understand it.
The rest of the morning was relatively uneventful. Herbie stayed quiet, not daring to ask any more questions or volunteer an answer. Once was enough. He just sat there with his head leaning against his palm while he doodled in his notebook. At one point during a lesson in addition, I stood beside him and looked over his notes out of curiosity. I'm terrible at math, so I wanted to see just how far back I could trace that problem. But to my surprise, amidst doodles of rocket ships and astronauts, Herbie had correctly solved the majority of the math problems that Mrs. Selner had written on the board. Either that, or he wasn't bothering to solve them at all and was just writing down the answers she wrote.
"Herbert?" Mrs. Selner called. Herbie and I looked up together. "Yes, Mrs. Selner?" he responded.
"Can you solve the next one? What do we get when we add four to three?"
Herbie looked down and scribbled the problem in a blank section of the page. His pencil hovered over the numbers for a moment before he wrote the number seven. "Seven?" he asked.
"That's correct," she nodded before completing the problem on the board.
Shawn Coleman, the pudgy kid sitting behind Herbie, muttered under his breath. "Nerd." For a moment, I contemplated smacking him. Then I thought better of it and returned to the back of the room.
Eventually, lunch period arrived, and Mrs. Selner led the kids downstairs. Doc and I followed at a safe distance, always keeping Herbie in our sights. The cafeteria was already full of kids when we arrived, just as always. Tables lined both the left and right walls, and two more rows of tables ran through the center. Due to overcrowding, there was barely a free chair at a table, but most kids had formed their own cliques and claimed their lunch tables at the beginning of the year. I didn't really have a group of my own friends the way everyone else did. But I was lucky enough to have two other boys that could somehow stand my presence. For a while, anyway.
Doc's voice startled me. "I didn't see Timmy in your classroom." I guess he felt it was safe to talk with the cafeteria being so noisy. "Was he an older child?"
"No, he was in the same grade. He just had a different teacher. If I remember right, there were four first grade teachers."
"Even without Timmy in your particular class, you still seemed to be singled out by your classmates," he said. "It looked like you handled it pretty well."
"I didn't," I told him. "Outwardly, I tried not to show it, but I was broken inside. I didn't understand it. What would drive them to be so mean not just to me, but to anyone? Childhood should be a time to laugh and play and make friends and have adventures. Why do so many children find such delight in ruining it for others?"
"Adults do it too. The average person, by nature, feels inferior to the rest of the world. They see the strength and accomplishments of others around them and feel the need to build themselves up in their own minds to feel just as good if not better than the successful people. What they fail to realize is that most successful people feel just as inferior for one reason or another."
I shrugged my shoulders with a sigh of resignation. "I guess I just don't understand the human race. Are we really that selfish and egotistical that we have to knock down and destroy anyone who either seems more intelligent than us or just has a different opinion? There's no room for any sort of individuality, creativity, intellect; you aren't allowed to have any of it if you want to be a part of society. The only interests you are allowed to have are what everyone else tells you to have. Anything apart from that predetermined norm is considered to be weird and therefore unacceptable. It blows me away. The human brain is capable of so much; each person born into the world has unlimited possibilities. But in this life, you aren't even allowed access to ninety percent of those possibilities. You either follow the crowd or end up being ostracized from the community. It sickens me. And it is the essence of what disgusts me the most about people."
"It's a sad part of human nature," Doc explained. "We are sinful from birth; the Bible tells us that. We have to learn the difference between right and wrong as we grow and then try our best to eliminate the wrong from our lives. Nobody is perfect, nor will they ever be. But progress can be made."
"The problem is that there are so many people who don't even try to change their attitudes. Most people don't even seem to care!"
"You can't worry about them, Herbert. You cannot control what they do or do not do with their lives. Nothing you do can change other people; they have to make that decision themselves. The only person you can change is you. You have to learn to accept the faults of humanity because, sadly, they aren't going away anytime soon."
"I don't know how to do that," I said. "I know I need to forgive people—all of them—for the pain they've caused me over the course of my life. But simply knowing that doesn't get rid of the pain. It's more than just a need to forgive, it's a need for reconciliation. I want those who hurt me to know what they did to me and probably many others. I want them to feel regret. Remorse. And if they don't regret it, don't care, don't have any desire to right the wrongs, then I want them to feel the same pain they caused me. I want them to feel the same fear they caused me. I know that's selfish and wrong, and it's yet another thing about myself that I hate and want to fix. But I just don't know how."
"Your feelings are completely . . . human, Herbert. But you will learn to forgive. In time, you will. I promise. Now, who are those two boys Herbie is sitting with?"
My gaze shifted to my childhood friends, though I use that term loosely. The one sitting to my left wearing a striped polo shirt was named Nick Trobolski. Across from me was Aaron Medderson. "Nick and Aaron," I told him. "For the first few years of elementary school, they were what I considered to be friends. They never came to my house after school or invited me to visit them, but during school hours the three of us would talk and play during recess. Back then, I thought they were real friends. But I saw a glimpse of their true colors on this day."
"What happened?" Doc asked.
"You'll see. It's almost time for recess."
The kids were given a measly thirty minutes for lunch and recess which meant fifteen minutes for each. It wasn't long before the doors leading outside were opened and the entire first grade charged out into the autumn air. It was almost time. And the anticipation was killing me.
As usual, it was a mad dash to the gym closets. The school made some of the sports equipment available to the kids during recess. The closets were located just beside the gymnasium door on the far side of the school, so it was always a race amongst the kids to get to the best stuff first. Of course, everyone scrambled to get the coveted red kickball. It was kind of an unspoken rule of the schoolyard that whoever held the red ball decided what games were played with it. Usually, that meant a rather large game of kickball, but sometimes a game of dodgeball would be set up along the wall near the cafeteria.
As I got older, I stopped trying for the red ball. I seemed to be the only kid in the world who got sick and tired of kickball, and no one was interested in the games I wanted to play. Then again, I was trying to invent new games, so maybe my ideas were just lame. I don't remember what kind of games I came up with back then.
But we were about to find out.
Although I stopped trying for the ball when I was older, this was first grade, and I was still running for it like my classmates. And on this particular day, I got it. Somehow, little Herbie managed to get in front of the pack and snatch the red ball up before anyone else. He came out of the equipment closet through the crowd with the ball high above his head like a trophy.
Outside, with the kids all distracted and shouting amongst themselves, I figured it was safe to talk to Doc. "You know where this is going."
"A dispute over the ball, if memory serves me." We had gone over this incident during earlier therapy sessions.
"Right. I don't remember what game I chose to play, but I know it was an unpopular decisi
on."
Herbie walked onto the field with the ball tucked under his arm. I could tell he was excited; the majority of the first grade was waiting to see what he'd do next. No doubt they were expecting him to choose a second captain and start dividing the teams for kickball.
Instead, he said, "We're going to play tagball!"
A collective groan went up from the crowd. Tagball was kind of like dodgeball and tag rolled into one. In tagball, the ball-carrier's goal was to peg the other players with the ball. Anyone that got hit was out. If you caught the ball when someone threw it, the thrower was out, and when the ball touched the ground, it became safe for someone else to pick it up and throw it again. It made for a fast-paced game where the ball was always moving and the last person standing was the winner.
I should've known Herbie would choose it. It was a game I enjoyed as a child but could never get anyone to play with me. Given that the ball carrier usually gets to pick the game, I figured this would be a chance to get kids to play my game for a change.
"Let's play kickball instead!" one of the boys yelled. I think his name was Raul.
"You guys play kickball every day!" Herbie told him. "I wanna play something different!"
There was some more grumbling from the kids, but the school didn't afford a whole lot