Shattered

The wooded roads of Dollar Bay, Michigan are about as upper as the Upper Peninsula gets, so Spring’s efforts at dispelling the frigid barrenness of winter go largely unnoticed until late in the season. On a cold afternoon, a solitary figure ambled home from school along the strip of dead, brown grass that separated the road from the tree line. Shuffling along, bent forward at the waist to ward off the piercing wind upon his face, the fifteen year-old boy gave off the appearance of a monk, his figure robed in a thick coat and heavy, dark jeans. The sun’s mocking glare belied a warmth that the chilly afternoon air did not afford.
Piercing blue eyes swept the path, inconsequentially marking each trudging step. His thoughts swept away from him, intermingling with the deadness of the air, and then plunged back again, skirting the depths of his moody, teenage ego. What did he find in there? The hazy innocence of a youth not long past? A burgeoning intelligence that was out of place in this backwater town? The harsh rebellion of a persecuted soul? It was too soon to tell; his thoughts strayed back outside, expelled like the steamy breath seeping out of his upturned jacket collar.

“A couple of kids jumped me,” Adam says to me plainly, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his chin nostalgically. “One of them broke my jaw with a baseball bat. My jaw still pops from it.” Seated comfortably in his barren office, I continue to listen to his story:

Across the road, he saw the wide expanse of russet grass that someday soon would become a baseball field once again. Dead tree branches crackled in the woods behind him. Startled out of his reverie, Adam instinctively turned to see what was causing the commotion.
There was no time for fear, no time for defense. The two boys scurrying out of the trees were bigger than him, and one wielded a long, thin-handled aluminum bat. Did the bully have time to say something clever? Adam would have. He was a smartass, and that was what made him a target: “Batter up!”
The bat swept through the air in an untrained arc, finding its target almost by accident. Adam’s jawbone snapped violently out of its place; inside his skull, the afternoon sun shattered into a mist of dazzling lights that blinded him from the pain. His knees buckled momentarily, before recovering his body to its full, if not significant, height. Darkness never descended, so Adam was able to see the stunned look on his attacker’s face.

“I think he couldn’t even believe what had happened. It was almost like it surprised him, so much so that he just dropped the bat. So I picked it up.”

He could taste the blood now. It poured into his mouth, seeping between his teeth, where the pain was beginning to localize. The two bigger boys stood dumbfounded, rooted to the dirty, dead grass as if they had forgotten why they had come. Lunging for the fallen weapon, Adam gripped its plastic-wrapped handle tightly. Fear had come and gone; the hatred of the hunter was now made insignificant in the face of the blind fury of the hunted’s revenge. Swinging the bat like a lumberjack hewing a tree, Adam crushed the side of the assailant’s chest, perhaps breaking the first ribs in that first hack. The squeals of pain did not deter him; again, and once more the bat came down as the once-bully crumpled to the ground. As if awakening from a daze, his companion lurched forward, throwing Adam back from his fallen comrade. Losing his balance, Adam finally toppled over, the bat rolling away into the underbrush. The previous moments’ rage and hostility spiraled down, down into a pinpoint of suddenly crystal-clear rationality: I have to get up. I have to get away.

“I was brought up on charges, but the judge dropped them, obviously because the kid broke my jaw first. He still ordered me to see a juvi officer, who recommended that I find a more constructive outlet for my aggression.”

When he managed to regain his feet, there was no sign of the two other boys except the muddy patch where the grass had been torn up by the sprawled body of Adam’s attacker. Turning to hurry homeward, his intention all along, the needling pains in his teeth exploded into a fire that consumed his entire skull. His eyes dulled, his ears closed off, and each step sent a wave of anguish through his loosely-hanging mandible. Behind the pain, though, Adam’s sharp intellect was reawakening, questioning: ‘What have I done?’