Chapter 1

I stood at the podium uncomfortably, looking at the twenty or so faces looking back at me from the people sitting in folding chairs in the basement of a church.

"Hello," I said. "My name is Bob."

"Hi, Bob," said about half of the people.

"And I'm a bully," I went on, dutifully.

"We know," came a single voice from the crowd. It was under his breath, and I couldn't tell who had said it. None of the people around him gave him away either, but one woman about six seats away glanced to her right.

In any case, I didn't try to figure out who it was. It was a Bullies Anonymous meeting, after all, and to take it out on the little sonofabitch who had popped off like that would sort of defeat the purpose of the gathering. I mean it would be like having a drink at an AA meeting, you know?

So I ignored the weasel and went on talking to roughly half of the group who didn't already know me because they were my victims. You know that T shirt that says "I fear not, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death - because I'm the baddest motherfucker in the valley"? Before I got caught and sent before Judge Judy, I sort of specialized in being a bully to other bullies. I guess something in me wanted to be the baddest motherfucker in the valley.

How's that for irony? The judge - whose first name is actually Judy, for pity's sake - decided that the most fitting punishment for my crimes was for me to be in the same chapter of BA as a bunch of the other bullies who had come before her in court. Judge Judy said it would be "fitting" if I had to debase myself in front of my victims. She said it would teach me humility. She said it would give me a chance to make amends for having "a vigilante mindset" and terrorizing half the town.

I don't know about the humility, or about having "a vigilante mindset" but I was willing to argue about terrorizing half the town. I didn't do that at all. All I did was terrorize bullies. Most of the time, anyway. And it takes a thief to catch a thief ... right? Everybody knows that.

If you ask me, it's Judge Judy who's the bully.

But I won't take up your time beating a dead horse. Instead, I'll just tell you the story of how I ended up in Judge Judy's kangaroo court, where she decided I needed to be debased, just like I had decided a number of bullies around town needed to be debased.

I'd like to start out by saying it was all Mia's fault.

I know that's probably not fair, but it's true. And my first victim, Jerry Harper will testify on my behalf. That's because I became a bully the day I saw Jerry Harper try to force Mia to have sex with him.

Mia Falcon (which was pronounced Fal-cone) moved into the house beside ours when I was fourteen. It was strange for me from the get-go. That's because Mia was gorgeous, and shaped like a woman, even though she was only fourteen too, just like me, while I was what people these days might call a geek. Back then it was dork.

I wasn't the classic geek of today's tech world. I liked science, but I didn't pore over books long hours into the night. When I got home from school I went out and played. I just didn't play sports, which was what all the "regular" boys did. Rather, I went into the woods and explored. I was sure there was buried treasure there somewhere, or maybe an old gun laying around from the Indian days, or the Civil War, or something. We lived in Missouri, and people had been fighting over Missouri for hundreds of years, right? I mean Jesse James had a hideout in Missouri. So somebody had to get shot and then dragged off by animals, leaving his gun lying there on the ground for me to find. Right?

I had a pretty vivid imagination. I'll admit that. And a silly one too, I suppose. But that's why I was out in the woods, instead of on the baseball diamond, or basketball court, where all the other boys my age were. And that's probably why I got a reputation as a wimp with certain guys. They never saw me belt one past the center fielder, or knock some guy down on a drive to the basket. Instead, they saw a kid with glasses that kept sliding down his nose, who was never aggressive and was always saying things like "Please" and "Thank you."

Telling you this story is complicated. It's complicated in the same way that a thunderstorm is complicated. There are all these individual drops of water, coming from different clouds in different parts of the sky. But at ground level, all you notice is that you're getting soaked. I might seem to be rambling a bit, but it will all come together at some point and you'll understand. So bear with me, please.

See there? I still say "please".

That's because my parents brought me up that way. And they brought up my brothers and sister that way too. Of course they were all older than me, so nobody used that word with me. With me, they just said "Give me that, Dork" and took it. Which is why I already knew what bullies were like before Mia moved in next door to us when we were fourteen.

