Chapter 12: Inferno

Chapter 12: Inferno

(Trigger warning: Abuse/Family Conflict)

Even though I had attended Los Molinos Elementary just a few blocks from my house, my parents enrolled me in Mesa Robles for middle school. It sat across Hacienda Boulevard, the invisible line dividing our district by class and test scores. My parents borrowed a friend’s address to send me there, hoping it would give me a better future, and keep me close to Lars, Alfred, and Jade; their friends wanted all four of us children to go to the same school. They hoped that we would stick together and keep each other safe.

In 2001 I started middle school. That year, there was no quiet left in the house. Every corner belonged to someone else. My mom’s Chinese school had grown into full operation with 12 children in two converted classrooms. Sometimes, a small girl named Joy would spy on me through the cracks in the door, running off to tell my mom whenever I read or fidgeted instead of doing my homework. She wasn’t the only one. Pretty soon, even at home I couldn’t shake the constant feeling of always being watched. Little by little I began to feel that home no longer existed. It was a workplace and it was a daycare. And sometimes it was a zoo.

My mom enrolled me in a different after school program after weeks of hearing me complain about the noise at home. It wasn’t really the noise. I just didn’t have words for the rest. The center sat in the plaza with Vons and Rite Aid on Hacienda and Haliburton. It was called Ivy, a name meant to sound aspirational. It wasn’t.

At first I joined activities, but as school worsened I stopped finishing my homework. Soon my mom asked the director just to make sure I got it done; I didn’t need the extra curriculum. She hoped I’d found a haven, a place to keep me out of trouble. Instead, it taught me how to disappear.

Connie, the director, put me in a storage room at the back of the building. I worked alone under the hum of fluorescent lights, surrounded by stacked chairs, toys, games, and dust. I tried to focus, but exhaustion made me drift, fidgeting with whatever I found. I wasn’t allowed to leave during breaks. Through the thin wall I heard the other students laughing and jostling, and I leaned against the door to listen, wishing I could join them. I felt trapped in the absurdity of such a thin wall being the divider between isolation and belonging.

One afternoon, as I played with a small set of blocks, I heard the others call me the loser in the cage. They banged on the door while I held it shut, the blocks falling from my hands. Connie stormed in, accusing me of throwing things. I said they lied, but it was my word against four others. It ended in a shouting match, and I was kicked out soon after.

Mesa Robles was technically in the same district, but it felt like another world. Naturally, I had no friends. Patrick had gone to private school. Lars, Alfred, and Jade were a year older. And Milly wasn’t interested in hanging out with me at the time. Middle school was structurally different from elementary school too, changing classrooms every period and seeing multiple teachers a day. I thought I made a friend in Language Arts, a boy named Jay. The children in other classes seemed cold and unfriendly, but Jay seemed excited to bond with me over games, and sports cars. He told me he was passionate about making little model ships. I brought him one that my dad had given me, thinking it was something he would enjoy many times more than me. My mom called me an idiot for being so generous for seemingly no reason. That was when I learned you couldn’t buy someone’s friendship.

I had hoped Jay could be a small ray of light and wanted very much to be friends. Maybe I talked to him too much. Ms Graham, the teacher, moved me to a small table near the door, far from the rest of the class, facing away, underneath the window. Another island to be marooned in. However, I learned that Ms Graham was nothing like my fourth grade teacher. She was much worse.

She was a blonde lady with a Southern accent and a perpetually twisted sneer. The first weeks of school she seemed sullen and quiet. However, as the school year went by, Ms Graham became progressively more harsh. First it was the yelling.

“Brian, turn back around, I moved you there for a reason!” “Omar, I swear to god if you don’t shut your mouth, I will staple your tongue to the roof of your mouth!”

Then it was a yardstick that she would bang on the tables or against books as she screamed at us. Soon she began to write pink slips, “office referrals”, almost weekly, sending students out of the classroom when she couldn’t stand them. As each student walked out the door, she directed the class to laugh and wave goodbye. One day I was very thirsty but I was not allowed to get up out of my seat. I watched as other students took their turn on the water fountain but I was yelled at whenever I even turned my head to look. Another day, my feet hurt badly because I had gone through a growth spurt and my shoes no longer fit. Ms Graham shouted at me from across the room, accusing me of stinking up her class. “Get your nasty feet back in the shoes! I’ll count to three and they better be on!” She counted but the shoes were so tight I couldn’t push my feet in quickly enough. I was sent to the office.

