Protective Beast
CHAPTER ONE
Ali
* * *
Just ignore it.
The most common, the most frustrating, and the most fucking useless advice there ever was for dealing with bullies.
That’s what my mom told me to do. “Just ignore it, Ali.”
Oh thanks, Mom. Really goddamn helpful advice you got there.
Like it’s so easy to ignore the entire football team when they’re chanting Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali in the same tone as a stadium of drunk soccer hooligans chanting olé, olé, olé, olé whenever I walk down the freaking hall.
And it’s soooo easy to ignore the WHORE spray-painted across my locker in big black letters. Or the printed out pictures of my head photoshopped onto naked porn stars’ bodies waiting for me on every one of my desks in every one of my classes.
It’s so easy.
According to my mom, I just have to look the other way.
What she doesn’t know is that every place I look, there are people laughing and whispering about me.
I’d have to put noise-canceling headphones and a blindfold on to ignore all of that, but even then, I’d still feel the wet slap of the spitballs hitting my skin whenever the teacher turns around.
I can’t wait until I graduate. Three more months of this shit and then I never have to see any of these fucking people again.
But three months is a long time to live through hell, so I’m on my way to try and make it a little bit better.
This all started with an attempted backflip. I was at gymnastics practice when I miscalculated a backflip and landed on my face. I hit the mat, but it still freaking hurt. A lot. The pathetic mat was so old that I could see the interior disintegrating through all of the many rips and tears. It was held together with duct tape and even the duct tape was so old that it was starting to turn to dust too.
I stared at the mat in disgust as blood dripped from my nose onto it, knowing that my mother probably used this mat when she was my age, and my grandmother before her.
That’s the condition of our equipment.
Meanwhile, the football team has the best of the best. New pads every year, new weight training equipment, and yes, brand new mats that have zero duct tape on them.
I wrote an article for the school paper about it, merely suggesting that some of the school’s athletic funds should be more evenly distributed between the many teams.
A blasphemous act in my small Texas town.
It’s not just the gymnastics team that suffers. The poor archery club has fishing line on their bows, the judo team practices in bathrobes, and the track team has to run around the Walmart parking lot because the football team hogs their track.
I thought the suggestion was reasonable enough. I was wrong.
It was a disaster.
And when the local newspaper picked up the story and printed my article, I became public enemy number one here at Jacksland High School.
The football team turned on me. I went from being invisible to being the number one target.
It’s like they all made a pact to make my life as miserable as they could.
And they’re succeeding.
This is hell. I hate it here. I just want to leave.
The principal was no help. He’s a former player and told me that punishing the football players so close to the playoffs would be a disservice to the community.