My Boruta

All of Ken’s dumb pants are brown. I have never seen him wear a pair of jeans or kakis or even a pair of shorts. Every time I have seen him, from the day I met him in the principal’s office until yesterday when he hit me—they’re always the same color. It’s one of the reasons I hate him. My Boruta is really happy about this. I think he would be disappointed if Ken got a clue and changed his style.

I met Ken because I got in trouble at school. This big kid named Dwayne was picking on me on the playground. He made fun of my glasses and my haircut. At first, I was scared. Dwayne could have pulverized me. He’s way bigger and stronger than I am. But then I started to get mad. When Dwayne was laughing at me with the other kids, I started to grind my teeth. I imagined Dwayne lying in the dirt with a bloody nose. I kept on adding little parts to the picture in my head until it seemed real: his shirt twisted in the dirt, his legs splayed out, one hand on his bloody nose and the other one held up to fend me off. I imagined the fear in his blue eyes, and the sound of him yelling at me to stop. I felt my hand get warm and heavy with anger.

Before I knew it, I had done it. I know it’s not right to feel this way, but for just a second, I felt like a king. There I was, standing over Dwayne, and the other kids were laughing and screaming, and two or three of them noticed me for the first time, and they looked scared. That made a warmth spread from my hand, which hurt after hitting Dwayne, to the center of my chest. I think my heart got bigger and stronger. But it didn’t last. It never does. That makes me angry, too. Points for my Boruta, right there.

Mrs. Bandy, my teacher, came running over to where Dwayne was lying in the dirt and grabbed my wrist, really hard. She’s so tall and skinny, like a scarecrow. That’s what we call her, actually, when she isn’t listening. She looked Dwayne over, told him to go to the nurse’s office on the third floor and marched me to the principal’s office. I had never been there before, which I guess is a good thing. It was quiet and smelled like Lysol. There was a secretary in front of the office door at her desk. She gave me a mean look. Then she started picking her nose, which was really gross.

After a little while, my mom came in. She looked mad and worried at the same time. Her hair was all crazy and she had her car keys in her hand, like she had run here without remembering to put them away and straighten her hair. It was kind of embarrassing, actually. She talked to the gross secretary in a pretty loud voice, really fast. Then she came over to me, looked at my bruised hand and let out this long sigh. She told me to come with her, and we went into the office.

There was Ken. He smiled when we walked in, and asked me what the trouble was. He didn’t really look at me, though. He was sort of talking at me, you know? He was really looking at my mom. I knew he liked her right then. It made me mad, but what could I do about it?

Now my parents are divorced, and my mom and my sister and I live with Ken. The first night I slept at Ken’s, in a small bed in the same room with his stupid son, Chris (he likes brown just as much as Ken, surprise surprise!) I pretended to be sleeping, but I was thinking. It had been a long time since my fight with Dwayne, but I could still remember that feeling, like warm power was moving from my hand into my chest. I tried to imagine that power growing. And, for the first time, I saw my Boruta.

I was lying on my stomach, staring at the carpet at the corner of the bed and thinking, and there was a shadow on the carpet. Just a normal shadow, from the corner of the bed. You could see the moon through the window. Its light made that little shadow, and it wasn’t doing a very good job. But the more I thought about that weird power, the darker that shadow got. Slowly, it got darker and darker, and I got madder and madder. I wasn’t just thinking about hitting Dwayne. I was thinking about how my dad loved beer more than he loved my mom, and about how Chris got the biggest sloppy joe at dinner, and about the way Ken looked at my mom.

Once the shadow was completely black, like somebody had burned the carpet, or spilled ink on it, two spots of light (I figured out that they were my Boruta’s eyes later on) turned on in the blackness, and a bright little crack showed up under them. The crack opened. It was his mouth, right? And he started whispering to me.

It was like he knew exactly how I felt. He said he could help me, as long as I kept him secret. Every night, once stupid Chris is snoring, I think about what made me mad that day (believe me, there are always lots of things. I haven’t even started to tell you about Ken’s sweaters) and my Boruta—he told me his name, which seems weird but kind of cool, last week—eats all of my anger and grows. Soon, he'll get too big to hide under my bed, but he's fine there for now. I think he’ll be big enough to give Ken a hard time in a couple of months or so. Then Ken will think twice about hitting me, just because I told him he needs some new pants.