This was what the principal, Principal Warwick, said to us, to me and my wife, after we’d sat down across from him in his office at our daughter’s middle school. He said that our daughter, Autumn, committed assault, that she’d gone up to another girl in the hallway—her name was Lacey, Lacey Kost—gone up to her between classes, and after shouting in her face, “This is what you suck on, bitch!” she, Autumn, pinned this other girl, Lacey, against a row of lockers and shoved, shoved, a piece of “excrement”—Warwick’s word—into her mouth. And let me tell you, it was not an easy thing to hear, to have to sit there and listen to these accusations being levelled against our daughter, especially since she’d never done anything like that before, had never once been in trouble at school for anything, and was also well-behaved at home, most of the time, not to mention the fact that, just a few short years ago, she was dressing up as a princess and singing songs about unicorns. And maybe that’s why my wife—that, and the fact that she’s a lawyer—why my wife, Caitlyn, after digesting the news, began to question it, to pick it apart, even though Warwick had backed up the accusations with statements—written statements—from several eyewitnesses, one of whom was a teacher, because it just seemed impossible that our daughter, our little Autumn, could have done such a thing.

         As for me, I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, or that I thought I should just let my wife go ahead and handle it, because of her knowledge of the law. No, what happened was, I became distracted by that name, the victim’s name—not the first name, Lacey, which meant nothing to me, but the last name, Kost, because I’d heard that name before, I knew it as well as my own name, although it had been a while since I’d last run into it, or rather, it had run into me. That name, Kost, was the last name of Eddie Kost, a classmate of mine in high school, who used to bully me—torture me, really—on a regular basis. Mostly he stuck to the usual stuff, the stuff that bullies have been doing since bullying was first invented, calling me names like “loser” and “buttmunch” and poking his wet finger into my ear whenever he sat behind me in class, things like that, or knocking my books out of my hands in the hallway and giving me wedgies when I wasn’t looking. A couple of times he shoved my head into a toilet, and I’m sure he would have locked me in a locker as well if our lockers had been big enough for that. But the two things that I remember most, the two things that still stand out to me whenever I look back on those days, was the time when he tripped me down a flight of stairs and I nearly broke my kneecap, and the other time when he lit a cigarette and placed it against the small of my back. Of course, the real torture wasn’t what he did to me—I mean it was, but it wasn’t. No, what really wore me down, psychologically speaking, was the anticipation of it all, the not knowing what was coming next, or worse, when it was coming. I never felt like I was safe, never felt like I could let my guard down for even a second, even when he wasn’t around, because it always seemed like whenever I took my mind off of him was when he would strike. And so when I heard that name again—Kost—all those old feelings, those old fears of mine, began to resurface, and made it difficult to participate in, or even concentrate on, what was going on right in front of me. And it was only afterward, when the meeting had ended and we’d gotten back to our house, that I began to snap out of it, and that was only because I had to, because if I hadn’t, who knows what might have happened?

         What did happen was my wife smacked our daughter. Before that, the three of us had all gathered around the dining room table—Caitlyn and I on one side, and Autumn on the other—in order to hash things out, to find out what had really happened, and to the dismay of both of us—meaning my wife and I—our daughter confessed to everything. That’s right, she said she did it. She sat across from us with her see-through braces and pink barrettes and told us that she had shoved a piece of “crap”—her word—into Lacey’s mouth, and all because Lacey had started a rumor that she, Autumn, had given Tommy Olson a blowjob, and also because Tommy, having heard the rumor, had come up to her during lunch and asked her, seeing as everyone already thought it was true, whether she might be willing to actually give him one—a blowjob, I mean. She, our daughter, headed straight to the bathroom after that and took a dump—that’s the word I’m choosing to use—into the bag in which I’d placed her vegan sandwich that very morning, and then she left the bathroom, dump in hand, and went and found Lacey Kost in the hallway. And my wife, Caitlyn, after hearing all of this, after discovering that our daughter was in fact capable of what she’d been accused of, reached across the table and smacked her across the face. Smacked her hard, too, and then got up and climbed onto the table and grabbed Autumn’s neck and began to strangle her, all the while shouting obscenities at her, things I’d rather not repeat.

