Slipknot

We were starting to sweat blood. In the blink of an eye they turned around and forced us up against the wall. I couldn't keep it in anymore.

Let's take it all from the beginning. Where I used to go to school is a ghetto, a dump. The crime level is horrifying and the people are completely atrocious. As I was about to find out when I first started there, only poser "gangsta" style was allowed and metal was despised. When I came there I was immedately rejected. Me and my friends were harassed and threatened on a daily basis. After some time they started to spit on us, it was repulsive, but they were so many that resistance would only get us in deeper shit. It sounds surreal, but this was a time we grew to miss deeply.

After a while it became apparent they had singled one of us out to be destroyed first; we called him Snake because he had a way of slithering and slipping out of situations. He had tried to commit suicide when he was 12 by jumping of a bridge and into a dried out riverbank but failed, he just lay there in the sun for hours. This one day all the running and avoiding finally caught up with him. They followed him and kicked him on the ground in a big circle. Aparrently they had started a rumor about him themselves just to justify beating the living shit out of him. He was paranoid for a few months and I think he was in that crazy limbo between overpowering anger and absolutely paralyzing horror in the face of the world that most of us would later experience. We were 13 years old.

The next thing in the seemingly never ending stream of dissapointments and low blows to stand before us was when they fired all the good teachers who understood us becuase there had been a slight opportunity to save money. The teachers were given the abillity to come back, but they didn't want to. This left us feeling completely betrayed by the only adults we thought we could rely on. This lowered the presence of people in the corridors between classes, so leaving the classroom for any purpose was a gamble. I was surprisingly lucky not to run into gangs skipping class more times than I did. On one such occasion I was on my way to the bathroom and there was a big mob right outside the classroom. They tried to trip me as I walked through them. they were leaning against both walls in the narrow corridor but I managed to get through. They screamed after me and I didn't go back to class. I locked myself in the bathroom until they left.

There was another friend we used to call Seven because he always seemed to be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time and stay clear of trouble. One day him and me were walking from school when some assholes started throwing icepacked snowballs. They hit him in the back of the head and I imagine it hurt like fuck. We kept on walking and Seven screamed at them to go fuck themselves. I still think it was stupid and reckless of him considering the circumstances and it marked the beginning of my end while he managed to get less shit for it than I was close to giving him myself. Later that week we were waiting outside a classroom with a bunch of kids we had been assigned to give a tour of the school. A teacher was supposed to show up and unlock the door for us but she decided to take her coffee extra slowly this day and because of that we almost got our asses kicked.

Two guys showed up, one of them was the guy who had caused Seven his headache. They started talking to the kids and it really creeped us out. We were starting to sweat blood. In the blink of an eye they turned around and forced us up against the wall. They screamed at me and accused me of saying what Seven had said earlier, I have no idea what they said to him. I barely had the time to deny my involvement before two cleaners showed up and started yelling after them telling them to stop. As they dropped us both and walked away I couldn't keep it in anymore, I cursed them from the bottom of my heart for everything they had been involved in regarding the systematic hatred towards me and my friends. They turned around and started walking towards me. I was bouncing up and down and ready to kill but before they reached me a couple of girls showed up pushing them away. We took our chance and left.

We were waiting outside the teachers lounge to give that ass of a teacher a piece of our mind when they walked by and spotted us outside. I wasn't going to get the teachers involved at first but now that they saw us standing there they would take it as if I had anyway. Eventually I decided I would tell the teacher we were waiting for at the end of the presentation. I kept it in for what seemed like forever but I was so chocked that after a while I just broke down completely. I won't lie about it, I cried my fucking heart out. I knew what this meant. I told her my life was over and she told me no of course, but the extent of my prophecy was incomprehensible even to me at the time.

