened yet, but Duane knew the next swing would come from the right. Despite still reeling from the pain, Duane’s mind was like a thing come alive. He envisioned a hundred different ways his opponent might swing and eliminated all possibilities except one. A wide swing from the right, Brandon’s eyes told him he would go for Duane’s head. He moved to lean away from the punch but his ribs sent electrical currents of pain all over his body. He gasped for breath and felt Brandon’s fist graze the side of his head.
As the fist scraped past, Duane saw his opening. Brandon had thrown everything he had into that punch and nearly missing it meant he was completely unbalanced. Duane dropped his right hand low and as he
brought it soaring up he twisted his body and used his legs to push himself up to maximize the power behind the punch. For the first time in his life, Duane felt he had done something perfectly.
Mr. Wilson had seen the crowd gathering from the school’s soccer field. Starting into a jog, he yelled over his shoulder to the boxing team to do more laps around the field. His whistle still dangling around his neck he pushed through the tall kids near the middle of the crowd to break up what he assumed was a fight. As soon as he caught his first glance of the scuffle he knew it was too late to stop anything.
However, standing where he was now, he had an excellent view of the new kid landing an uppercut under Brandon’s chin. It was perfect form. Brandon’s legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground, completely out cold. Mr. Wilson stood there, his mouth agape, the scene looked like it could have been out of a
boxing promo video to him.
“This kid is a boxer. A damn good boxer,” Mr. Wilson told his wife much later, “a natural!”
It had been a very long time since Mrs. Wilson had seen her husband this excited. Ever since that career ending concussion a few years ago, the light had gone from his eyes. But tonight his eyes shone like they did in the old days as he gestured wildly, talking about hooks, straights, bees and butterflies throughout dinner. He spoke so quickly that it all seemed like gibberish to Mrs. Wilson but she found herself beaming back at him, years
of worry quickly washing away.
“So you like to fight huh?” Samantha asked while still hugging her son tightly.
“Yes mama,” Duane said softly, wincing at the pain from his bruised ribs being squeezed by his mother’s embrace. He tried to muster the courage to mention that his broken nose needed some attention.
The phone rang, Mr. Wilson was on the other end.
Duane and Mr. Wilson had a long talk after the fight while they worked to get Duane's nose to stop bleeding. Mr. Wilson had promised to talk to his mother about the whole situation.
“Boxing team?” Samantha asked, “Well, I like that much better than detention.”
Duane smiled but then immediately regretted it as he felt a stabbing pain from his broken nose. Duane was going to be a boxer.
“That was the day everything changed,” Duane finished saying to the interviewer.
“But you could only tell after all these years!”
Duane nodded, “They say hindsight is 20/20.”
A few time zones away, Brandon made an irritated grunt at hearing Duane’s last comment and with his thumb squeezed the power button on his TV remote.
“What’s wrong honey?” Brandon’s wife Suzy asked from the kitchen. The house was silent save for the sound of the hood range above the stove top.
“Duane was on TV,” without taking his eyes off the blank TV screen, Brandon turned his head slightly to yell at the side of the house with the kitchen, “you remember Duane?”
Suzy rolled her eyes, not this again, “Yeah, didn’t you two get into a big fight back in high school?”
“Yeah, I remember that fight with Duane,” Brandon yelled back, he had turned the TV on again and was staring at the credits roll for the talk
show. “It was nothing. Just two boys fighting, nothing new about that, and everything was over in under a minute.
No big deal.
All these marketing folks have to blow everything out of proportion. I mean, I’ve seen all this guy’s fights, he’s a born boxer, that’s all there is to it. Why do they have to do all this fancy talk?”
“It sells tickets.” Suzy said flatly as she stirred the soup on the stovetop. They had this talk every time Duane came on TV and she had learned that this was the best and most acceptable answer. As of late, Duane was on TV all the time, promoting a fight or a charity or something. He had really made something of himself, Suzy thought to herself.
“Yeah,” Brandon nodded vigorously and the old couch creak in agreement with him, “it’s all about the marketing these days, no substance.”
“Right,” Suzy said as she took the soup off the heat and let it cool. She made her way from the kitchen to sit on the couch beside Brandon. The credits roll had finished and Brandon was channel surfing now to see what else was on.
The rest of the evening was quiet as per usual. Brandon and Suzy ate their dinner in front of the TV like they did every night. Neither of them could remember what they watched but they patiently waited for exhaustion to set in before they would collapse into bed. Too tired for anything but dreamless sleep, only to wake in the grey morning to shuffle off to work.
Until then, they let the volume of the little box in front of them fill the spaces in-between.
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