“He’s not your friend is he?” asked one of the girls, a big girl, one of those rapidly growing girls with big jaws and mean eyes and curly hair. It was common at school that if you grew faster than the majority you became a real bastard.

Katie didn’t say anything.

“Because if he’s your boyfriend, then you’re about to be on the ground next to him,” the girl added. “That’s your future.” They were deep words for a thirteen-year-old girl.

Everybody fell quiet as Katie thought about her future. “He’s . . . he’s not my boyfriend,” Katie said.

“Then who is he?”

“I don’t know. Just some . . . some loser in my class,” Katie said—there were tears in her eyes but they didn’t fall.

“A what?” the girl asked.

“A loser. A loser,” Katie said.

Adrian can still remember it, word for word. He doesn’t have problems with those memories, only with the ones he’s developed over the following years. That day he fell out of love as easily as he fell into it, or at least that’s what he thought at the time. His life at school got worse. The girls began to tease him as much as the boys. Katie became popular. To her credit she never teased him directly. Sometimes he’d come home with a bloody nose and grazed elbows and knees and his mother would call the school and complain, and the following day the bullying would be worse. Bullying was like that, the more you complained the bigger the problem became, the teachers never able to do anything about it. His classmates took any chance he had of becoming a confident student and squashed it. It was months after Katie called him a loser that he learned the only way to find happiness was to take it from somebody else.

He also knew how.

In the morning, while his mother was making him breakfast, he would go into the bathroom and urinate into a plastic bottle that would hold half a liter. He would screw the top on really tight. The bottle would be warm when he put it in his school bag but cold by the time he got to school. He would take one of his many moments of isolation between the taunts and the beatings, and he would go into the locker rooms and unscrew the plastic bottle and pour the contents into the bags of anybody who hurt him. There was a time, about a week into it, that he had to pour it over his own bag so the others wouldn’t think it was him, but he diluted it with so much water that it wasn’t really that bad and he took the things out of his bag he didn’t want damaged. If he couldn’t pour it into their bags, he’d pour it into their desks, over their uniforms while they were in gym class when he could manage it. He lasted a full month before he lost the courage to continue regularly. By then there were too many people watching out for the Urinator as he was called, with a promise from the principal that the Urinator would be expelled. It didn’t matter, because by then school was nearly over for the Christmas holidays. He carried on when they went back seven weeks later, not as often, only once or twice a term. He never soaked Katie’s bag, but he soaked some of the other girls’ bags. The occasions lessened. Once a month became once every three months. Then only a couple of times a year.

It all ended three years later when he was sixteen. He doesn’t know the boy’s name who walked in on him during the act, he was pouring his urine through the grill holes of another boy’s locker, a boy who had walked past him the day before in the corridor and slapped him in the face for no reason. In that moment of being caught his future flashed ahead of him, it would start with his mother finding out, he would be expelled, he would carry the Urinator name with him wherever he went. He was old enough to know his astronaut fantasy wasn’t going to pan out, young enough to have no idea what he wanted to do in life, and old enough to know that whatever dreams he would have were now over. The boy stared at Adrian, said nothing, and then walked away.

The rest of that afternoon was the worst. He couldn’t concentrate in any of the classes. He thought the teachers were giving him a funny look. He kept waiting for somebody to bring a message for the teacher, asking for Adrian to be sent to the principal’s office. The school bell rang and it was time to go and still nothing. When he got home, every time the phone rang he knew it was going to be the school talking to his mother, that expulsion was next, but the call didn’t come.

If the first day was bad, the second was by far much worse. He didn’t eat breakfast that morning. He felt sick all day. On recess breaks and during lunch he would sit in the bathroom with his stomach holding what felt like a bucket of water.

It was the third day the boy came for him. He didn’t come alone. They took him at the end of the school day and dragged him into a park. Together they held Adrian down and tied him up. They didn’t kick or punch him, not in the beginning, and when he was securely bound they stood around him in a circle and they all pissed on him, eight of them in total. It splashed over his skin and ran down his body. It pooled beneath his back and buttocks and soaked into his clothes. They strapped a stick in his mouth so he couldn’t form a seal with his lips. They aimed for his face, it streamed into his eyes and burned them, it rained onto his tongue and felt like acid at the back of his throat. He gagged and coughed and spluttered and it stuck in his throat and he felt like he was drowning. It felt like it lasted forever. When they were done they laughed at him and one of the boys kicked him in the head. The kicking caught on the same way fads tend to sometimes, because then another boy did it, and another. Soon they were all kicking him, and when he finally blacked out, their laughter followed him into the darkness. He dreamed of Katie. He dreamed of better times.

When he came to, the ropes were gone. He couldn’t stand. The world was off balance. A passerby found him. An ambulance was called. He was in hospital for six weeks. His brain had swelled and holes had to be drilled into his skull to relieve the pressure. He was put into an induced coma for two weeks. Six of his ribs had been broken. So had his right arm. When he came out of it, he didn’t name the boys who had done it to him. He told the police he couldn’t remember who they were. Only he could remember.

His balance came back after a month. It took him a couple of days to start walking straight. Things he’d learned at school no longer made sense. The simplest things were no longer that simple. He didn’t like listening to his music anymore. He hated it. The comics didn’t make him laugh anymore, and he hated the stories because they were about people who had unique abilities he could never have. Instead he started to make his own comics. He wasn’t a good artist, but he was good enough, and he’d draw those kids who had hurt him, and he’d draw himself standing over those boys, and he’d draw different types of weapons and different ways to use them. Sometimes, when he wasn’t drawing, he’d sit in his room snapping the doors and wheels off his model cars. He heard his mother telling his aunty that he had changed, that something inside his head had been broken. He didn’t know what. His mother knew, and she’d explain it to him, but it just didn’t make sense. He was the same person, he felt the same—and yet he knew he had changed. Sometimes he’d forget things. Things before the beating were locked inside his memory for good, but some new things struggled to stick. He was always losing things, he couldn’t remember people’s names. But he didn’t forget the names of each of the boys who had done this to him. The police were still asking questions, only not as many now. They had moved on to other things. People forgot about what happened to Adrian.

He got his strength back. His balance came back. His mind started to heal. He would never be a hundred percent, but at least he could remember new things if he tried hard enough. However he saw things differently now. The kicks to his head, the swelling to his brain, it changed his perspective on life.