Rock throwing punk

I was finishing up my run this morning (which means I was at the point where I felt like hell, was sweating buckets, and had to keep playing the Rocky theme in my head to even keep moving), when I rounded the corner on a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus, about 10 of them. I've seen these kids before. Our town has this dress code for elementary kids where they have to wear khaki pants and green polo shirts with their school logos on them, and thus appear way more harmless and collegiate than they really are.

So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.

As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.

At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.

As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.

Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.

Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.

Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.