When I was ten years old, I got beat up—for the first time—in the woods behind the hockey arena. 

The first time. Not the last time, certainly—but those are different stories and not for now. I looked at Google maps the other night. Small towns don’t change much. The arena is still there, along with my house, the baseball diamond, my school. The post office and the drug store are gone.

That year, my mom and dad had packed kids and dogs and clothes into an orange Allied Van Lines moving truck, left the flat farm fields of Kansas for Canadian forests and rivers. Endless lakes and trees, and I fell in love with the woods in our new town. Wherever I needed to go—from home to school, for candy at the drug store after baseball practice—I could find an alternate wooded path, a way that avoided streets and sidewalks.

The forest paths felt like ducking into a different world, then popping back up somewhere else. Magic.

I  never knew who made the paths I walked on. Generations of kids before me, maybe. Animals. Elves. Robin Hood. Fun to wonder, but it didn’t matter. I think people didn’t fuss as much about private property in those days. Nobody hesitated to take a shortcut through someone’s back yard. A patch of trees became an open invitation.

One of my paths looped through the woods behind the hockey arena. I don’t think it took me anywhere in particular. Probably, I just liked it. 

An early June day, the very start of summer vacation, I walked through the trees, probably on my way to nowhere. Another boy stepped onto the path, up ahead. Four of his friends materialized behind him. The leader stood in my way, immoveable. He sported a reddish crew cut and a t-shirt that gapped at the belly—the kind of beefy kid who always looked sweaty. I recognized him, right away. He was a couple of grades ahead of me in school, and I had a crush on his sister. From the look on his face, I figured he must have found out.

Julie was my age, a tall girl with long hair and hoop earrings. She wore bell-bottom jeans and blue eye shadow to school. She walked around like she stepped out of a fashion magazine. As I drifted into sleep, I dreamed about driving her places fast in a Plymouth Duster, or saving her from bank robbers. 

She never looked at me or spoke to me. She didn’t know I existed, let alone dreamed about her—but I figured her brother must have intuited my secret. He had other things on his mind, as it turned out. He stomped toward me, followed by his minions.

“Hey, stupid,” he said. “You’re not allowed here. This is mine.”

I was small for my age. I wore four-eyes glasses that I hated, and Keds with perpetually broken laces. I did push-ups, but my muscles never seemed to get bigger. I had a whole lot of brothers and sisters though, so I was no stranger to fist fights. Once provoked, my sisters fought to the death. I wasn’t scared.

“These aren’t your woods, fatso,” I said. “They belong to everybody.”

I learned a quick lesson about consequences. He hauled off and slapped me across the face. I remember my surprise. Slaps weren’t weapons. They were warnings at best, like pulling hair. This one felt different—harder and more painful than any punch I had ever taken, it rocked my head sideways. My glasses were gone. My face felt like it had caught fire.

The cohorts caught me by the elbows, held me up while fatso delivered slap after slap, backhand-forehand. In hindsight, I realize some grownup had showed him the technique. No kid knows how to combine humiliation with pain unless his father teaches him, the hard way.

“I’m not even punching you,” he said, between slaps. “Fucking baby.”

Slap-slap-slap. Eventually, Ricky tired out. The pals let go of my arms and I dropped onto the path, dazed.

“Go cry to your mommy,” he said, breathing hard. “Tell her I didn’t even hit you once—just a couple slaps—but you’re still crying, you fucking baby. From now on, stay off my path. Next time will be a lot worse.”

They left me there, with my ringing ears and broken glasses. Eventually, I picked myself up, wiped tears and snot with my shirt, and went home. I took sidewalks, the whole way. No more forests for me.

My mom took one look at my bleeding mouth and swollen face and started yelling. She didn’t know whether to call the cops or start the manhunt herself. 

I told her I had never seen my attacker before, didn’t know his name. I figured any chance I had with Julie was gone now, but I didn’t want my mom to make things worse. I didn’t want Ricky to tell her I had been beaten with only slaps. For once, my dad intervened. He headed her off and followed me to my room.

“You met a bully,” he said. “Won’t be the last time.”

My dad was a veteran of the meanest streets in Boston. He knew a couple things about running into trouble.

For most of my life, my father and I agreed on very little. He told me some things though, over the years, truths he had reached by living them, and those moments have stayed with me and guided me. That’s what fathers are supposed to do, when all is done. Getting older has taught me that many of the ways I thought he failed me weren’t his job in the first place. Those things were my job. Someday, maybe I’ll get the chance to tell him that.

“Bullies talk a lot,” he said. “They get followed around by guys who don’t belong anywhere, aren’t much good at anything. They look for little kids like you, people who can’t defend themselves. They hurt them.”

“Why?”

He sat on the end of my bed, thought about it.

“They aren’t happy,” he said. “A lot of times they have parents who don’t treat them well, and they don’t know how else to deal with that except by hurting someone else. Other times, they are just rotten people.”

He looked at me, waited until I looked back.

“Important you know that sometimes people are just—bad. Nobody made them that way. Either way, knowing ‘why’ about a thing doesn’t help, unless you can change it.”

“Nothing is fair.” I struggled with the thing that outraged me. “They’re older than me, and it was five against one. I didn’t even do anything to them.”

I couldn’t articulate the humiliation. Ricky hadn’t just beat me up. He had done it with slaps, made me small, exposed me as a weakling his sister would never fall in love with. Not a fair fight. Not fair, in any way.

“Not fair,” my dad agreed. “Injustice—remember that word. If you grow up to be a good man, this kind of thing will get even harder when you see it happen to someone else. That’s for later, though. For now, you need to decide what to do about this—what happened today.”

My outrage flared red.

“I’ll find him and beat the hell out of him,” I promised. “Even if I have to wait until I’m older.” I started to calculate how many pushups I would need to do.

“You probably won’t need to,” he said. “For guys like that, life tends to be a long, miserable beating. He won’t need your help with that. You like walking in the woods, though. Are you going back to walk on that path?”

The idea seemed crazy, like a death wish. “What happens if I do?”

 “Maybe you’ll get smacked around again,” he said. “You can’t fight five guys older than you. On the other hand, if the bullies see you on the path when they told you not to, maybe it will trouble them enough to leave you alone. Things work that way, sometimes.”

He closed my bedroom door behind him, so I could think about things by myself.

As it turned out, I did go back to my forest paths. I was scared at first, but then I wasn’t. I never saw Ricky again. When school started up in September, he had gone somewhere else for junior high. I didn’t love Julie anymore. Her jeans and eye shadow had lost their magic. I sensed that wasn’t fair either, since she had no part in what her brother had done. She still stared through me like I was invisible though, so it didn’t matter.

Nobody told us the Devil is a mean girl, a senile old telemarketer who pushes bitcoin and golden basketball shoes. We never imagined the bathroom smells, the Temu gold decorations, the cruel monkey cartoons. We look at redacted photos, shrug, and say don’t blame us. We aren’t fortune-tellers. We didn’t know.  

The path behind the arena is still there. My dad is long gone. Ricky is dead, too. I looked him up, and he died young enough that the internet doesn’t say what happened to him. I’m still here, still kinda small for my age, still wearing Keds with broken laces. The forest is still my favorite place.

Things work out that way, sometimes. These aren’t your woods, fatso. They belong to everybody.

Stay strong, kids.