“There’s nothing to talk about, Mom. The guy had a big mouth and pissed me off.”

“I don’t care if he pissed you off! I don’t care if he called you every bad name in the book. You don’t hit people! I feel like I’m talking to a three-year-old.” Her lips pursed in frustration, a sure sign that I’d successfully pissed her off, something I knew would bother me later when I wasn’t so fueled by my own anger. “You need to learn to settle your problems by walking away, not spouting off with your sarcastic crap or using your fists!”

My muscles tensed, the small pool of guilt she had created had begun to get deeper with seeing and hearing her disapproval.

I’d punched a guy that morning for writing “fag,” “cock sucker,” and “ass driller” all over Ben’s car with lip stick and shaving cream last week. The shaving cream was easy to get off, the lipstick on the other hand, was nearly impossible.

The kid was in our class. He’d even spoken to me a few different times, trying to get on my good side, but I still couldn’t recall his name and didn’t want to after he pulled that crap. I would never have guessed his Dockers’ ass was the one that humiliated Ben. We probably never would have known. We still weren’t sure who outed Ben. There weren’t many that knew he was gay, not even his parents.

But the kid couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut, heckling Ben as we pulled into the parking lot. Ben had already had a rough year. His parents were splitting up and his little sister had been diagnosed with cancer last year. Although she was in remission, that shit was more than any one person should have to deal with, especially at seventeen. Then he had his trust betrayed by one of his closest friends? I wasn’t about to let the fucker careen around spouting off a bunch of ignorant shit that he knew nothing about.

As the word faggot poured from his shithole of a mouth, I punched him. The kid fell like a brick, but it wasn’t nearly satisfying enough for all of the crap he had caused, and worse, what he was still trying to inflict. Before I could continue my lesson, Mr. Mitchell arrived and hauled me off, threatening expulsion and having baseball disappear from my future.

What he didn’t know was I had no desire to pursue baseball. I had loved everything about the game at one time—from the sound of the bat as it kissed the ball to the smell of leather from my glove to that feeling of watching the look of defeat on my opponents’ faces. However, once I got to high school, baseball lost a lot of its luster when I met coach Ballin. I thought making varsity as a freshman was the highlight of my life at fourteen. He quickly proved to me that it was one of the worst things that could have happened.

Coach Ballin liked to remind me what a fuck up I was, telling me that he’d have left me behind too if he were my dad at every chance he got. His favorite practices consisted of setting out garbage cans and making us all run until everyone puked.

He was a fucking dick.

He’d thrown balls, bats, and a few chairs at me over the years, leading to me walking off of the damn field probably twenty times, only to have one of my teammates haul me back and tell me not to give him the satisfaction. I didn’t give a shit about his satisfaction, but I had a thing about quitting; I couldn’t do it. I never could accept defeat.

Mr. Mitchell, one of our three principles, sat me down in his office, berating me for fighting … again. We’d had this song and dance enough over the last four years. We both knew how it would end. There was no way in hell I was going to tell him what the fight was about. I never did.

He leaned against his large, industrial-sized desk, and then righted, folding his thick arms over his growing stomach, and stared at me. He used to think I was a hoodlum. It shocked the hell out of him when he learned my mom was a surgeon. I don’t know why he tagged me as a hoodlum. I didn’t dress like a hoodlum, I didn’t talk like a hoodlum, hell, I didn’t even hang out with hoodlums, but after I was hauled into his office my second day of high school, I heard him mutter to the hall monitor that insisted on escorting me down that I was the hoodlum he’d heard about. It was one of the few fights I’d ever initiated, and my first fight with someone besides my brothers.

We’d been living in California for nearly three years, and I had established a group of friends that I made playing baseball at the park near my house and on the little league team my mom had eagerly signed me up for. My buddy Ian and I were in the cafeteria, waiting to get food, when Lee Carroll, a kid that had gone to middle school with us, started telling his friend he was going to get Kendall Bosse to blow him. I didn’t have any feelings for Kendall other than a strange sense of responsibility stemming from the fact that she was my neighbor and David still made every effort to talk to me. I warned him to shut up. His response was to tell me that if I wanted a turn, I’d have to wait in line. Then he turned to ignore me and said maybe the youngest would join in too. It wasn’t jealousy I’d felt; it was disgust. Ace had been twelve and in seventh grade.

I hit him.

He came at me, muttering a slew of promises to beat my ass. He didn’t stand a chance.

After that, there were several occasions where Lee or one of his friends would seek retribution. It wasn’t that I was a prodigy fighter, or even the strongest kid in my class, I just had a lot more practice in knowing how to deliver punches and more importantly, how to avoid receiving them. My brothers were to thank for those important lessons since we pretty much fought anytime there was a disagreement. The intensity of the fight told you if something was a big deal or not. If they took an easy shot, it meant they were just being a pain in the ass. If they scrapped and hit to break the skin, it usually meant it was important for one reason or another. Though sometimes with Billy it just meant he was tired of losing.

He got his height from Mom’s family, so by fourteen I was already taller than him, and a whole hell of a lot faster. Hank had six years on me, and like me, was built like our dad—tall with a broad chest. We worked out a decent amount, but building muscle was easy for us. My friend Justin that started varsity as a freshman with me could throw a baseball like a slingshot—I’d never seen anyone with his kind of talent—but he was a bean pole, with muscles barely visible under his skin. He’d scarf donuts, pizza, and everything else he could get his hands on, trying to bulk up.

After winning numerous fights with Lee and his friends, word had traveled through parties and baseball about me being a fighter, and soon people wanted to fight me for nothing more than the desire to see if they could beat me. It earned me some heckles from the guys and a few phone numbers from the girls.

Later in my junior year, I got jumped by four guys from another school. We were at an away game and I had run inside to take a piss, completely oblivious of the group of assclowns that were following me until they were on top of me. One was on my back, another locked around my elbow like a dog in heat, and another had punched me in the stomach, successfully knocking the air out of me. I hadn’t realized that there’d been a fourth because a guy from the opposing team, who was actually classmates with the dicks, had punched him in the face and impressively broke his nose.

He helped me get free from the others and then turned to me, his top lip busted open and his brow glistening with sweat, and said, “I thought you’d be tougher.” Then laughed.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I replied, smiling because I knew he was being a pain in the ass and he’d just put his neck on the line helping me when he could’ve just as easily walked the other way.

“Try not to make a habit out of it,” he said, offering me his hand. “I take it you’re Miller.”