Free The Forgetting Place by John Burley

was just me. There was no one else I could count on, and I realized then and therethat I would take a beating for this. They would gather their forces and come for me. I would be ready for them—expecting it—but I knew I couldn’t win. Not on my own. And even through the blood and pain, the cold, hateful look in Bret Forester’s eyes told me that he knew it, too.”

Chapter 14
    I allot a certain amount of time each day to talk with my patients, and my session with Jason had already run over, but I couldn’t leave it at that. “Eventually, they caught up with you,” I surmised, and he nodded.
    â€œI couldn’t outrun them—not with my ankle the way it was—and so the first time they came for me I simply stood my ground.”
    â€œHow badly were you injured?” I asked.
    Jason shrugged. “Not as badly as I’d anticipated. Black eye. Cut lip. Once I went down, I was able to get my arms up over my head and face, but they kept kicking me and managed to break a few ribs and bruise both of my kidneys in the process. The ribs took six weeks to heal, and there was blood in my piss for three days after the assault. But all things considered, I counted myself pretty lucky. Mostly, I was just glad it was over.”
    I waited for him to continue.
    â€œExcept, of course, it wasn’t over. With guys like that, it’s never really over, is it? Once they set their sights on you, it becomes a compulsion, like a patch of dry skin they just can’t scratch to their satisfaction. And even though you’re cracked and bleeding—and on some level they must realize that they’ve gone too far—theysimply can’t stop until something irreparable happens, until the wound is too macerated and ruined to tolerate anything further.
    â€œThe second time they came for me was in the school bathroom. I fought back hard that time—hit one of the boys, Tim Maddox, in the windpipe, putting him out of commission. Clayton Flynn took a kick to the knee that I hope he still feels on rainy days, and I kept swinging at Bret Forester’s pimply, bulldog face, trying to break his nose for the second time. But there was a fourth boy, Billy Myers, who was mean, quiet, and probably the only one of them with true lethal potential. He’s locked up in a maximum-security prison somewhere right now, I just know it, but on that day he snuck up behind me while most of my attention was on Bret and he hit me in the back of the head with something hard and metal, and that’s all I remember of the fight until I woke up to a small crowd of students around me, some teacher’s voice calling my name, and my head resting on the lower lip of a urinal.
    â€œThey took me to the hospital—my fourth visit in two months—only this time the ER doctor was a woman who made small noises I couldn’t interpret and shook her head as she examined me. They did a CT scan of my brain, which was thankfully normal, kept me overnight for observation, and discharged me the next morning with a diagnosis of concussion.”
    Jason’s eyes cleared for a moment. “My sister came to visit me in the hospital,” he recounted. “She sat at my bedside and studied me, saying very little. I had other visitors, of course, but it was her presence that I remember the most. We must’ve spoken to each other during that visit, but the only thing I remember was what she said to me just before leaving. She walked over to the bed, leaned forward, and planted a kiss on my forehead—which waspretty unusual behavior for her. She drew back a bit, observed me with a calculating look. I thought she was going to give me a brief lecture, tell me something useless like how I needed to stop fighting and just stay away from those kids. But what she instead said was ‘This will not happen again.’ Then she turned and left, leaving me to wonder how she could promise a thing like that. Yet,