Anyway, it wasn't Beauty and the Beast. It was more like Beauty and the-dork-who-lived-next-door. My mother gave me a casserole to take over to the new neighbors and I did that, and Mrs. Falcon (who was just as beautiful as her daughter) was really nice to me and thanked me, and introduced Mia to me and suggested that we could maybe play together. Mrs. Falcon saw us both as children. There we were, both well grown, with hormones raging through our bodies, and she treated us both like we were ten. Mia rolled her eyes. I stared at Mrs. Falcon's tits.

Sorry. Breasts. I don't mean to be disrespectful to Mrs. Falcon. It's just the word a kid uses when he's trying to grow up and also tries to talk "grown up."

But that meeting did, in fact, forge a relationship between myself and Mia Falcon. It wasn't the relationship I would have chosen, but we did become friends.

We became friends by virtue of the fact that she wasn't allowed to date yet, but she could hang out with "Little Bobby from next door." I had been branded as "safe" by her mother. Her father investigated me for all of a minute and a half, one day, and decided I was a wimp, like my older brothers had. So he considered his daughter's virtue safe with me too. Whether those evaluations of my manliness were somehow communicated to Mia, or she made them herself, I have no idea. Or, I should say, I had no idea then. I know now what she thought of me, but I didn't then. And that's because she never told me, back then.

I wish she had. I might not be standing in front of a group of bullies, apologizing to them for being the king of the bullies, if she'd told me then what I know now.

Anyway, there were two years of what I'd call "living next door to the Garden of Eden." That is to say that paradise was within sight ... but I just couldn't go there.

Mia and I spent hours together. Since the only things I knew best were the woods behind our house, I took her there on long hikes. I showed her the things I'd found that had been left there by humans long dead (my characterization). Sure they were only old bottles, or tin cans with faded labels, or strangely shaped pieces of metal, or the old hammer I'd found lying on a boulder in plain sight.

But the bottles had corks in them, and nobody had used corks in bottles for decades. And the labels of those cans were painted on, not on paper, like in modern times. And yes, I had no idea what the chunk of iron was that I'd found stuck in the crotch of a tree that had grown up under it, but it was thick with rust, and it was embedded in the tree, which had had time to grow around the object. So they were all old. And they had been left out in these woods by some human.

Who probably was long dead.

I know a lot of people would say "That's junk," but to me, each of those corks had been put there by somebody, and all the paint on those cans had been lovingly applied as somebody's job. People had created and used all that "junk". They had lived their lives each day like I was doing. I guess I felt some kind of connection.

Plus I imagined myself as an alien who landed on Earth and found all this stuff that was proof that intelligent, tool-using creatures had once lived here - and might even still be living here! (Pull out ray gun and be extra alert as you tread softly through the forest, being wary of possible predators, who might like the taste of alien flesh!)

I'll say this for her. Mia wasn't afraid to get dirty. She wasn't as enthralled with the junk I'd found as I was, but she could climb a tree and scamper over rocks and boulders with the best of them. And she listened to me, which was something most people never took the time to do.

I listened to her too, of course. She was a talker, but not in that annoying way that a lot of girls had. She talked about where they had come from, and how much she missed her friends, and how boys were treating her different, now that her breasts had gotten big and stuff like that. Mia would talk about anything.

And, of course, I was too embarrassed to talk about what was happening in my own adolescent body. I saw her as brave and strong. Somehow I felt like she was more grown up than I was. But being around her was fun in an agonizing kind of way. She was so beautiful. It didn't matter what she was wearing. Whether she had on cutoffs and a checkered blouse, or jeans and a parka, I'd get stiff in my pants. And you can't tell a girl she gives you a boner every time she looks at you.

At least I couldn't.

