Short Story – Bad Boy

This is where I tell you the story of the good boy gone bad. Me.

They always used to call me good boy. Then they stopped. I wasn’t trying to be good, or bad. I was just being and doing what I felt like I wanted to be and do. At first it was good. Then, I guess, it was bad.

It started with the broken squirrel. I didn’t understand dead. So even though it wasn’t moving I assumed I could help it if I could unflatten it where the car ran over it. I put it in a cardboard box with a towel like I saw so many people do on TV.

Then I squeezed its sides where it was flat. There was a terrible cracking noise and all its guts and all these bugs came squirting out all over me. I ran to my mother. She threw me in the shower, ripped off all my clothes and left me there freezing for a long time.

She called me bad boy at least twenty times. I stopped counting at twenty, but she said it more. My father called me bad boy too, but just once. Mother threw the squirrel, box, towel and all into the trash. The next day she tried to explain to me what death was.

Death is like broken but it can’t be fixed. It took me a long time to really know the difference. At first I didn’t understand that to be dead something first had to be alive. They tried to explain to me what alive was. If something moves on its own it’s alive. But cars move on their own and they’re not alive.

I gave up trying to figure out and just brought things to my parents to ask them if it was dead or broken. I got called bad boy a lot. Sometimes for breaking things. Sometimes for killing things. I decided it would be better to not break or kill anything so I started spending all my time sitting on my bed.

To try to get me to play outside my parents took my TV away. After that I had to make up TV shows in my head. They all started off good but always ended bad. People killing each other. Animals eating people. Car crashes. Lots of blood. Red became my favorite color.

Then the police brought me home from school. They told my parents I was a bad boy. My parents believed them and didn’t even listen to why I broke that boy’s skull. He was a bully and was hurting the younger kids so I picked up a baseball bat and made him stop.

I thought that stopping a bully would be a good thing. This is what superheroes do. I was protecting the small kids. I’m the good boy. I give up.

So now I have to write this bad boy essay. They better like it cause I know where the warden hides his gun.

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