One by One. Nicholas Bush
business owner, but he is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, so we get by just fine.
Home is very strict. My parents act as if we kids, Lindsay and Allison, my older sisters; me (all spaced three years apart); and my five years younger brother, Austin, have to be perfect: perfect manners, perfect speech, perfect attire, the list goes on and on. We are also often forced to go to church. “We are going to instill religion into you,” they say.
Breaking the rules means facing dire consequences, with privileges taken away and sometimes physical punishment. If I give my dad an answer he doesn’t like or don’t respond quickly enough, he grabs my chin, holding it and looking at me with blazing eyes until I respond with a “Yes, sir.” I’ve harbored an almost incomprehensible rage directed at the man from as far back as I can remember. And my mother isn’t much better. She’ll look at me, screaming, “This is totally unacceptable behavior” or “I’m very disappointed in you!” so often that she actually has me thinking, I’m an unacceptable disappointment.
Mealtimes provide a perfect paradigm for illustrating home life. If my elbows are on the table, my father stabs them with a fork or knife. If we don’t eat all the food on our plate, we are not allowed to leave the table. As a kid, I’d refuse food for so long that I’d fall asleep at the table, exhausted and bored. Sometimes I tried to fill my napkin with food so I could secretly throw it away later. I’ve always hated asparagus and once, when forced to eat it, I vomited it on my plate. Rather than comforting me, my mother force-fed it to me right in front of the rest of the family. Another time, I stole a cookie from the baking sheet on the oven just before dinner and was caught running around the house laughing and wolfing it down in a hysterical frenzy. My mom grabbed me and stuck her finger down my throat, gagging me until I threw it up.
I’ve learned over the years to be secretive and never share my cares and desires, or prized possessions, with anyone in the family, so that they can’t be scoffed at, laughed at, or taken away. I’m convinced my parents are utterly obsessed, to the point of paranoia, with how their children’s behavior reflects on them. The best way to get what I want is to lie low and cater to their beck and call, always asking, “Is there anything I can do for you?” It’s as if they’re only satisfied when being worshiped or something. As long as I do these things and stay out of trouble, I’m a free man.
I can go on and on about the abuse that occurred in my family, but you get the picture. Plus, one day the better half of my siblings will be dead and my parents still living, so it seems counterproductive for me to do so. I like to think that with retrospect, seeing how things unfold, my parents will wish they had raised us differently, in order to preserve our relationships—and our lives. But of course at this stage, they don’t know what is still to come.
Since there will be ridicule and abuse whether I behave or not, my childhood perception of right and wrong has become severely obscured. I will lie, cheat, and steal if it benefits me in any way. At home, I do my best to stay quiet and out of sight. Away from home, I intimidate, connive, sweet-talk, or cajole my way into getting what I want.
To deal with the abuse, my siblings and I (except for my brother, Austin) do our best to keep as busy as possible through whatever means available. I like to call this happiness through distraction. Whether it is horseback riding for my eldest sister, Lindsay, modeling for Allison, or hockey for me, we don’t idle at home.
To my parents’ credit, they enrolled me in youth hockey when I was six years old, a year-round activity that I excelled in, so I learned early on that I’m a pretty good athlete. Everyone needs something they’re good at. I remember my coach saying early on, “Bush, if I had a bunch of you, we’d never lose a game.” In recent years, I switched from hockey to football and that has also become huge for me. I will later take up rugby and boxing.
I found my calling in sports; so just two weeks after the wakeboarding incident, in early August, I start the eighth grade football season despite my sore back. I am a defensive end, offensive right tackle, kickoff returner, punt returner, punter, and kicker.
Two full teams are formed due to the high number of prospects who try out and the high quality of talent. Each defense has three squads and I am placed on all three. Offense has a permanent roster, with myself shifting to wingback for trick plays such as reverses and the Statue of Liberty play, where I swing around and become the ball carrier, taking the ball from the quarterback as he positioned himself to throw a pass. Both teams are supposedly evenly split in terms of talent, but my team is always the victorious one. Such a stark contrast in performance leaves the other squad grumbling among themselves, and there is some jealousy among our crew of warriors.
Make no mistake: I am an athlete who has played for keeps from day one. Since I was six years old, I have always been out for blood—in the rink or on the field. (Checking in hockey wasn’t allowed at such a young age, but that didn’t stop me.) I play sports to stay out of trouble in school, stay out of my house, and stay off the streets, not to play by the rules. There are no laws in collision sports, only rules, and the punishments for breaking them are less severe than they are out of the rink and off the field.
I can vividly recall the first time I thought I killed someone. It was in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 2002, and I was twelve years old. My team was in the state hockey tournament, playing for the championship. I was right defenseman and nothing short of a goon who had a great shot and was a good passer. I could skate faster backward than anyone on the other team could skate forward, which is partially what led to the incident. As the other team broke away, three of their forwards came barreling toward me. I was alone when it happened and I knew I had to try and keep all three of them in front of me. I crossed over between the puck carrier and his closest teammate. The center had possession and I faked as though I was going to charge into him in order to get him to pass, which he did. I timed it perfectly. Just one little shift of weight caught his eye, enough to cause him to skirt the puck over to his wingman. The moment the puck left the center’s stick, I rapidly carved my way toward the wingman and barreled into him. The hit was timed so perfectly that it barely felt as though I’d made any physical contact. As I made the move to hit him and as the moment of collision came, I clenched every muscle in my body, bringing my arms in close and crossing them around my abdomen. I lowered my head at the last possible moment. I was a human bullet at that point. With a loud grunt, I crashed into the forward with such force that I heard the wind get knocked out of him. At the moment of contact, his head was facing downward, his eyes looking at his feet where the puck met his skates instead of the tape on his stick. The top of my helmet hit just under his chin as I knocked him into another galaxy. He careened backward, hitting the boards and then the ice, his head whiplashing violently each time. I had effectively hit him in the head and caused him to hit it twice more. Without a helmet, his brains would have been all over the place.
The player lay unconscious on the cold rink floor for thirty minutes. There was a long, awkward silence in the arena and I began to get cold as I sat on the bench looking at the scoreboard, which read 2 to 0. We were losing even though the board showed that our team had thirty-eight shots on net and the other only two. In a hockey game, fourteen shots on net is a pretty average game, anything more than that shows a great offensive game. Anything less than ten for the other team shows you’re playing a great defensive game. The fact that they had just two shots on net showed that I was killing it on defense.
I couldn’t have played better! Our offense was doing well too, with over twice the average amount of shots on net, but there were no goals to show for it and that’s really all that matters. I kept asking myself, How could we not have the lead? It was because they’d scored on their lone two shots. I was so angry that they were about to win the championship, with barely three minutes left in the third period, that, well, I took out my frustrations on that kid. I didn’t want them making any brave moves toward our zone ever again.
Ever again, I remember thinking to myself, then, Where is that kid? Was he still lying there? When I peeked out from inside our bench, looking at the place where I hit him, I could see he was still there, and the coaches were now kneeling beside him. Finally, an ambulance came onto the ice; it was then that I realized that it was very serious and got a little scared. Well, serves him right . . . I’d tried to rationalize to myself. That’s what happens when you come