Her lids are squeezed tightly shut, her lips are pressed together, and she’s trembling so hard her curls are vibrating around her head. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I’d say she was scared out of her mind, but I was there that day in seventh grade P.E. when Sam jumped the girl who’d been calling her pube head all year. I was there when we were sixteen and caught two homeless guys torturing a dog behind the Mana Health food store in Paia. One moment, Sam was vibrating on the sidewalk next to me, the next she was shoving the bigger guy so hard he ricocheted off the Dumpster before falling flat on his drunk ass on the pavement.
The man was nearly twice her size, but he was a coward who got off on torturing animals and he didn’t have a knife. If she decides to fight back right now, it could end with her throat getting slashed open in the middle of the street and her life isn’t worth the risk. Not even a little bit.
I’m opening my mouth to beg her not to do anything crazy, but it’s too late.
My words die on my lips and my heart lurches into my throat as she reaches up, grabbing the arm that’s holding the knife with both hands. The kid reaches for her hair with his other hand, but she’s already turned her head, opened her mouth wide, and bitten down so hard I can see the tendons in her jaw pop as her teeth dig into his flesh.
“Fuck!” The kid screams and the knife clatters to the pavement.
He fists his hand in Sam’s hair and pulls hard enough to make her cry out, but before he can do any more damage I’m all over him.
My first punch connects with the center of his forehead, bone hitting bone with a satisfying thud, sending a wave of pain up my forearm I barely notice because it feels so fucking good to know Sam’s free and this trash is getting what he deserves. As he stumbles back, Sam slips out of the way, giving me a clear shot at the rest of the creep. Before the kid can recover his balance from the first punch, I’m pummeling him in the stomach, hunching my shoulders, ducking my head, and getting in close, protecting my torso as I make him wish he didn’t have one.
It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.
Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.
I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.
When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.
Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.
If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.
But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.