Another one of my friends we called Mutant, because he had something wrong with his ribcage. When he sucked his stomach in his chest would pop out like a spike, like an alien trying to get through. What now happened was the absolute peak of my misery, our most brutal defeat. It completely destroyed us and sent us into some dreamlike condition you can't explain to someone who hasn't been through it. It's almost like your body doesn't believe it's own reality. It feels too alien and tragic to be happening to you, and you see yourself in a completely different light. Only two months or so after the previously mentioned incident we were going to the store to get some stuff when I noticed we were being followed by a massive group of people, almost 30. Snake was with us and valliantly offered to draw their attention away while we slipped through, but it didn't work. They came closing in on us in a circle and there was no escape.

One of them grabbed Mutant's shoulder, one of them rushed towards him and gave him a fist right across his face, they pulled his wool hat down over his eyes and started knocking the shit out of his head. They threw him to the ground and started kicking him. I couldn't take them all on. My entire body was protesting but I ran down towards the school and into the cafeteria. My head was spinning and I was about to throw up, but I managed to tell them what was happening. I wish I could retell all of this in grater detail but ist's all a damn daze to me. I might aswell have dreamt it.

As we were running up the hill over to where Mutant was I didn't know what to expect, they might have completely battered him for all I knew. They had no limits. Apparently someone had come along and stopped them and they were making their way down to where I was. I ran up a couple of stairs and hid in a small house next to the main building. I called him on my cellphone because I couldn't see him. Turns out they had moved over to right outside the building I was in, so I carefully made my way out of there and met up with him. The vice principal pulled up next to us in her car and drove us to his house. They told me to call my mother, she was enraged to hear the news. The police arrived and questioned us, it all happened in about half an hour.

Following this event Mutant and I were assigned to a sort of protective custody. We were sort of, well not escorted, but rather herded around. It seemed like we were just shuffling around from one bad place to the other. The principal had given us her word we wouldn't see theese people in school again, but only two days or so later we encountered them. I almost walked into the lockerroom by myself while they were there. So fuck that. Fuck them and fuck the establishment, I should have known better than to trust them. I was devastated and on the brink of collapse and they failed me. After that I was going to go away on a vacation to London. I was fucking stoked, I got to fly over there and everything. Then, four days after what had happened to us, some volcano on Iceland exploded and filled the air with crap. We couldn't go. I had to stay in school. It was the biggest dissapointment I've ever had.

After a while when I was on the bus on my way to school one morning, Seven told me Paul had died. I just snapped. I felt like catching on fire and crashing into the ground. I got of the buss at the junkyard, called the school and told them to fuck off, I didn't care about education, I didn't care about anything because I felt it was all over. After that I had to go through home schooling for a while. Let me tell you, that fucking sucks. There's something about not being able to do what you want in your own house that is infinitely more tormenting than not being able to do what you want in school. Following this my grades dropped and so did my mood. Everything felt so heavy and I was so powerless. Maybe it was my own fault for being weak I felt, it sounds stupid but that's how I thought at the time. All reason just goes out the window.

After a long wait we went to London by bus many months after. It was cleansing for the soul and I felt real again. But the world rarely misses a chance to mock me and about a month after that I had to go be a witness in court. Mutant's parents had sued the two people behind the assault, turns out they had actually planned it and wen't through it in their heads, assholes. The whole procedure felt like painfully having a lethal poinson sucked out of my body and a new one injected. I thought I would see them punished and it sort of finished a dark chapter of my life, but they got nothig for it, and seing them sit there with their dead eyes just denying everything I said was torture. Fuck the Swedish justice system, it offered me nothing but the newly awarded stamp of "the witness".

It has been a while now and nothing new has come up, but I still suffer from all the social interraction this robbed me off, I never wen't anyhere fun because I was so paranoid that they might be there. Mutant moved as far away as he could to never see these people again, he now lives on an island quite a distance from here. I don't talk as much to Snake anymore because we went in different directions and Seven is always with his girlfriend so hanging out with them only makes me feel like a third wheel and isn't much fun at all. Still, I will always remember how much support we gave to and took from eachother and will always share a connection with them because my darkest years are theirs and theirs are mine.