         Later, much later, I realized why Caitlyn had done that, why she’d acted so violently against our daughter, when she was usually so deliberate, so in control of herself. It was because she, my wife, wasn’t seeing Autumn, no, she was seeing one of her clients instead, one of the hundreds, maybe thousands that she’d represented over the years, who were always getting into trouble and making excuses for what they did. It was something my wife must have wanted to do for the longest time, whenever she’d sat across from one of them in a visiting room, to reach across the table and slap some sense into them, so that they might change their ways and stop acting like such buffoons. But she couldn’t, she couldn’t do that to them, because if she had it would have only gotten her in trouble, and so it fell upon our daughter to absorb the blow, to be the victim of my wife’s pent up rage. But like I said, that was later when I figured that out, because in the moment, when everything was going down, and my wife and daughter, grappling with each other, fell to the floor, that’s when I finally snapped out of it, out of my thinking about Eddie, and actually did something to help, or at least prevent things from getting worse. I got up—by then I’d already spoken, had already shouted at my wife to stop—and came around the table and grabbed my wife and pulled her off our daughter. Whether intentionally or not—probably the former, given her state of mind—Caitlyn elbowed me, right in the ribs, but in the end she gave up, she stopped resisting me and settled down. And now that she, Autumn, was free from her mother’s grip, now that she was able to breathe again and feel the blood rush back into her face, she got up and ran upstairs to her room, crying and yelling the whole time about what an injustice it all was, how unfair the world was treating her, and then she slammed her door.

 

*   *   *

 

         What I’d been thinking about, what I’d been turning over in my head while the world in front of me was falling apart, was whether or not this Lacey Kost, whom my daughter had assaulted, and my own assaulter, Eddie Kost, might be related in some way, and if so, did that mean that there was a chance, no matter how remote, that Eddie might reenter my life. I tried to convince myself that there wasn’t, that the odds were stacked against it, if for no other reason than that I’d moved since high school, not far, but far enough, to another city, for college, and once again for graduate school, and even though, technically, I was only living a few hours from where I grew up, those hours, or miles, should have been enough to create a buffer between him and me. Mind you, it’s not that he couldn’t have moved as well, to the exact same city, and also into the same school district as me, so that our kids would be classmates, it’s just that it seemed unlikely—not to mention the fact that he and whomever he might have had Lacey with would have had to have had her around the same time that Caitlyn and I had had Autumn, so that our daughters would be in the same grade. You see what I mean? Unlikely. On the other hand, Lacey need not be Eddie’s daughter, they could be related in some other way, she could be his niece or something, a second or third cousin perhaps, however you determine those things; so it was possible, at least in theory, that if he were related to Lacey, that our paths might cross again, which was why I’d had so much trouble letting it go.

         But that said, when the doorbell rang that evening, and I got up to answer it, it didn’t occur to me that it might actually be Eddie. I figured it was probably someone for my wife, as she sometimes had papers delivered to the house, or perhaps Autumn had called a friend over to console her after the day that she’d had (we all could have used some consolation), or maybe one of them had ordered a pizza, or Chinese, because with everything that had happened I don’t think any of us had eaten—I know I certainly hadn’t. In fact, my only concern as I walked into the foyer was that it might be the police, that they might have come to question Autumn about what had happened at school, and possibly arrest her and take her to jail. No, either because of the unlikeliness of it, or because of what had happened between my wife and daughter, I was no longer thinking about Eddie, not as intently anyway, and it simply didn’t cross my mind that it might be him. And yet, when I opened the door, there he was.