Months later, for whatever reason, Ms Graham was taunting me in front of the class again. “Do you have any friends at all? Are you just a little loser?” she said. “Everyone, raise your hand if you are Brian’s friend”. I pointed to Jay and said he was my friend. He paused for a moment and said quietly, “he’s not my friend just someone I talk to.” Eventually I stopped listening. I stopped turning my head. Everyday during sixth period, I sat like a stone and stared out the window during Language Arts. I found a spot outside, a pretty knot on a tree, and looked at it until the bell rang.

I don’t know what happened in PE. A few months into the school year, I became more sluggish. I felt tired of being told to hurry up. I took more and more time to change into my clothes, pretty soon not even bothering to change out of the PE clothes at all. During the weekly mile run, I was often told I ran too slowly. Soon, I stopped running altogether, simply walking instead. The teacher punished me by excluding me from the other activities such as basketball and volleyball. Everyday, I was to walk loops around the perimeter of the school. I was to walk without stopping until the bell rang.

There was one day I wanted to show him I wasn’t the bad kid he imagined. I began to run, until I heard jeers. “Brian’s running! Oh my god, he’s actually running, look at that fat kid go! Did you see a hamburger somewhere?” I stopped. Kept walking. One day as I made my loops, I saw my teacher resting under a tree. I told him, trying to sound cheerful, I think I walked exactly 2.6 miles today. “I think that’s your IQ”, he replied.

My dad worked a grueling job that year. He had to be in China several months at a time, but it was a leadership position at a major company. In China, he wore a suit and managed people who respected him. However, it was exhausting. The hours were long, and he developed gout from the physical strain and the poor diet. I remember the sight of him coming out of the gate one time we picked him up at the airport. He limped out of arrivals and pressed a new Game Boy into my hand.

My mom began to feel frayed, juggling everything on her own, from planning the children’s curriculum to writing the afternoon meal menus. She cleaned up after the children everyday at the end of class. In addition to picking up Milly and I from Mesa, she drove to three other schools to fetch the other children. As the months passed, I watched my mom unravel at the seams. In my room I heard yelling, I heard crying. I heard my grandmother pleading with her in a voice I did not recognize.

I began to fear eyes. Not metaphorical ones, but literal gazes. Everywhere I went, I had the sense I was being watched. I argued with my mom in a grocery store once. She couldn’t understand why I was so stressed out. I didn’t know how to tell her that with every passerby I felt myself inside their thoughts, and those thoughts were not kind. In that crowd, the people mountain people sea, I was drowning.

In 2001 there were only four Harry Potter books. I read all four religiously, immersing myself back in the magic world, wishing I could escape. My mom began to wonder if it was the books causing my problems. One night she boxed them up, sealing the seams with duct tape. You’ll get them back when you give me better grades, she said. She hurled the box down the stairs.

I took very long showers too, wishing I didn’t exist. One day I heard the door slam open and my mom dragged me out, still wet. She showed me what she found in my backpack, a report card with a 1.83 GPA, crying, asking me why I’m throwing away my own future, that she had given me everything for the hope that I would live a better life than her. “1.83!”, she would spit like a curse, instead of calling me by my name for several weeks after.

My grandpa knew something was wrong with me but he couldn’t understand. Grandfather was a man of very few words, preferring silent gestures. He could tell something was becoming broken. He wanted to give me warmth any way he could. Grandpa brought me McDonald’s sometimes while I worked. I was gaining weight at a dangerous pace, looking more like the Michelin Man every day.

Lars lent me Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. It was the first time I’d heard angry music. Beneath all the aggression was something soft, splintered, that spoke to me. It became the first language for my frustration and defiance. I listened to it every day, drowning out the house until it felt like a hiding place. I popped it into the car CD player one day on the way to school. My dad turned it off. Told me this was music for bad kids.

Despite our disagreements as children, I believe Lars had always tried to love me the best he could. As we were both only children, he felt like the brother I never had. I could tell he had troubles of his own at school. I once saw graffiti on his backpack. Someone had written “chinker boy” with white out.

We didn’t talk about things like that. We didn’t talk much at all that year. One afternoon, as my mom picked us up, Lars threw his bag into the car. It hit me in the face. The weight of his textbooks slammed against my cheek. I lost it. I punched him. He hit back. By then he’d gone through several growth spurts and was stronger than me. His punches felt like bricks. I clung to him, scratching, biting, until I drew blood. Then I collapsed against the window. I looked at Jade, hoping she would speak up for me. “You’re fucking insane. No wonder you have no friends,” Lars said. He showed Jade his hand. “I think he’s gonna give me rabies.” They laughed.

