Best American Crime Writing 2003 by Otto Penzler; Thomas H. Cook

Author:Otto Penzler; Thomas H. Cook
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: True Crime
ISBN: 9780307514097
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

He remembers. Timmy Titimski remembers the bully—his bully, the one designed especially for him, like a bullet with his name on it. I remember him, too, of course. How can I forget? He was crucial. He helped form me, as I suppose I helped form him. He exists as a signal event in my conscience. Hell, he is my conscience. There was nothing else to stop me back then except its slow drip. Today, if I lived in Cherokee County, Georgia, or in any of the other counties across the nation that have adopted three-strikes laws or zero tolerance policies in response to bullying, I would not have had to stop myself. I would have been stopped. I would have been suspended, expelled, possibly sent for a spell to a juvenile detention center. Instead, I grew up. I had the freedom to develop a sense of regret—the great sustaining mercy of guilt. I even had the luxury of figuring out why I did what I did to him. It was the matter of tears: I couldn’t control my own, so I figured out a way to control his. I was a kid who cried whenever my father yelled at me. My tears were a source of great shame, so when I found a boy whose tears I could turn on and off like a faucet—well, it gave me what shrinks would call a necessary sense of mastery. As the bully stands sentry on his victim’s road to manhood, so does the victim stand on the bully’s road to self-knowledge, and in time, my shame over my tears has been succeeded by my shame over what I did to him. I am grateful for the time and freedom I was afforded, but I’m sure he isn’t; I’m sure he wasn’t. I’m sure he prayed for something to stop me because he knew that my own leisurely prerogative wasn’t enough. I’m sure he would be grateful for any laws or policies that would keep his children from going through what he went through. And so, one day, I called him. I told myself that I was calling him to see what he thought about Jonathan Miller, and to see if he thought the difference the antibullying movement would have made in his life justifies its existence. But, really, I was calling out of some terrible curiosity. To see if I could speak his name without threat. To see if I had, through some kind of perverse nostalgia, exaggerated what I did to him. To see if he remembers.

He remembers. I knew it before I even spoke to him. I knew it when a little girl answered the phone, her voice like a babbling brook and said, “Daddy, there’s a phone call for you”—because I knew he was a father, and so had something to protect. I had never called him anything but Timmy—his name seemed to exist to be spoken in the diminutive—but when he came on the phone, I heard myself saying, “Timothy?” He had a deep voice, deeper than mine.

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