         Of course, physically speaking, he’d changed a lot in the twenty or so years since the last time I’d seen him, and so for a second I thought maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, that because of all the time I’d spent thinking about him my mind was projecting an image of Eddie onto someone who merely bore a resemblance to him. But no, after blinking a few times, and making sure that my legs weren’t going to give out on me, because they had gotten a little wobbly, I took another look and was certain that it was him: he was nearly bald now, the skin on his ratty face was darker and more splotchy than it had been when he was younger, and something—cancer, a workplace accident, a fight with a dog?—had caused him to lose the top part of one of his ears, but it was definitely him—which is why I nearly slammed the door in his face and locked the dead bolt. Only I was too panicked to do so, it was like I was frozen in time—two times really, both the present moment and the past which colored it. And it was while I was frozen that Eddie asked me, “Yeah, hey, you Daniel Kagen?” a question which caught me off guard, because I’d just assumed that he already knew who I was, that that was the reason for his being here at my doorstep, because he had heard that his daughter or niece or whomever had been assaulted by the daughter of one of his former classmates, a classmate he used to terrorize, and so he’d decided to pay that classmate a visit, in order to teach him another “lesson,” as he would often phrase it right before bullying me. And yet it was clear, both by the sound of his voice as he asked the question, and also by the look that he was giving me, as if we were mere strangers meeting for the first time, that the question was sincere, that he really did not know who I was.

         “Y-y-yes, I am,” I answered cautiously, because I was afraid of jogging his memory, of causing him to realize that we were already acquainted. I wasn’t so much concerned that confirming my name in and of itself would do it, because he’d clearly forgotten it, or more likely, had never known it in the first place, not my last name anyway, and as far as my first name went, well, he’d probably met half a dozen Dans or Daniels or Dannys over the years, so there was no reason for him to assume that I was one of them. But what about my voice? What if the sound of it created some kind of reaction inside of him, as hearing his voice again, the rough, aggressive timber of it, had sent shivers up and down my spine? Or what if I made some kind of gesture, something reminiscent of the way I’d behaved back in school, and that was what tipped him off? I mean, I was just worried that the longer we stood there my features would come back to him, because my appearance hadn’t changed nearly as much as his had—I still had roughly the same haircut with the part off to one side, the same pattern of freckles on my cheeks, and of course I still had a clefted chin. And even if he didn’t recognize me, so what? He was still a man who was capable of inflicting harm on someone, and willing to do so, and all just for the fun of it. Imagine what he might do now that he had a motive.

         “Yeah, well, I’m Eddie Kost, Lacey’s father—stepfather. Anyway, I’m here about what your daughter did to her at school today.”

         “Okay.”

         “Okay, well, me and her mother, we ain’t too happy about it.”

         “Neither are we—my wife and I.”

         “Yeah, but your girl ain’t the one that had to eat shit.”

         “No, that’s true.”

         “So that’s what the problem is. That’s why I’m here. Something’s got to be done about it, you see what I’m saying?”

         “Perhaps.”

         “Anyway, there’s a bar nearby, I saw it on my way over. I thought you and me, we could take a ride over there—”

         “You mean, together—as in the same vehicle?” There was still a bit of daylight out, and I looked over his shoulder at the truck that was parked out in front of the house, still running. It was a white truck, and appeared to have some equipment in the back; on the side of the passenger door, there was a business logo that read Kost Konstruction.

         “Yeah, why not? No sense in both of us driving. Anyway, I thought we’d go over there and hash things out, you know, man to man. What do you say?”

         “Gee, I, I don’t know.”

         “Look, it’s either that or Vicks is gonna press charges. So what’s it gonna be?”

 

*   *   *

 

         On the ride over Eddie had the radio on. He was listening to a game, a game, he told me, that he’d placed a bet on, and when we got to the bar, a sports bar, he made a point of finding a booth that gave him a clear view of a television. Me, I didn’t care where we sat, I was just relieved we’d come to a place where there were so many people around, because unlike my daughter, Eddie had always been careful about when and where he would attack, so as to reduce the chance of getting caught. It’s not that I suddenly felt safer—there was still the ride home, after all—but at least I knew that I had some time now to make out where all this was heading.

         “So hey, what do you do for a living?” he asked me once our beers arrived.

         “I’m a psychologist,” I said, taking a gulp.

         “No shit? A shrink. Say, is it true you guys are just as fucked up as the rest of us? That’s what I’ve heard anyway, that it’s why you guys go into the racket.”

         “We’re human, too. We all have our problems.”

         “Yeah, so what are yours?”

         “You, you want to know my problems?”

         “Hey, look, I’m just making conversation here. No need to get all defensive.”

         “No, I—”

         “You want to know what my biggest problem is? It’s this, what we’re doing here. I mean, how the hell did I wind up in this mess anyway? I told you Lacey’s not my kid, right?”

