Promise Boys

by Nick Brooks

Once it touches you, you tainted forever, guilty or not. Same thing happened to me.

They’re children. Everyone seems to always forget that. No matter their size. No matter their skin color. No matter their attitude.

I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody tell me they need me for anything.

Teachers shouldn’t be allowed to not like kids.

Only takes a day in this world to learn that people will see you the way they want to see you, then do what they want to do.

When you need money, when you need to survive, violence follows.

Every child has dreams until the world crushes them out of him.

Shame can grow into anger.

Sometimes a wolf can only protect another wolf if they’re in a pack together. Otherwise, the pack turns on you.

There are other, slower, and more agonizing ways you can hurt people.

What do you do when you run out of options? When it feels like all the people you’re supposed to trust have shown you they can’t be trusted?

“But it doesn’t look like going to school and trying to fit into some shit that hates us in the first place. We have to work together to build our own. This is the only choice they leave us with.”

“If you tell yourself there’s only one choice, that’s all you’ll see, primo.

When that gun is pointed at you, it’s scarier because that gun isn’t bound by the same rules.

Every day we send our children out into the world, they are inflicted with a thousand tiny cuts. And all the limpias in the world can’t clean it, because the wound is open.

I would hoist the whole planet up on my back and carry it around the sun, if you so much as whispered for me to do it.”