A Bully

Most primary school buildings looked like blocks of pressed dry cottage cheese with the white and yellow surface ready to peel off at any minute. Blaise’s school was no exception, and he walked in every day among his classmates – those grotesque dwarfs. Perhaps his classmates were better suited to be called zombies since they ran across the playground in torn and mud-spattered shorts, damp shirts with missing buttons sticking to their skin, and blood-stains from having wiped a scraped elbow or knee.

It was a nightmarish all-boys school. Everyone was in a drab green uniform five days a week. It became their second skin to peel off at home. At school, some looked like walking cucumbers and others, whole watermelons. They flailed their arms about, punched one another in the gut, ran after an almost deflated ball and ate anyone else’s lunch except their own. The very young ones had snot dried up from the nose till their chubby red cheeks, crying because they were vulnerable.

Blaise was not skinny, obese, or vulnerable. Instead, he was a bully and struck his victims like the ninja kicking the enemy in his video games. He kicked those who came in the way of his desires. He also preferred solitude and made no friends, only followers. He was the one whom everyone feared so much that they had no choice but to side with, hoping that one day, someone would defeat him. They thought about complaining to the teachers or parents, but Blaise’s followers never voiced their fear unanimously, and the victims preferred silence over the humiliation which would taint their growing manliness. In the quiet depth of their hearts, all the little men repeatedly demanded for Blaise’s suffering, praying to life and karma’s justice (although words such as karma were unknown to them).

One day, Jason’s lunchbox smelled of spicy chicken curry. When the watermelon-like boy hesitated to hand it over, Blaise took it as a personal affront and shot out his foot to trip him up. The followers laughed, while patches of sweat stretched under their armpits. Jason avoided blinking for almost two minutes to prevent tears from rolling down his cheeks. He could almost hear Blaise say something mean like, “You’re crying to wash out those muddy freckles on your ugly face.” So Jason gave in and comforted himself with the fact that there would be more spicy curry once he reached home in the afternoon.

Classes resumed after lunch but Blaise felt a bit uncomfortable in his seat. At first, his butt cheeks felt numb on that flat wooden chair. Then, a tingling sensation overtook them and left tiny pricks in his muscles. It was the feeling he had when he sat cross-legged playing video games for too long and one of his legs felt numb until he moved. Only this time, he did not know how to relax muscles in his butt cheeks. He tried to endure it for a few minutes but then started sweating, the droplets falling from his armpits like water from a broken tap. Blaise’s belly was now aching, so he massaged it, applying pressure and jiggling the fat just as he had seen his sister do when she was in pain with her period cramps. He did not know what kind of pain she went through, but it could not be worse than his usual episodes of indigestion. His pain was usually accompanied by vomiting and diarrhoea.

He mentally braced himself for having to go to the toilet. The toilet was in a different compound, one of those little blocks which stood alone in the middle of the school grounds, ostracized like a dirty ogre. The afternoon classes were too quiet with the lifeless boys exhausted from running around too much during break time. Mr Suraj’s voice echoed in the classroom and a paranoid Blaise heard his own loud, gurgling stomach. Afraid his classmates would hear the weird noises, Blaise asked to be excused to the toilet. He winced in pain with another spasm in his gut, panting and dragging himself to those dirty cubicles. The stench of urine welcomed him before he even opened the door. It was horrifying.

At home, cleanliness and personal hygiene were his family’s prioritised values. He could even eat a burger in the toilet and have a nap on the floor if he wanted to. On the contrary, toilets at school almost screamed for mercy. Once inside the cubicles, Blaise was surrounded by walls smeared in faeces that were drawn on the blue paint like little brown clouds. Everything in there made him retch, leaving the most unwanted taste of chicken curry in his mouth. The boys had peed on the toilet seat and tank, even the door handle, and Blaise imagined them standing behind him, laughing at his misery. He thought of turning back and pretending to be sick to go home, but he was left with no choice when the gurgling grubbed his lower abdomen.

As soon as Blaise squatted over the toilet and contracted his belly, he felt a wiggling sensation coming from his butthole. It was the same half-ticklish, half-prickly muscle spasm from his butt cheeks. He held his breath in a natural response to focus better as if he would understand what was happening if he avoided hearing his own breathing. Something was squirming to come out, and Blaise’s already pale face became whiter and whiter. His sister had joked about this situation once when she had heard his stomach. She had said, “I think you have a monster in there. I think it’s a very long and ugly worm with two heads or something.” He had slapped her, and they had engaged in a brutal fight that had ended with her cursing him, “You deserve a huge worm, you ugly bastard.”