         “You mentioned you were her stepfather.”

         “Right. So some jackoff plants his seed inside of Vicks before I’ve even had a look at her, and now I’m the one having to clean it up. You know what I’m saying? It’s bullshit.”

         “So, how did you, um, how did you come to meet her—Vicks, I mean.”

         “Oh, now there’s a crazy story, you’ll appreciate this. A while back I fell hard for this other chick, back from where I’m from. Big tits, blonde hair, just the way I like ’em. Anyway, about six months after we start going together, her boss says she’s gotta move here if she wants to keep her job. So, dumb shit that I am, I follow her here, only to have her dump me two months later for one of her co-workers, some pissant in accounting who’d been flirting with her since she got here. So now the whole reason I’m living in this shit hole is blown to bits, but before I can get my own shit together and move back home, my sister phones me up and says she just got a notice that my driver’s license’s about to expire. So, there I am waiting my turn at the DMV when I hear my name called, only I ain’t paying much attention, and it turns out they called some other Kost, some lady—Vicks. Well, shit, she thought that was quite a coincidence, you know, that two people with the same last name would be getting their licenses renewed at the same time, and so we get to flirting, and finally I ask her out. And why not? She’s got blond hair and big tits, too. Course I didn’t know at the time she had a kid, or that one day I’d have to act like a father to her, you know? And she could use one, too. Hell, when Vicks called me up, told me what’d happened, I thought for sure she’d gotten her facts mixed up. Thought for sure it was Lacey who’d filled someone’s mouth with shit, not the other way around.”

         “So Lacey, she’s been in trouble before?”

         He shrugged. “Small stuff. Got caught cheating once. And there was this other time, back in grade school, when she brought her tarantula to school and put it on someone’s head. Nothing like what your daughter did though. Shit, I think we can both agree that was pretty fucked up.” He said this as if he were envious, as if he wished he’d thought of it himself back when he was bullying me. “Anyway, did she tell you why she did it? Because Lacey, she’s been tight lipped about the whole thing, acting like she didn’t do nothing to deserve it. Like your daughter just goes around shoving shit into everyone’s mouth.”

         “She said it had something to do with a boy.”

         “Wasn’t that Tommy something or other, was it? Because Lacey—ah, c’mon, ump! That was right down the middle! Because Lacey, she’s always going on and on about this kid, got a huge crush on him, you know? They must be fighting over him or something.”

         “Could be.”

         “So what are we gonna do about it? Those fancy degrees you got give you any ideas?”

         “Well, I’m not a child psychologist—”

         “I’m not talking about them.”

         I paused. I felt my pulse beginning to race. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

         “Your daughter’s toast, alright? As soon as they can dot their I’s and cross their T’s, they’re going to expel her ass from school, you can bet on that. That’s what zero tolerance means, or didn’t they teach you that in school? What I’m talking about is you and me.” He leaned back. He was looking at me now—there was a commercial on—and he had this big grin on his face. “See, Vicks, she’s got this idea that I’m some kind of tough guy, and I am. But I’m also getting older, and as far as I’m concerned, my fighting days are behind me.”

         “Fighting?”

         “Yeah, see, the reason I came out tonight is, she wants me to kick the shit out of you—not real shit, like with your daughter, but you get the idea. Thing is though, I’m not really up for it, you know? Like I said, I’m older now, and besides pleasing her, what good would it do? From what I here, your wife’s a lawyer, right?”

         “Yes. Yes, she is.”

         “Alright, so that’s all I need is to kick the shit out of you, break your nose, crack a couple of ribs, and then wind up in jail for it, or have a lawsuit hanging over my head. I got a business to run, you know? So let’s you and me put our heads together and see if we can come up with something better, alright?”

         I gave it some thought—a lot of thought—and finally I came up with something that I thought he might go for. “Perhaps you could threaten me,” I said.

         “Yeah, and how would that go?” He was looking at the game again, only half paying attention to what I was saying.

         “You could tell her you threatened me that if anything like this were to happen again you’d beat me up with a pipe.”

