Homecoming

Chapter 2 — Bullied

The first time Brad Mason noticed Eli Park, Eli was fourteen and reading a book in the library during lunch.

“What’s the chink reading?” Brad said, loud enough for the whole room, and the table behind him laughed, and Eli learned the first rule of his four years at Ashford High: invisibility was the only currency that mattered, and he didn’t have any.

He tried anyway. He sat in the back of every classroom. He took the long way around the courtyard. He ate lunch in the stairwell when he ate at all, which wasn’t often, because his stomach had learned to knot itself by eleven thirty every morning. It didn’t matter. Brad Mason had decided he was fun—the way a cat decides a mouse is fun—and the decision was permanent.

The locker came first. Freshman year, October, third week of school. Eli turned the combination dial and opened the door and the smell hit him before he saw it: cafeteria garbage, stuffed to the top. Mashed potatoes and milk cartons and someone’s half-eaten hamburger, coffee grounds, a banana peel gone black. It spilled out onto his shoes and the hallway floor. He stood there holding the door while the hallway filled with laughter, wave after wave of it.

“It suits you,” Brad said, leaning against the locker beside it, arms crossed, grinning like a king holding court. “You live in a dump anyway.”

He didn’t live in a dump. His parents ran a dry-cleaning shop on Main Street and worked fourteen-hour days and kept their little house on Cypress Street spotless. But nobody corrected Brad Mason. Nobody ever corrected Brad Mason.

The janitor made Eli clean it up himself. He missed third period. When he finally sat down in algebra, reeking faintly of garbage no matter how hard he’d scrubbed his hands, Brad turned around in his seat and mouthed: tomorrow.

Sophomore year, the beatings started. Behind the gym, after practice, where the coaches never went and the security cameras—there were none, this was Ashford—couldn’t see. Brad’s gang. Troy, built like a refrigerator, with hands he’d already broken twice on other kids. Danny, quick and mean. Kyle, who laughed the whole time like it was the funniest thing in the world.

They called it “the toll.” Eli paid it in bruises he hid under long sleeves, in a split lip he told his mother was a basketball accident, in a cracked rib sophomore spring that he never told anyone about at all—he just breathed shallow for six weeks and told the track coach he’d pulled a muscle. His mother pressed cold cloths to his face and looked at him the way mothers look at sons who are lying, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. The Masons owned half the town. The Parks owned a dry-cleaning shop and an accent and a mortgage.

Junior year was the cafeteria. Eli was carrying his tray—rice, vegetables, the food his mother packed because the school lunch made him sick—and Troy “accidentally” stuck his foot out at exactly the right moment. The tray went up. The food came down. All over Eli’s shirt, his pants, the floor. Four hundred kids turned to look. Someone whooped. Brad stood up at the jocks’ table and started a slow clap, and within seconds the whole cafeteria was clapping in rhythm, and Eli stood there in his mother’s cooking while the noise washed over him like dirty water.

He didn’t cry. That was the one thing he refused them, the single coin he wouldn’t hand over. He scraped the food off his shirt with his hands, set the tray on the nearest table, and walked out with four hundred pairs of eyes on his back. He heard Brad call after him, bright and carrying: “See you tomorrow, Park! Wear something washable!”

That night he sat on the floor of his bedroom and understood, with a clarity that frightened him, that nobody was coming to save him. Not the teachers, who looked away. Not the principal, whose son played wide receiver on Brad’s team. Not his parents, who had given up everything to bring him to this country and couldn’t afford a war with the Masons.

Nobody. Except one.

Mrs. Alvarez, his English teacher. She’d found him once in the stairwell, holding a split lip, trying to get the bleeding to stop before fifth period. She’d sat beside him on the step and handed him her own handkerchief and said, “You’re going to leave this place, Eli. And you’re going to be extraordinary. I need you to remember that when it gets dark.” She’d given him books—Vonnegut, Morrison, Le Guin—and talked to him like his mind was a thing that mattered, like he was a person and not a target. She was the only adult in four years who ever stood between him and Brad Mason, and she did it exactly once, in the hallway, in front of everyone: “That’s enough, Brad.” Brad had laughed. But he’d walked away.

It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. One teacher against a town.

Senior year, the worst day. Late April, rain coming down in sheets, the sky the color of a bruise. Eli was walking home from the library, hood up, books in his backpack, taking the long way to avoid the gym lot. They came out of the alley behind the hardware store—all four of them, like they’d been waiting, like they’d planned it. They didn’t even bother with the jokes that night. No setup, no audience. It was fast and efficient and it ended with Eli on his knees in the wet gravel, blood running from his nose into the rain, his glasses gone, his books scattered and swelling with water, Brad crouching in front of him with that golden-boy smile gone cold and flat.

“Stay down, Park,” Brad said quietly, so only Eli could hear. “It’s where you belong.”

Eli stayed down until their footsteps faded and the rain was the only sound left. Then he got up. He found one lens of his glasses, cracked. He picked up his ruined books. He walked home through the rain, and his mother cried when she saw him, and his father put a hand on his shoulder that shook with something beyond anger, and that night Eli Park stood at his bedroom window looking out at the water tower and the dark fields and made himself a promise.

I’m leaving. I’m never coming back. And when I do—

He didn’t finish the sentence. He was eighteen. He didn’t know how it ended.

Until now.