He closed his eyes and prayed because he could do nothing else. His warm tears stopped at the corner of his mouth, and he tasted how salty they were until others rolled further down, trickling from his chin to the puddle of urine on the floor. Blaise waited for what seemed like forever, while he pictured what a flailing two-headed worm looked like. He felt it was possible and easier to kill a two-headed snake, a monster in front of him, rather than a smaller one coming out of his body. He shuddered and since he was squatting and hovering in the air, refusing to allow his butt to touch the toilet seat, his legs trembled and almost caved in under his weight. His world was falling apart with the rise of a monster bred and fed inside of him. He did not know what to do, and thought for a moment, panting and sweating from the simple idea of a squirming creature.

Suddenly, the monster stopped moving completely – as if it never existed. It was probably tired and Blaise thought he could use this opportunity to pull it out. He had resumed squatting in the lowest position due to the numb muscles in his thighs. Now, his butt cheeks nearly touched his ankles and he wondered if the worm would hold onto them once it came out. His mind was racing with thoughts intruding upon his actions, making him doubtful of the strategy he came up with. Was the worm like an earthworm? He pulled out squares of tissue paper in dozens and wrapped them around his fingers. How long was this creature? He tried to loosen his butthole and stick a finger in it, but before that happened, the creature popped its head out and wiggled like it was suppressing a loud laughter that made its body move up and down.

In Blaise’s mind, the plan seemed simple. All he had to do was grab the worm and pull it out. And he mentally repeated grab and pull, grab and pull, grab and pull, until he finally did it. He nearly crushed the worm between his fingertips. But Blaise threw it on the floor and stood up like a cork flying from a bottle of champagne. He clenched his butt cheeks and pressed them with his hands, vowing to never allow any creature to pass through (even though he did not know how he would uphold that vow).

It was over. The monster writhed far away. Blaise did not want to look at it but his eyes disobeyed him and landed on the floor. The worm was swimming in urine, like a white filament dropped in orange juice, curling and uncurling itself, still deciding whether to explore new territory or not. Blaise did not handle this sight as he expected, instead, the longer he stared at the creature, the more he felt his life was being drained out of him. But his life was not being drained, he was simply exhausted and in shock. Within a few seconds, he passed out in the same place he squatted earlier – and the worm too, stopped moving, dead, drowned, or mourning the loss of a home.

When Jason came to the toilet upon Mr. Suraj’s request to search for the missing Blaise, he saw the boy lying in the first cubicle. Blaise was a yellow sponge on the floor, and his white shirt soaked up a lot of urine. Jason acted by instinct and tugged at him, dragging Blaise like one of those heavy rugs rolled up in home decor boutiques. But then, Jason stopped whatever he was trying to do and stood there for a while. He stared at Blaise and felt, at once, all the misery the bully had caused him draining his energy more than the weight of the physical body he was pulling. Jason stared, and when he was done staring he walked back to his class.

***

The mattress had a yellowish stain, just where the pillow was supposed to be. Even when the blonde nurse covered it with the light green sheets, Blaise hesitated before getting in bed. He felt the stain and its yellow scent crawling under him (even though he was not sure what exactly yellow smelled like). The stain reminded him of an egg yolk, a paste on the fabric, a splash of urine. At night, he refrained from tossing and turning since the frame where his body lay was warm while the sides were cold and damp. It was the stain’s doing: its coldness creeping around Blaise, tormenting him. He asked the nurse if he could be moved to another bed and she said she would do her best, but she probably never even tried or listened attentively to the boy with that smile plastered on her face like a permanent wallpaper.

During the day, Blaise kept himself busy to forget about the yellow patch. But the channel aired in the ward was BBC News, and the only one which Blaise never bothered turning on at home. He did not even try to ask for the remote because he could tell from a cursory glance – at the large male figures propped against the grey bedposts; their coughing spasms; their eyes sinking in black sockets and staring intently at the news of crimes, political upheavals and drama – that they had no intention of letting a nine-year-old rule.

There were six people in that ward, including Blaise. The seventh enrolled the day after his admission and it was a girl, probably one or two years younger than him. The sky blue curtains were closed immediately as the nurse entered with an IV drip and then a platter with little tubes and syringes. Blaise heard the girl’s voice and it spiked his curiosity for it was as squeaky as the little cat, Yzma, in The Emperor’s New Groove.