         “Yeah, that sounds like something I’d say. Could I also say I grabbed you by the collar, shook you a little, so you got the message?”

         “I’d be okay with that.”

         “Course, if we ever ran into you, you’d have act like you’re scared of me.”

         “I can do that.”

         “What about your wife? You willing to lie to her?”

         I shook my head. “I won’t have to. She’s used to this kind of thing, because of her clients. They’re always making up stories that she has to go along with. And besides, she wants this to go away as much as we do.”

         He slapped the table. “Good, it’s settled then. Now if this dipshit would just swing the bat.”

 

*   *   *

 

         We remained at the bar until the game was over. His team won, or rather, they covered the spread, and given how pleased he was about it, how he ordered another beer for the both of us, on him, it was looking more and more like I’d dodged a bullet—or more accurately, a fist. But like I said, there was still the ride home, and once we’d pulled out of the parking lot, with little by way of traffic to distract him, his demeanor changed, and after glancing my way once or twice, just long enough to meet my own more protective glances, he turned the radio off, and said, “You alright over there?”

         “Hm? Yeah, I’m fine.”

         “You sure? Because the whole night you’ve been making this, I don’t know what you call it, like this wheezing noise when you breathe.”

         “I have?”

         “You didn’t know? What about back then?”

         “Back…you mean at the bar?”

         He laughed and scratched his cheek. “No, not the bar. Back when we were kids. Must not have, or you’d know about it now. Fucking annoyed the shit out of me. That’s why I started picking on you, you know. Well, that and you were such a goddamn goody two shoes.”

         I was more than wheezing now. My pulse was racing again, and I could feel my intestines wrenching this way and that. We were pulling up to a stop light, and I gripped the door handle, ready to jump and run. But I never got that far, because just as I was about to, just as the truck was slowing down, my phone rang, and instead of running, I took my hand off the handle and reached for it, trusting that if someone knew where I was, and who I was with, then there was little chance that Eddie would do anything to me, because as I said before, he was never as flagrant as my daughter, he was always exacting, always seemed to know just when and how to strike in order to get away with it, which is no doubt why he seized me by the forearm, and prevented me from swiping across the screen.

         “You don’t need to answer that.”

         “But it’s my wife. She’s probably wondering where I am.”

         “This will only take a minute.”

         “This?”

         “Just put the phone away, alright? Or this won’t be the last you see of me.”

         I did what he ordered, just as I did back in high school, hoping that by complying with him he might go easier on me, or at least let me live; and when the light turned green, instead of going straight, which would have taken us directly back to my house, without signaling, he took a left. He drove us to our daughters’ middle school and parked alongside the football field. We got out, and walked more or less alongside each other—perhaps I was a step or two behind, regretting that I hadn’t ran when I’d had the chance, and wishing that I could get myself to do so now, but also knowing that if I did, eventually he’d track me down—and as we passed the goalpost he took a swipe at the pad around the base and said, “Say, you remember that time I had you take off all your clothes and I hung them on the uprights? How the hell’d I get them up there anyway, you remember?”

         “You used a pole vault,” I said, staring up at the red flag dangling off the end of one of the posts. “You placed them one by one on the end of it and hung them up there. I remember my underwear slid down to the crossbeam, and I couldn’t get them off.”

         He laughed. “That’s right. Shit, man, you remember it all, don’t you? I must have really fucked you up good.”

         “I got over it.”

“Yeah, sure you did. Course you know it wasn’t personal, right? None of that shit was about you.”

         “Yes, I know. Bullying starts in the home.”

         “Yeah, that’s right. I’d go home and get the shit kicked out of me by my old man, then I’d come to school and pick on you. And that thing I used to say to you, about teaching you a lesson, that’s what he used to say to me. ‘I’m gonna teach you a lesson, boy, a lesson you ain’t never gonna forget.’ But that really wasn’t fair to you, was it?”

         “Life’s full of injustices.”

         “Ain’t that the truth? But it’d sure be nice if it had a little revenge in it, too, huh?”

         “I don’t, what do you mean?”

