If you strike first, then you are only proving what these people are saying about you to be true. The memory came up unbidden and unwelcome from his mind. His mother wiping the blood from his nose scolding him about the latest fight he had gotten into.

  He was only seven years old but the kids at this new school called him stupid and a ‘ghetto hood rat’ whatever that meant. He didn’t know who that fat white kid leading the other white kids was, and he didn’t care. Javier had done nothing but try to stay quiet, focus on school, and keep to himself.

  His mom and dad had worked long and hard to move to a nice neighborhood, whatever that meant, and he wanted to be good and show his parents that he appreciated them and loved them. The Lord said ‘Honor they mother and thy father’ and he would do that by doing good in school.

  At least that’s what he thought. The first day there, he noticed that almost everyone else in the school was white. He had attempted to make friends with the black girl in his class but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him and no one else wanted to even talk to him. So, he decided to just keep to himself. That’s when the bully found him.

  He was sitting under a tree eating the black beans and rice his mom packed for him when suddenly the Tupperware bowl flew out of his hands into the air and landed on the ground several feet from him, the barely eaten contents now strewn about the ground in a shower of black and white among the brown of the tree roots.

  “Hey, why don’t you learn how to eat, dip shit! I guess they don’t teach you how to eat in the ghetto. You can eat it off the ground without using your hands like the sand pig you are!”

  Javier was stunned and sat looking at the plastic fork that had, until a second ago, held a mouthful of food. He had no control over what happened after that. He felt himself jump to his feet and charge after the fat white kid that had dumped his food into the dirt. The kid was bigger than he was and he couldn’t reach his face with his fork or his fists, so he punched at the boy’s girth and solar plexus.

  The next thing he knew he was knocked back and fell, sitting down hard on his butt in the dirt. The fat white kid leered over him with his hands in fists. “You fucking asshole!” Javier felt blows rain down on his face and chest. He couldn’t move and was only able to protect his face and neck from the blows.

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  Javier had been in fights before; he had never fought anyone this fat though. It was like the fat on the boy somehow protected him. Whatever punches Javier could get in, didn’t seem to slow the attacking boy at all.

  Then it suddenly stopped. Both he and the fat kid were being dragged back from each other by adults. Of course, all the kids were so quick to tell the teachers that ‘it was that asshole Mexican that started it’. ‘It must be his culture from the ghetto.’ ‘He shouldn’t be here with us anyway.’ And of course, the teachers bought it. Not that he could blame them. If he was talking to a priest, he would have to admit to the Mon Seignior that yes, he did throw the first punch.

  His mother had been called by the school to come and pick up her disruptive child who had been suspended for the rest of the day and she had to leave work early. His mother picked him up and drove him home in silence. When she got home she began cleaning and disinfecting his wounds and cuts. She explained to him that if this happened too many more times she might get fired and that Javier had to understand just how hard it was for her and her father to move here.

  Javier tried to explain. He tried to tell her what they said about him and that the fat kid knocked his food out his hands. He tried to make her understand that he had to fight back.

  “The only way to win, is not to play,” his mother said. “If you do and act the way they expect, then you’ve done nothing but prove them right. If you want to be basura in their eyes, keep fighting, keep letting your fists talk for you. But, if you want to prove them wrong, you have to find alternatives to fighting.”

  His mind snapped back into the present and he found himself looking into the cool blue eyes of Yrsa and his fingers slowly opened and his fists relaxed. He took a few seething breaths and calmly sat down. Yrsa gazed at him for long moments, but eventually she too returned to her seat eyeing her guest cautiously.

  Javier’s nose flared as he forced his body to relax and his mind to return to calm. It took a lot of effort; a lot more than it should have. The longer he sat in this cabin waiting, the farther away he felt from his pack. He had to help them, but destroying Yrsa’s cabin wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

  Javier returned his focus to the woman sitting across from him, “I never thanked you for pulling Huan Li and myself out of the storm this afternoon.”

  “I did what anyone would have done. I’m not going to let you die out there if I can help it.”

  Javier nodded, his rage still not gone from his features but he felt it begin to ebb, ever so slowly. His mother was just as right now and she had been when he was seven. Yrsa expected him to act like a monster. The only way to win was to not be the destructive unthinking beast that she thought him to be.

  “Thank you for saving our lives. That’s twice now and twice that I owe you in return. I’m a lot of things, but I am not ungrateful… and I’m not a monster,” he added under his breath, more to himself and the memory of his mother, god rest her soul, than to the woman sitting across from him.