This one was recently rejected, and I would like to know more about why. Please have a read and leave me a comment describing what about the story would make you reject it.
Tucker
What surprised him was that he didn’t feel, he heard–heard every fist, every knee as it slammed into his head and back. Heard a thumping like plastic watercooler bottles being thrown onto a wooden floor, hollow and fluid. Transmitted through his bones. Heard from the inside, not through his ears.
Tucker had never been in a fight before, mostly because he was sure that it would hurt. He wasn’t the kind of man who could put hurt in a box and ignore it in order to get things done. He hadn’t been that kind of boy, either. He avoided hurt—he avoided almost everything hard, in fact—and now that he was actually in a fight, he wondered why.
Still, he wasn’t fighting. There was no violence in him. A fight had started, true—a beating really in which he fell to the ground the second he was hit, resting on his left side, hands covering head, knees protecting belly. To be honest, the fact that he had defied his soon-to-be attacker at all, a stringy teenager in a concert t-shirt, surprised him. He knew the kid was going to have to hit him, to show the rest of his friends that he wasn’t a coward, but he didn’t back down, didn’t run like he always had before. He had no idea why.
And now the boy was on top of him, sort of sitting on him and punching at the patches of hair and skull that Tucker couldn’t cover with his hands. The friends were hooting. The parking lot smelled sweet and dirty from so close up. The boy grunted as he inflicted his damage.
There was a kind of peace in it, in suffering if that’s what it was. Why had schoolmates teased him because he wouldn’t fight? Sissy. He hated the word. Why did women reject him because he lacked courage? Spineless. Weak. If he had known how easy it was, he would have been brave long ago. The pain of something you accept is nothing compared to pain that you’re trying to keep out. He hadn’t wanted the fight when it started of course, but now that he was in it—now, he could lie there on the ground and absorb the thumping for the rest of his life.
He chuckled at the thought, and the pounding stopped. “What are you laughin’ at Faggot?”
Tucker laughed even harder at the question. The word faggot seemed funny, infantile, weak. But the situation wasn’t funny. Asphalt grated the left side of his face. His eye tooth seemed broken. He could taste blood in his mouth for the first time, ever, and was surprised that it tasted so much like metal, like the stink that stained his hands when he helped his grandma roll coins into paper sleeves. For the first time in his life, Tucker was in danger. But he wasn’t scared.
Nearby, he saw the feet of one of the girls who was watching, just her feet, one crossed in front of the other, and noticed through the open toe of her high heeled, little-girl-trying-to-look-chic shoes that her big toenail had a happy face painted on it. He laughed, hard this time, from the belly. Bobby slapped him, just behind his right eye. “Shut UP!”
“Oh, gross. I think he likes it,” a girl said, one he couldn’t see. “Bobby, I think he likes you being on top of him and shit.”
Suddenly, the weight was off him and the kid was yelling, hollering. Tucker didn’t pay attention to the words, just to the sound the retreating voice made. He could tell that Bobby had moved a few feet away and he heard the others jeering, calling their one-time hero names. Tucker uncoiled from his protective ball, and stood. There seemed nothing else to do. He swiped with the back of his hand at a tickle near his right ear, and was astonished at seeing his own blood. He had feared it so long, seeing his inside come out, but now he knew that there was no reason for it. He licked the crimson from his hand. And smiled.
“Oh my God, look at him.” the unseen girl’s voice said. “He’s totally like, in-to this.”
Silence.
They stood, quiet and motionless, all of them looking at Tucker, staring at Tucker, now not a group of hormone fueled hoodlums but a gaggle of bewildered children. Tucker enjoyed calmly looking back at them, breathing heavily, exhausted, and smiling. He rubbed his thumb against the ragged edge of his eye tooth—broken.
“Come on you guys,” Bobby finally said, tugging at the arm of the happy face toe girl like a little kid who sees the playground but who knows that Mom would rather go home. “Let’s GO!”
The rest of the little gang followed him across the parking lot, turning here and there to look over their shoulders as if they expected Tucker to follow, ready to scatter like gazelles in every direction if he did. He could hear them beginning to relive the experience as they got further away, telling each other the tale with ever widening ranges of exaggeration so that, when they spun the yarn at school on Monday, the story would be more captivating and more scandalous than any Hollywood blockbuster could ever hope to be.
And Tucker loved it, loved that he would be the villain in their epic, the pervert, the trickster who had manipulated Bobby into the fight, lured him in as a pawn to satisfy masochistic urges. He imagined that in their telling, he would be huge, muscly, hyper-aggressive. The anti-hero. He imagined that he—he–would become an urban legend.
“Thanks Bobby!” he yelled after them as they passed between the shrubs that separated the parking lot from the city sidewalk. “See you soon!”
His joy was boundless when he saw them all run as fast as they could.