A Piece to a Different Puzzle

Chapter 53

The last competitions were run, the visiting teams boarded their buses and all the equipment was put away.  The BCA students were reliving various successes and failures as they hiked back to the locker rooms in the main building.  Stu, who had a natural raconteur’s talent, related the BCA come from behind, heart stopping four by four hundred victory, including, as it turned out, Amani out running the boy who had won the individual four hundred earlier in the morning.

Amani felt great.  The win was nice, but giving your all and accomplishing something beyond what you would have thought possible was way better.  He’d been lifted up on the shoulders of his teammates before his grandfather and maybe, if he and Zach worked it right during lunch, it would overcome the bad feelings about him being removed from the basketball team and inspire his grandfather to additional altruism to the betterment of the other students at Bryan.  Sweetest of all, Zach had asked him to go to the prom.  They couldn’t go together, of course, because nobody else could understand the invitation the way he and Zach would understand it, but still, it was a beautiful gesture from his friend.

He wasn’t wistful in the least when he said goodbye to his friends and teammates at the door to the boy’s locker room.  He had carved out a little place for himself in that big, wild world of pubescent American boys and girls.  He had friends – good friends.  He was happy.

He headed down the hall towards Coach Thomas’ office, carrying his track cleats as he walked on the old polished stone floor.  He couldn’t shower out like the boys and girls, but it was okay.  He had a wet washcloth in a ziploc bag and some wetwipes in his gym bag.  Unlike every other fifteen year-old, Amani didn’t really need to use deodorant.  He smiled ruefully - ‘Got ‘em there’ he thought to himself.

There was half a flight of stairs from the locker rooms down to the coach’s office.  At the top of them, something - Amani’s brain didn’t understand what - happened.  He hit the stairs and then the floor below hard, and he felt the snap as a bone in his left hand broke.  As he gasped, a big hand grasped him by the hair and hoisted.  Amani tried to scramble to his feet to relieve the excruciating pull in his hair, but his left knee exploded in pain and gave way beneath him.  He floundered and hopped as someone half dragged him into an empty classroom and threw him back on to the floor.

Before he could turn to look, he heard Carl’s nasty voice.  “Take a tumble down the stairs, little faggot?” he sneered.

So that was it.  Amani had been tripped and pushed down the stairs.

Carl probably outweighed him by thirty-five kilos of muscle, and Amani couldn’t use his left hand or rise on his left leg.  He was on the floor and there was nothing that could be used as an improvised weapon in reach.  Meeting violence with violence was a dead loss.  The bodyguards trained him in such a situation to do what he needed to in order to reduce the fury of his attacker and wait for reinforcements.

Amani surmised Carl was sadistic, but not murderous.  He lay passive.  What was Carl’s goal?

“Always dancing back and forth across the gender line, aren’t you?  Wear a dress to the opera; run boys’ track.  Dr. Brooks’ darling little genderqueer; Zbranek’s yaoi lover.  They aren’t here, and all you have evidence of is that you stumbled down the stairs.  Let’s get this over with - it’s time to see what you’ve got.”

Carl wanted to fight?  See how much pain Amani could absorb?

Carl’s hands grabbed the waistband of Amani’s track shorts and pulled and tugged them off tossing them across the classroom.  “Panties under your boy’s track uniform!  Why am I surprised?  They even match your sports bra.  You’re like a poster sissyboi!”