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Flowerboy and the Kid

Riley Winchester

    Flowerboy started with the kid’s face, hit him in the nose and blood started dripping down his upper lip like red oil. Flowerboy hit him again and I watched, too scared to act. We were the only ones in the locker room. All the other boys were already in the gymnasium doing stretches and shooting the shit before gym class started.
    Flowerboy wasn’t his real name but his dad was a florist so we’d been calling him Flowerboy since about the fifth grade. I remember what the kid said to Flowerboy that sent him over the edge. “Hey Flowerboy,” he said, “you think your dad got his colon cancer from getting fucked in the ass so much?” Flowerboy stopped tying his shoes, looked at me, then the kid. His eyes were big and full of evil.
    The kid went to the ground quick, two punches to the face and dropped. Flowerboy dragged him into the showers, across the wet, soapy tiles, and started kicking the kid over and over in the stomach. The kid recoiled and begged for mercy. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It was just a joke.” The kid spit blood. It mixed in with the soap and water and dribbled toward the drain, thinned and feathery like a streamer.
    It was the kicks to the head that killed the kid. That’s what the police report said. Repeated blunt force trauma to the skull, dead on arrival.
    At the funeral the kid’s mom screamed and railed at the principal and gym teacher for allowing it to happen. She said she was going to sue the school, and she did, and she lost.
    Flowerboy was tried as an adult and sentenced to ten years for second degree murder. He missed the rest of his senior football season, prom, graduation, and most of his twenties. Flowerboy’s dad died while he was in prison. He hadn’t seen his dad for almost a year prior to his death. His dad was too sick and weak to visit him toward the end.
    I played my senior football season, made All-District. I went to prom with Emma Cooper, even got laid at the end of the night. I graduated and went off to a college five hours away, got my degree and a job right out of school.
    People used to ask me about the incident all the time. I told them the same story. I tried to stop Flowerboy, I really did, but his rage was too powerful. He was a boy determined to kill, and I couldn’t stop that. Flowerboy even tried to get me to join in, I told people. “Hey man,” Flowerboy said to me between kicks, “get over here and help me. You hear what he said about my dad?”
    The school ordered me to go to therapy afterwards. They were worried about mental trauma or PTSD or they were just trying to make it look like they were doing the right thing.
    What I never told the therapist or anybody else was the way Flowerboy looked at me and paused when I joined in on the kid. The strange pleasure I felt as my foot drove through his skull like a jackhammer. The squeal in Flowerboy’s voice when he said, “What the fuck, dude? I think you killed him!” How I almost slipped on the blood when I ran out of the showers. How I was able to easily wash the blood stains off my black Nikes to exonerate myself from any involvement.
    Nobody knows that. Not my parents, not my wife, not my two sons or my daughter. But Flowerboy knows. We know.

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