He had had just about enough. I should have done something that day, but I knew I didn't have to just by the way he had looked at me earlier in the day as I passed him in the hall. I smiled at him, and he actually smiled back, rather than give a funny look as he usually did. That day at lunch, he stepped into the hall where all of the grade 12's sat to eat and talk. He stepped in the door, and I think I was the only one who noticed him. How could I be though? I thought he was devastatingly cute. But I'm a "silly girl with strange tastes", as my mom has said. He opened one of the double doors, with this big duffle bag. I hadn't seen it with him earlier at all. Never before. It was the strangest thing, he just set that gigantic bag down, and no one noticed at all. He bent over and unzipped it lengthwise, this strange big tattered gray bag. It could have been a military bag, if it was green. Well, he opened it, and took out a ghetto blaster. It was a pretty crappy looking low-budget thing, but it was covered in stickers and it had character like he did, and I loved it at once. He set it down, and I think that's when the first jackass noticed. I never understood the process of high school males picking and choosing who was a geek and who wasn't. Well, I guess he was a geek though. Someone asked if he was going to "pump some Backstreet Boys, like a regular fag-boy" or something along those lines. He paid no attention. It was like he didn't even hear him. He plugged it in, and turned it on. He pulled a cassette from his jeans pocket, and slid it in to the machine near a sticker that said "Fuck you? Fuck ME!" and pressed play. I felt something then, maybe a sort of respect, possibly. It hissed for a little while, then machine gun drums started up. It got into the song a little bit, and I realized it was REM. "The End of the World as we Know it" as a matter of fact. I've always loved that song, I actually know most of the lyrics. It'd been a while since I heard it then when he played it, and that made me feel even better. Like... comfortable I guess is the word. He reached into his bag with one hand, and turned up the volume with the other, his right. He pulled out something I didn't make out at first. At this point people were finally paying attention. I squinted, not having my hideous glasses on, and saw it to be... a baseball bat. It was black, taped all around the handle in aging white-yellow baseball tape. Then... well, he started to cry. He just looked at the bat in his hands and started to cry, and I almost did too. I wanted to run up to him and take him in my arms and tell him everything would be okay, but I just couldn't. There were people around him now, making fun of him anyway. I couldn't understand why. Well, I could, but I didn't want to. I didn't want to allow myself to understand like those other people, those assholes. I think I did start crying then, I don't really remember. But he just stood there for the longest time, crying silent tears from those deep blue eyes. I admired him so much at that moment for some reason. I smiled at him through my own tears, hoping he would see and smile back like he had earlier in the hall. But he didn't see me. He just looked down in his hands to his bat and let his music play as he did it. They were all teasing him. Some from where they were sitting along the walls and some that were really in his face, pushing him. If I had a gun then I would have not hesitated. But he just stood there and took it all. I couldn't believe it. I noticed the song must have been looped on the tape, because it started over. At the chorus, one of the assholes reached down to "turn that shit off" as he put it, in his mastery of language. Michael Stipe was singing "It's the end of the world as we know it, it's the end of the world as we know it, it's the end of the world as we know it..." and I was mouthing right along. The song was playing with its distorting guitars and the look on his face changed. He was still in tears, but he looked up from his hands and continued the chorus, "...and I feel fine..." silently to himself. He wiped back a tear from his face then, looked completely calmed over, and then burst into loud tears and sobbing. He brought the bat in his hands down on the head of the boy who was reaching for his beautiful little stereo, knocking him down onto the floor with a force I did not expect he even had. Maybe it was not his own, as he kept doing it. Streaming with tears, he swung at the boy twice more, making contact both times. The first boy who pushed him took a step back, but two others around him went to grab him. Another actually ran. I didn't know what to do. His face was twisted in so much pain that it could have been him that was struck with the bat, rather than the other way around. He jammed the blunt end of the black and red bat into the larger of the two aggressive boys jaw, and I'll be damned if I didn't hear it crack in five places or more. The boy, wearing overalls and bleached hair fell to the ground with a thud I could hear and was unconscious. The boy that had ran away was all the way down the hall before the boy with the overalls hit the ground. The boy with the overalls lay beside the first boy, who had tried to stop the tape from belting out the REM song. The third grasped him by the collar of his yellow "Kill Lincoln" shirt and simply held him close to his face, as to intimidate him. It was one of the silliest things I have ever seen. Trying to intimidate a boy who has just beaten two other boys senseless with a bat, who was crying and crying and couldn't stop. He just looked at him, into his eyes, his soul maybe... at this point I thought he was capable of anything and was sure I was truly in love with him and would be forever. He grabbed one of the boys hands and took it off his shirt. Then he stepped back, and wiped his nose with one hand, bat at his side in the other. He shook his head and the other boy just stood there, backwards Leafs hat and all. He grasped the bat with both hands, and swung at his head like it was a hard ball. A cheer rose up in me, but couldn't find its way out of me. All down the hall there were people getting to their feet and running as fast as they could away from him, but I didn't move. One of the ones who had been sitting, a boy with a punk hairdo and chains who had every day called this spectacular being "faggot", "cocksucker" or "queer" got up and ran at him however. I shook my head, knowing even if he didn't what was going to happen to him. All I knew was it wasn't going to be pretty for him.
".... Leonard Bernstein..."
He took an end of the bat in each of his hands, and thrust the middle of it across
".... birthday party, cheesecake..."
the punks throat. The punk fell down, clutching his throat, and making a gurgling noise. He kicked him, but he was still crying, and just as hard as ever. The punk stopped struggling, and just cried to himself. "How does that feel, you bastard?" I thought, with no sympathy at all. He had snapped my bra all the time in grade seven and eight. I told him to stop and it really hurt all the time, but he never did. But once I wasn't pretty enough for him anymore he finally did stop. He dropped his bat, and brought his hands to his face and let cries that were the loudest yet. He hurt so much... I felt so bad for him. Every day they did that to him. Every day they beat him, and called him names, and did things to him. I thought he was going to fall over, and no one was left in the whole hall but him and I, so no one was going to be there to catch him. But he didn't fall. He took his hands from his face and looked up to God or whatever, sniffling. Then he saw me, still sitting there, crying so badly my eye makeup must have been all over my face. He walked over to me, me crying there. His face cleared from the storm it had just housed and he looked down at me like a saint right from heaven. He looked sad, in a different way, as if for me. He looked sort of confused, and spoke to me. He just crouched down and said, "please, don't." He took my hand, oh God, he took my hand and stood up slowly, bringing me up with him gently and calmly. I was still crying, I knew that because he actually wiped a tear off my face. It was corny, something he picked up from a sappy movie or something, but I smiled just the same. I swear to God what happened next is true, he put his arms around my little body, and held me so close to chest I could hear his heart beat. I could hear it.

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