When the curtains were finally drawn, Blaise was plainly disappointed. The girl was nothing like the cute lavender cat. In fact, she was more similar to the adult Yzma without all the wrinkles. Her body was made of skin and bones and a pigeon’s nest on her head. Her sole redeeming feature at first glance was her creamy cocoa skin, but Blaise was too fascinated by the ugliness of her face to dwell on it.

“What’s your name?”

“Celine,” she said shyly. Celine smiled at her new friend and her brown eyes sparkled like a—

“Zombie. You look like an ugly zombie from The Walking Dead,” said Blaise. “Do you play video games? You know what I mean, right?” He wanted to be sure that his victims always knew what he meant. His words or actions would bear no fruit if no one understood anyway.

As for little Celine, it was simply the start of long hours of verbal torture from a stranger. She bore names such as “evil little girl from The Ring” or “the silent fart.” When Blaise’s disturbing creativity dropped a few notches, he went on to make lengthy statements about her chipped nails, protruding elbows, kneecaps, and collarbone. She also walked in an unusual way: slouching her skinny back, spreading her legs too much, like a drug addict or a man walking on the moon. Her hair covered her face and probably smelled like fermented herring, even though Blaise had neither seen nor smelled fermented herring before. Once, he had heard his mother say that someone she knew had this rotten fish smell. But he thought that sounded stupid and he said something else to Celine:

“You’re so ugly that I can hear the voice of your blood crying to be completely drained out of your body.” He smiled when he saw that Celine was persistently holding back her tears.

She longed for his silence more than anything. After clearing the lump of mucus in her throat with two coughs, she said, “Stop it, please. I’m tired. What can I do to make you stop?”

This reaction satisfied Blaise who was also getting a bit tired himself. He had run out of verbal abuse and now sought to upgrade to physical torment. “I want you to drink a glass of water every time I’ll tell you.”

An exasperated Celine nodded and had her first glass. Then, she had one every fifteen minutes followed by trips to the toilet – almost every thirty minutes. He woke her up at night when he felt disturbed by the crawling yellow stain, and made her drink two glasses at once.

The curtains were closed the following afternoon during visiting hours. Blaise had no visitors because his mother worked till late. His sister treated him like he was a huge worm creeping around her, ready to lay eggs on her skin and infect her too. So he did not even expect her to come, and she had not. He heard voices on the other side of the curtain. The nurse came out with a woman who was definitely Celine’s mother since she looked like a dumpling version of Celine. The women walked away, talking while looking over some documents. It was too quiet and Blaise drew the curtains apart, only to notice that the girl was not alone.

Celine was fiddling with a plastic cup and Jason was sitting next to her.

Surprised, Blaise asked, “What are you doing here?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Just because we’re not at school doesn’t mean you get to talk to me like that, you fat piece of shit,” said Blaise.

Blaise’s domineering tone crushed Jason’s short-lived arrogance, and the boy replied obediently, “She’s my sister.”

“Ah, it makes sense now. You’re eating all her food back home, that’s why Ugly has to come here to—”

“Don’t you get tired of this?” Celine interrupted Blaise with tears welling up in her eyes. “Stop being so mean. I don’t even know you but I don’t want to hate you. I thought we could be friends.” She wanted to say something else but her voice hid itself. She struggled with a lump in her throat, made of sobs and gasps.

And for the first time, Blaise had a similar lump in his throat too, by just looking at this girl’s tears, rolling down to their death on the green sheet. When Celine’s mother came back, they were all quiet and Celine’s tears had not yet dried up. She asked what was wrong and Celine said, “I just wanna go home.”

“Oh, you are, sweetie. You are coming back home. The nurse said your blood cleared faster this time. You did such a good thing by drinking so much water. She told me she saw how brave you are, taking care of yourself like that on your own.” She kissed her daughter and whispered, “I’m proud of you. I’ll go get the papers ready. Can I count on you to help your sister with her stuff here, baby?” She smiled at Jason and he nodded.

While Jason was packing Celine’s water bottle, clothes and tissue paper, Blaise was rummaging in his mind for a sentence, a word, anything that was not an insult. He clenched his fists and did not understand why he wanted to say something kind to that skinny little girl. He ran out of time and simply sat there, looking at Jason helping his sister.

Before leaving, Celine looked at Blaise and said, “I don’t hate you. Goodbye, Blaise.”

And Blaise remained quiet, because he did not know what to say. The little girl waved her twig-like hands and smiled at him with large watery eyes.

An hour after Celine left, the blonde nurse came to change the bed sheets. She asked Blaise if he wanted to move into this free bed. Blaise said no because he had forgotten the reason why. All he could think of was Celine’s smile, even as he leaned against the bedpost and sat on the yellow stain.