Victim

by Andrew Boryga

Mr. Martin was now deep in thought. I decided that he looked too young to be a guidance counselor. I decided that on the bench of counselors at Groverdale, he was probably near the end. I decided that he was like twenty-seven, that he drank craft beer in Brooklyn when school was over. He knew a few Jay-Z songs, could quote Plato and Tolstoy, and rode a skinny bike.

She knew me too well. Unlike some of our other teachers, she hadn’t come from some faraway state with a mission to save us that blew up in her face once we started throwing chairs. She’d grown up on blocks just like ours, gone to schools just like ours, and pronounced ask like it was an instrument to chop people’s heads off with.

The large houses had nice porches, with doormats, lights, and wind chimes. They looked like the houses on those streets in the opening credits of Disney shows. Where the camera pans around the neighborhood and everyone waves at each other from their cars or smiles while picking up the newspaper on the driveway.

Bronx. I loved it—warts and all. As far as I was concerned, the two of us would buy a house there one day, and when I was old, I’d fall over and die on a gum-stained sidewalk.

Anais had that end-of-a-long-day, dead-eyed, staring-vacuously-a-hundred-yards-past-the-etched-windows-of-the-subway-car look. She was finally becoming a real New Yorker. And she’d earned it.

I wasn’t trying to be a victim until the world taught me how powerful victims are. Now I understand that my life circumstances just were what they were. The hand I was dealt, and so on.