Anyway, that sweet torture continued for two years. I can't say we were best friends, or anything like that. I was sure she hung around with me because I was the only other kid her age who lived in that neighborhood. She had this odd kind of aloofness about her that seemed to prevent her from making a whole passel of new girlfriends at school. Oh, she got along with everybody well enough, but other girls were jealous of her looks, and all the boys at school could think about was the same thing I was constantly thinking about. And that was what those fabulous breasts might look like with nothing covering them up.

And then she turned sixteen, and was allowed to date, and things kind of went to shit.

That's because one of the very first guys she went out with was Dennis Thurman, who took her to a movie and tried to grope her in the dark. I say "tried" because every time he put his arm around her shoulders and let his hand fall way too low, she moved it. And when he put his hand on her thigh, she moved that too. She did kiss him a few times, and she did let his hand stay on her butt for a few seconds before moving that too, but that was all. I know this because she told me about it the next day, while we were walking to school.

But Dennis bragged to his buddies that he fucked her to screaming orgasms.

And every guy who asked her out after that expected to get to do the very same thing.

She didn't tell me about all of those. Not back then, anyway. Instead, she learned - the hard way - that guys all want just one thing. She resisted giving it to them. In fact, she resisted giving it to them for another year and a half. But she was up against a brick wall.

That's because of what I'll call "The reputation quandary." Males and females look at the concept of having a reputation differently. Girls want to have a reputation that engenders respect and popularity. Boys, on the other hand, want to be viewed as men. Or at least as having manly attributes. They want to be the fastest runners, the longest hitters, the top scorers and the guys who get the most pussy. They think all those things will make them look more grown up. I'll admit there's a biological component in there too, but there are lots of guys who don't get any pussy at all (me, for example) and who don't excel at sports (me, again) who still feel manly. We can't explain exactly why we feel manly, but that's not the point. Suffice it to say we get boners just like the popular guys, and that makes us men too.

Anyway, these two phenomena work against each other. The guys are all trying to get into the girls' panties, while the girls are trying like crazy to be popular while not getting a reputation of being a slut. The problem is that the guys don't get nearly as much pussy as they think they're supposed to. And, of course, they have to claim they have conquered, and taken that pussy - whether that is true or not.

So some guys lie about their conquests. They feel like they have to ... to appear as manly as Joe over there, who probably also lied, but you don't know that for sure.

The only defense against this pack of wolves is similar to the herd mentality that sheep use. Girls band together in small herds for protection, going shoulder to shoulder, eating the same things and trying to look as much like the other sheep as possible. And when a wolf - let's call him Dick - says he tapped one of the sheep in the herd - let's call her Cindy - all her friends loudly proclaim it's a lie. They are willing to go to bat for their friend because it must be a lie. That's because Cindy didn't tell the rest of the herd all about getting her adolescent pussy well reamed by Dick on their date last night.

But if you're a loner ... if you don't have a herd to protect you ... then you end up like Mia, with a reputation you don't deserve. Especially if the whole wolfpack claims to have plundered your flower of femininity.

The other part of all this is that no wolf is willing to admit to the rest of the pack that he struck out with Mia. So he lies, just like the rest of them lied. And they all believe each other, because they want to believe the lies. And what happens then is that the pack members all get enraged that she gave it up to the others ... but not to him.

So they attack the lone sheep again, trying to claim what they now believe, they are owed.

I know I might be taking this analogy too far, but stay with me a minute longer. If you're a ram (that would be me again) and you look longingly at that lone ewe out there, surrounded by wolves ... you know you don't have a chance in hell. So you wander off and eat some grass somewhere else. Or maybe chase after one of the ewes in the herd. That would not be me, by the way. I just went and ate grass. The point is, the only guys who asked Mia out were the wolves. And her only alternative was being the girl who never went on dates. That really fucks with a girl's self-confidence. Or so I hear. I'm pretty sure it fucked with hers, because she kept going out with them. I knew she wasn't spreading her legs for them. I knew she was just trying to lead a normal, adolescent female life.