One afternoon I snapped at my grandma. I don’t remember what I said. Something impatient, said too fast. Dana became angry, as she was just as close to Grandma as I was. She followed me upstairs as I stormed off mid-argument. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” she yelled, giving me a rough shove. Before I could think, I grabbed a yo-yo off the bookshelf and threw it at her, hard. I already regretted it the split second the toy left my fingers but it was already too late. It hit her arm. A small bruise appeared.

She began crying immediately. “What is wrong with you?”, asked my mom as she led Dana back downstairs. I spent the rest of the day sitting on the floor beside my bed staring at a spot on the wall. I was too ashamed to leave. I could still hear her crying as her parents picked her up. That was the day a friendship that began at age four ended. We wouldn’t speak again until college. Even then, our voices never quite found each other.

Toward the end of the year came finally the Catalina Island field trip. Outside of eating with Patrick during school lunches the previous years, I still felt unfamiliar with many Western foods; my family did not eat out very often other than Chinese restaurants. The first day we had sloppy joes for lunch on the picnic tables in the secluded camp. Sloppy joes are a strange kind of sandwich. Why would anyone put loose ground meat soaked in sauce between slices of bread and expect it to stay there? Each bite sent bits spilling out the other side. A teacher started yelling at me, slamming her hand down on the table with every word “We! Do! Not! Eat! Like! Pigs!” I froze with the sandwich in my hands, afraid to move.

I got along fine with most of the chaperones on the trip. One parent, Danny’s dad, Mr. Matthews, took a liking to me early on, and we made small talk often. Stu’s parents came too, mostly to keep an eye on him. He was a sheltered kid, a little spoiled, and the others teased him for it. They teased me too, though not for the same reasons. Two of my tent mates lost patience and joined in. I tried to be kind, to talk to him, but it backfired. The next day he told everyone I’d been the one picking on him. It was easier to blame someone smaller.

I remembered the misunderstandings from elementary school, how often I was blamed, labeled the bad kid. Maybe that’s why I sounded defensive whenever teachers asked me questions. As the students walked to dinner, I lingered in the back with Mr. Matthews. He lectured me about being nice, about thinking before I acted. I listened to every word, but it felt as if my head were underwater. I watched myself from far away, like a scene in a movie. I was tired. I wanted to go home. “Are you even listening to me?” he asked. “Yes. Consequences would be scary,” I said. The words felt wrong the moment they left my mouth. “You know what? Wait here,” he said, and walked off. I knew then that something bad was about to begin.

I would think back to this moment often in adulthood. Throughout childhood I felt as if everyone else had been given a script. How did people know what to say? Would this have gone differently if I’d given a better answer? It felt like stepping on a conversational land mine.

For the rest of the trip I was excluded from all activities. During the squid dissection class, I sat at the corner of the room, facing the wall. I listened to the laughter behind me as I hunched over a table, writing apology letters to every teacher and parent. One of them would read my drafts, marking what was too vague, what didn’t sound respectful enough. I apologized for some things I did, and for many I didn’t remember doing. That night, I was moved to a tent at the edge of camp, to sleep alone.

When we came back, I was suspended for a week. I noticed the office referral slip was signed by all of the teachers on the trip. It looked almost like a group project. I kept staring at their names, trying to understand how so many adults could hate one child.

Ms. Graham sent me to the principal’s office again, in the last month of school. One day I told a few classmates to leave me alone. Laughing, they told her I’d said, “Shut up, your mom is ugly.” I hadn’t. But as I protested, Ms. Graham smiled with a kind of glee and began writing another pink slip. The vice principal, Ms. Castle, was a gentle woman I’d never met before. The other staff were out that day. I cried and insisted I hadn’t done anything, and she seemed to believe me, but her words felt thin. When she said I could go, I begged, “Please don’t send me back.” She gave me a strange look. The following year I learned Ms. Graham had been fired.

My mom wished my dad would find another job. She was collapsing under the weight of the months he spent in China. He wouldn’t listen, feeling chained to the best position he’d held in years. My mom asked me to talk to him, to convince him. I tried. It started with small complaints about how often he was gone. Then it turned into an argument. He lost his temper and gave me a shove, rougher than he meant to. I fell against the kitchen counter, knocking over some dishes with a clatter.

Time stood still. I looked at him. He looked at me for a long time. Then, without a word, he turned and went back to the computer room.