Restart

“But where’s their leader? The apex predator? Could that be him paying for a pack of Fig Newtons at the cash register? Yes, it is—the king of beasts, Footballus herois.”

I’m blown away. My record as a nerd and goody-two-shoes never seemed like much to me before. For sure, it didn’t compare to Chase’s—athlete, bad boy, big man on campus. But it was my reputation, not his, that got us out of a jam back there.

Aaron eyes Chase with a long face. “You shouldn’t have done that, man. Joey’s your friend. He’s had your back plenty of times.”

Chase is still defiant, but a little more subdued than before. “So I should just let him beat up a kid half his size for no reason?”

Aaron stands his ground. “If you’d told him to stop, he would have stopped. You didn’t have to attack him.” He shakes his head. “None of us are perfect—not even you. Next time, take a second to think about who your friends are.”

I get that his memory is erased. But is our whole friendship erased too? Being boys with someone isn’t just a bunch of stuff you did together in the past. There has to be more to it than that! But right now, it’s like we’ve got zero in common with the guy.

That’s how I always looked at it. We are who we are, and we’re good with it. I figured the others felt the same way. Who cares what the popular kids think of us?

Was I ever wrong about that! As soon as someone from the A-list showed even the slightest interest in video club, we all went weak in the knees and lined up to love him.

I guess having the power to torture another person made us feel like big men. Especially when we picked somebody smaller and weaker, who was into music instead of sports.

That’s when it hits me how this must seem to the teachers. The music room is a disaster area. Instruments, music stands, books, and papers are strewn everywhere, the whole place buried in foam. The school’s three most notorious bullies are right there. One of them—Chase—still wields a fire extinguisher. And their number one target—Joel—is down on the floor with a rapidly swelling face, obviously the victim of an assault.

“It isn’t what it looks like!” I gasp, and then bite my tongue. What if it’s exactly what it looks like?

Dad says the old Chase is back. I wanted that once. But right now the new Chase is the life I’d rather have.

And I’ve lost that too.

“He’s like a cobra. He lured us in until we trusted him. Then he struck. And now he’s slithered back to his old life as if nothing ever happened.”

It’s hard to watch, but it’s not as hard as I thought it would be. This is not who I am, I tell myself. It’s just something that happened to me. Somehow, seeing it unfold in real time, in high-definition video, I’m able to expand the fracas in the band room to include every rotten bullying thing that was ever done to me. And here I am, alive, undamaged—well, except my eye.

I’ve been victimized, but I don’t have to let that define me as a victim.

I’m back—back at home and back to myself.

“It was the old you!” Brendan mumbles around a rapidly swelling jaw.

“There’s only one me.” Chase says it so quietly that I can hardly hear him.