         We were approaching the fifty yard line, and once he had himself centered over the white Spartan head painted on the grass, he stopped and turned to me. I stopped, too, just outside the helmet’s crest, and waited for what his next move would be. In the darkness he knelt down and plucked a blade of grass and began pulling it apart into little pieces and sprinkling them in front of him. I’d seen him do something like that before, either with grass or a napkin or whatever he had on hand. It was an old habit of his, a sign that he was just biding his time, waiting for the perfect moment in order to strike.

         “I’ve been thinking about your plan,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, but it’s missing something. See, Vicks, she’s gonna want some kind of proof, something that’ll show her I didn’t just head off to the bar and have a few drinks with my friends, you know? So what I’m thinking is, I’m gonna let you take a swing at me.”

         I shook my head. “I’m sorry, are you…are you saying you want me to hit you?”

         “Nothing in the nose or jaw. I don’t want you breaking anything. And stay away from my eyes as well. To me, a black eye makes it look like someone lost a fight. Let’s say the cheek, alright? That’ll leave a scuff, maybe a bruise, but nothing I won’t recover from in a day or two. Course, I’ll have to tell her I did a lot worse to you, maybe something like I stopped just short of putting you in the hospital. Yeah, she’ll like that. She’ll eat that up. And, you know, if we ever do run into each other again, we’ll just go with that plan that you came up with, alright?”

         “No.”

         “No?” he said, rising up fast, causing me to fall back a step. “What do you mean no? Don’t tell me you’ve never fantasized about it, getting a little payback for all the shit I did to you. C’mon, admit it. You’ve dreamed of a chance like this.”

         “It doesn’t matter. Violence is never the answer.”

         “What is that? Some bullshit you read in one of your textbooks? Look around you, man, at this Spartan, at this field. Turn on a TV once in a while, look at the news. Violence is what makes the world go round. It’s in our nature, it’s what makes us human.”

         “I don’t believe that.”

         “You don’t, huh? What about your daughter? She seems to have gotten the message, loud and clear.”

         I waved my hands in front of me. “Don’t, let’s leave her—that was an aberration.”

         “Yeah, no shit. Me and Vicks, we looked her up online, just to see what we were dealing with, and from what we found, you’d never have expected something like that out of her. So sweet and innocent looking, like a little princess. I’ll tell you though, she sure has a nice set of tits.”

         “Now,” I said, raising a finger, though immediately I caught myself, and brought it down. “No, I won’t fall for that. You’re not going to goad me into hitting you, no matter what you say about her.”

         “She fucking yet? Because let me tell you, when she’s ready, I got something for her. I got something’ll break her in real good.”

         I just stood there, my lips tight, saying nothing. He waved his hand at me, disgusted.

         “Alright, fine. Have it your way. But just remember, if we don’t have a story Vicks’ll buy, then we’re back to pressing charges. That’s all that’s on the table, one or the other. So what’s it gonna be?”

         Of course, when he put it that way, I knew that I had no choice, I knew that I would have to punch him, knowing also that once I had, he’d punch me back. Because that’s what this was really about. He wanted me to punch him first, so that when he retaliated he could say that it was in self-defense, and in that way he might avoid any of the legal entanglements he’d talked about earlier. He’d be able to do exactly what his wife had wanted him to do, what he no doubt wanted to do as well, if only for old time’s sake, but without having to suffer any of the consequences. The whole thing was a trap, and such a well-crafted one, that I could see no way out. And so, after some further hemming and hawing, and a prayer to my family under my breath, I finally took my swing, and punched him right in the cheek. And then, right on cue, he came back at me. He bum-rushed me and knocked me over. He was on top of me, heavy, and began to unload on me with all his might. But what neither of us had anticipated, what came as a surprise to both of us, was that I began to fight back. I began by deflecting his punches, and then throwing my own in return, and at a certain point, I managed to roll him over. Suddenly I was on top of him, giving him as good as I’d gotten. And I just kept doing it, too, pounding away at him, one punch after another, even after he told me that he’d had enough, that I’d taken it too far, even after he began to beg me to stop. Because I’d learned from him. I’d learned that you don’t stop just because the other guy wants you to—it doesn’t work that way. No, whatever you’re doing to him, you keep going, you go and go until you say you’re done. And I wasn’t done, not even close. Hell, the way I felt about it, I was never going to be done.