Day
and night, he went to the gym. And when he wasn’t there, it wasn’t strange to
see him on a swimming pool, playing tennis, kicking footballs on a park or just
jogging around the neighborhood. Jason had been a chubby kid fro ma very young
age and the bullying he suffered in primary school and then high school, made
him start his training. He finished high school from home and once he entered
university, he was an entirely new person. Many of those who had mocked him,
were now envious of him.
Of course, Jason loved that. He really liked
to see the face on the people that had pushed him into lockers or shamed him in
the changing rooms after gym class. He had seen a number of them in his
university and it was always a pleasure to see their faces when they realized
who they were looking at or, even better, who they were talking too. Even the
many girls that mocked him in school were now falling for him left and right,
forgetting their past words directed at him.
He had been called a “pig”, a “hog” and a “chubby
little fag”. Children can be mean, that’s true. And it’s always blamed on the
parents, rightfully so. But Jason had discovered, with time, that all those
people that had mocked him earlier in his life had always been that horrible.
Yes, maybe they learned at home or they picked it up from the television, but
the fact was that they hadn’t outgrown their bullying ways. Even in university,
Jason saw how many were made fun of.
For a while, he tried to help those people
that had been left out by society at large, either because they were fat or
maybe because they were gay. There wasn’t a single minority that was out of
range for those that mocked them. He went to several meetings of college
groups, he held rallies and supported the so-called liberals to help improve
the situation on campus and he even experimented on a private level to fully
realize he was as open and really free as he thought he was.
The first year in college was good but then he
grew annoyed by the crowds, by those who wanted everything to change. They
wanted the world to see itself through their eyes, instead of trying to be part
of the community. He met very angry people and extremists, where he would have
never thought to see any of those. He stopped going to the meeting, supporting
political candidates and even helping shamed people to stand for themselves. It
had become a burden on him and he felt it wasn’t fair to carry someone’s load
when he had so much to process by himself.
He focused in only two things: his studies and
his workout regime. A year before he got his degree, he was able to pay the
rent for a small apartment not so far from home. He had gotten a job at the gym
he worked out and that had given him enough money to get where he wanted to go.
He was to become a real state agent and he would try to be the best at it.
Jason had always loved many of the things related to that job and he was
certain he could get his license in a heartbeat.
He started as a part-time intern in a real
state agency. There, he could get all the necessary experience to get his
license and maybe even get noticed by some of the bigger agencies to get hired
for a full-time job, hopefully being the person that shows people houses and
apartments. That’s what he wanted to do, for a long time. Jason was even
willing to leave the gym regime in order to get his dream job, although he
would still try to workout as much as he could on nights and weekends.
One day, Jason had left for his job from his
tiny apartment. It wasn’t a perfect life, but the liked it a lot. He really
loved to go and learn a little bit everyday. He had learned some architectural
terms, as well as many things an engineer should know about how houses work. He
had even been taught how to properly accommodate furniture in order to secure a
sale. He was really in love with it all, with every single detail. And it
showed. People would often tell him they thought he looked better, somehow more
energetic.
That morning, when he felt on top of the
world, an SUV came roaring through his street. Jason woke up really early, so
he knew it was uncommon for that to happen. Nevertheless, he didn’t looked back
to the noise, as one would have. He was busy thinking about his day, he was
busy being too happy about himself and his achievement. He was to busy to
notice the SUV had veered towards the building and that it was going at full
speed on the pedestrian side of the road.
A neighbor called the ambulance, several
others watched from their windows or from their doors. No one else helped, no
one else said a word. The woman that had found him had lost a husband recently,
so she knew exactly how it felt to lose someone like that, in the blink of an
eye. So she decided to call and help another family not being torn apart. The
ambulance took a bit too long to get there. When he got to the hospital, Jason
had lost a large amount of blood and the doctors where not optimistic. It was
nothing short of a miracle how he recuperated, in a way.
The hardest moment was when he woke up. Jason
knew immediately what had happened. He didn’t have a hazy memory; he didn’t
pretend he didn’t know what was going on. The moment his eyes opened, that
young man knew his legs weren’t working and they might never work again. He touched them softly and, when the nurses
weren’t there, he pounded the hard, in rage. He wanted to die several times
during the course of the next few weeks. Aside from his legs, the rest of his
body was fine.
Well, except for his brain. Because he was
pissed with the world, with life and with everyone that owned a fucking SUV. He
couldn’t understand how people drove drunk. That was what the police had told
him, that a drunken man had being the one that had put him on that hospital
bed. But they could not really prove it because the SUV had never been found as
no surveillance cameras had ever being installed on that street. No neighbor
had seen anything, or so they said.
Jason grew to hate everyone, especially the
days his mother and father came to his house to take him out for some fresh
air. After being the most admired man in his gym, he was no a ghost of his
past. In a way, he was that “chubby fag” again. He hated everyone for being
able to walk and he preferred to be inside, away from others, sheltered from
their laughs and their lives. His was over, so he didn’t really mind about
anything else. As far as he knew, his life had come to an end.
However, a young policewoman had entered the
force recently. She was called Susannah and had freckles all over her face. She
had being bullied at school and now she was a real police office. She
investigated Jason’s accident and, with resilience and intelligence, she was
able to discover that the person that had run over Jason had not being drunk.
Furthermore, he was a former student in the same high school as Jason and also
in the same university. He was called for questioning shortly after.
Months later, he was sent to jail for
attempted murder, as he confessed he had hated Jason from day one in high
school. He hated that people that he deemed “less” could become successful when
others like him, so successful in early life, were now facing the hard reality
of life.
Susannah explained it all to Jason and he
thanked her for giving him back his life. Inspired by her, he went back to the
gym to try and recover his legs. Nothing was lost forever, not his real estate
license, not his legs, nor his will to live. Jason would never again let go.