Anyway, it was perfectly by accident that I was in the right place at the right time one night. It was a Friday night, and Mia was out on a date with Jerry Harper. He was the alpha wolf. He was the quarterback of the football team. He was also a bully. Everybody knew that. He did things like knocking books out of people's arms. (Yes, sigh that would be me, once again) but he got away with it because he always apologized profusely. They were false apologies, and everybody under the age of nineteen knew it, especially the other wolves, who all chortled when the books went flying. But all the adults heard were those profuse apologies, so they smiled at his good manners and walked away. I was told he made other kids do his homework and do chores for him and things like that. That never happened to me, probably because I got solid C's in my classes and didn't excel at much of anything, with the possible exception of imagination. But that doesn't count for much in high school.

I knew they were out because I'd seen him drive up in front of the house and honk for her. If her dad had been home, he'd have gone out and suggested that a gentleman comes to the door to escort his date to the car, but Mr. Falcon was working the late shift that night. Mrs. Falcon would have agreed with him, but she wasn't the confrontational type.

It had been a week since we'd hung out, and I was feeling neglected. Okay, I was feeling sorry for myself. The love of my life was out with shit-head Harper and I was too chicken to ask any other girls out myself. So I went outside and took it out on a tree. I fashioned a "morning star" out of a stick by driving four or five nails through it, leaving the points poking out in vaguely different directions. Then I did battle, in my imagination, with a dragon's neck, which was the tree trunk, of course. The nails bent a bit as I whacked away at the awesome creature, but that turned out to be a good thing. Had I not dulled my spikes on the armored scales of the dragon, I might have done really serious damage later to Jerry Harper when I caught him trying to rape Mia.

I heard them drive up and park in front of my house, instead of hers. I'd been out there in the dark for quite a while, so my night vision was good. Nobody got out of the car, which was parked in front of the wrong house in the first place. So, being curious, I sort of wandered over that way. When I saw the car rocking a little on its springs, I confess the voyeur in me blossomed. I knew what was going on in that car. My princess was in there, spreading her legs for the Black Knight.

And it pissed me off like no dragon ever could.

But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I got close enough to hear her saying, "No, Jerry! I said I'm not going to do that! Let me go!"

And then he said, "You bitch. You've given that pussy to every other guy on the team. You're going to give it to me tonight. You're going to give it to me right fucking now!"

"No!" she squealed, as I opened the door.

She was lying down on the front passenger's seat, which had been reclined. He was between her thighs with his knees on the leading edge of the seat, holding her wrists as he fell on top of her, crushing her. His pants were down around his knees.

Those two pale, round butt cheeks were a target I simply couldn't resist.

So I whacked them with my morning star.

I didn't realize I did it until it was done. I hadn't even realized I still had the makeshift weapon in my hand. All I was doing was approaching the car to peek inside and see what was going on in there. But when I heard her tell him no, and then heard him say he didn't care what she thought, I just lost it.

As I said, the dragon's neck had thankfully bent the nails, so at least they didn't penetrate their entire length into his backside. It would have been real trouble if that had happened, because those nails were sticking out a good two or three inches when I first nailed them through.

But they did penetrate a little bit.

Four dark red spots popped into view on his white backside. He screeched, and I backed up, suddenly aware of just what I'd done.

He was going to kill me.

But then a funny thing happened as his ass lifted off of Mia. Blood ran from his wounds ... wounds I had inflicted. And I realized he was only human! He bled just like anybody else would have.

And that made me feel powerful. It was an epiphany I can't really explain, but suddenly the biggest bully in school was just a kid who I had drawn blood on, and could do so again if I wanted to.

It turned out I wanted to.

Mia had stopped crying and was breathing normally. We were sitting on my front porch. But I need to back up a little, because what happened before we got to the porch is important. He'd ripped her blouse open and pulled her bra up under her chin. That's how I first saw her when I finished punishing Jerry with my morning star, as he danced, screaming for me to stop and saying, "What the fuck?!" and, "Are you crazy?" and other things I can't remember. Eventually he ran. Actually, he shuffled. I let him go and he pulled his pants back up. Then he ran.