I Once Punched a Midget
His name was Paul Drummond and I was in Grade 4. I tried searching for him on Facebook, but couldn't find him (or didn't want to sift through the many different Paul Drummonds), so I just gave up. The last I saw of him he was smoking at a bus stop [snarky remark about how smoking stunts your growth removed] and that was a few years ago.
He was a few years older than us, but, since he was much smaller than the people in his grade, he didn't really hang around them much. He tried playing basketball with them once, but bounced off someone who was setting a pick and hit his head on the ground pretty hard. He needed a couple of stitches. I remember him getting up and screaming as blood dripped from the cut on the back of his head, and after his recovery he only hung out with the caretakers or played with us.
Well, he didn't really play with us, not all the time anyway. We saw him during lunch and maybe said a few things to him but aside from just random stories he told we didn't see him during recess, just the lunch hour. I remember one lunch I saw a bunch of my friends surround him. I guess he was telling a story or something but before I could find out what it was the crowd disbursed and everyone who was in ran out laughing hysterically. I asked them what was up and they were like "oh man, he showed us his dick!" You know, now that I think about it, that's a pretty disturbing story.
He also used to just join in on our games of Red A(ss) during lunch. For those unfamiliar with the rules, I'm just gonna go off on a bit of a tangent and explain how we played the game, and how the name came to be, it's somewhat relevant:
My mom's cousin played this game and back when he was a kid it was called Red Ass. I'm assuming the name was shortened to Red A because kids didn't want to get in trouble saying "ass" all the time. Basically, what you had to do was throw the ball against the wall without the ball hitting the ground first. If you couldn't make it, you had to run to the wall and touch the wall before someone threw the ball against the wall and got you "out."
My uncle said you're supposed to whip it at the guy's ass, not the wall, hence "Red Ass" but we were a little more tame. Over time we decided to semi-adopt that rule, but instead of whipping it directly at someone, we had to bounce it off the wall and get them on the rebound. It was much less painful, unless you had the misfortune of having to avoid one of my throws which were wildly inaccurate and could potentially hit you directly in the face.
Anyway, Paul loved to join in on this bit because he liked running to the wall and avoiding the balls and we loved throwing at midgets. He became a bit of a staple in our game, but then we eventually got bored of him and didn't really want him to play with us anymore, because he'd hog the attention and take over the games. He joined in anyway, much to everyone's annoyance. Now, I'm not sure how it started but there was a dispute over the ball one day and Paul grabbed my friend's hand and started twisting his fingers. We all pleaded for him to stop but he kept going on and my friend couldn't pry his hand loose so as a last ditch effort I ran up and, with all the power my grade 4 body could muster, punched him in the back of the neck. I think I missed, because I was aiming to hit him in the head, but ended up punching down onto his spine instead. I got the job done anyway because he crumpled to the ground pretty quickly and started writhing in pain on the floor. I looked around for a bit, then grabbed the ball back and ran my ass off into the field. I'm not sure what refuge I could have sought in the field, since it's open space with nowhere to hide, but it was the furthest I could get from the scene without going off school property.
Luckily for me, the teachers didn't go out on patrol yet so it was only the lunch supervisors (parental volunteers) who were outside. Nobody saw what happened and I never got in trouble for it. Paul also never came back to play with us, understandably so, and spent the rest of his year hanging out with the caretaker.