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enough to make John stop. But he kept me sane. Late at night, alone in our room, he’d whisper to me across the darkness, “You’re okay, Frankie. John’s the asshole.”
    My mom refused to see the truth – probably because John never hit me in front of my mom. She never saw the beatings, only the bruises. And like me, she pretended I got them playing hockey. She couldn’t do that anymore after John stormed up the stairs screaming, “Margaret, your idiot kid just made me break my hand!” There was no more denying what John was doing to me. So my mom started in on why he was doing it. John was smacking me around because I was a smart mouth. I was an idiot. I was a brat. John was a good man doing what any good man would do to try to save a rotten kid like me from ruining my life. If it weren’t for John, I’d end up no better than my no-good father. And if I weren’t such an ingrate, I would be thanking John instead of whining about him to my mother. The lecture got a little longer every time she bandaged up a new round of my battle scars, but she always finished with the same advice, “If you’d just stop upsetting him, he wouldn’t have to hit you.”
    In the end, my mom was the one who got upset. About halfway through seventh grade, I finally figured out that John was going to smack me and ground me the same for not doing my homework at all as he would for doing it wrong. So I saved myself the trouble: I quit doing my schoolwork. John knew, because he punished me for it, but apparently he never told my mom, so
when my school called her in for a conference, the news blindsided her. That pissed her off even more than my failing grades.
    Everything I know about what went down immediately after that meeting I got from Nick, but not until weeks later. My mom was enraged by the time she stormed through the door. When she told John I was flunking, he pretended he didn’t already know, then he went off on one of his riffs about how I was a retard. My asshole cousin Jerry was there too and egged them both on, saying I needed a lesson I wouldn’t forget.
    Things didn’t seem right as soon as I stepped through the front door. Cigarette smoke wasn’t hanging over the first floor like smog. The house was quiet as a tomb. I paused for a second to wonder where everybody was, and that’s when John got me. It was a perfect ambush. John had tucked himself against the wall behind the door. He waited until I was exactly where he needed me to be before he punched me square in the side of my head and knocked me across the living room. Before I even realized what had hit me, he was on top of me. He dragged me to my feet and pinned me to the wall with one hand; with the other, he proved he really could’ve been a contender. It was the most savage beating he ever unleashed on me, so brutal I knew I had to make a run for it.
    I took the first chance I got. When he pulled both hands off me to set up for a combination, I broke free. I sprinted up the stairs, thinking if I could just make it out the bathroom window, I could jump onto the kitchen roof, drop into the alley and run away. But John was too fast. I couldn’t make it into the bathroom, so I cut hard right, into my room. He grabbed me from behind. He yanked my shirt up part of the way over my head, pinning my arms. I was completely defenseless.
    My stepfather opened round two with a quick series of hooks to my ribs and an uppercut to my jaw that made me see stars. I felt the room start to spin. I heard my dad’s voice: “Always know what you can use for a weapon.” I shook myself back to reality and peeked beneath my shirt, scanning the floor for
anything I could use to fight John off me. I guess John was doing the same thing, because when I slipped out the bottom of my shirt and lunged toward my hockey stick, he hurled my most beloved possession, my E.T. lamp, down onto my back. Shards of E.T. skittered across the room. I screamed and slumped to the floor. Then I rolled