Cruelties Received: Antione Struthers/Felipe Santos

Antione Struthers was smaller than me, but he had the biggest damn mouth at Pennington Elementary School. And he had power, somehow, with that mouth. I think that Felipe's loyalty to Antione was familial, a first or second cousin, perhaps. Though I vaguely feel that their picking on me was ongoing, I remember only specifically one day outside at PE when Felipe was running after me, throwing tennis balls at my legs per Antione's instructions. Felipe called me "Marcus da Carcass." I think he just liked the rhyme, and didn't realize how terrifying it was for a third grader with abnormally large muscles to refer to me laughingly as a "carcass." Clearly he intended to kill me eventually, after playing with me for a time, like a cat with a mouse. It wasn't personal at all, somehow. Sometimes Felipe would just talk to me casually as if we were friends, and he seemed genuinely nice. And then Antoine would walk up and Felipe would remember that he was supposed to hate me. I only felt mildly terrorized. We were pretty heavily supervised, so they couldn't get away with much. Towards the end of my fourth grade year, though, Antione told me "When we get over to Buena Vista, there ain't gonna be nobody there to protect you." We were both headed to Buena Vista next year for fifth grade, a school right across the street from a rough area of government housing. I sweated bullets for roughly the next eight months of my life, constantly looking over my shoulder once I got to Buena Vista, expecting little Antoine to shiv me. I actually never saw him there at Buena Vista at all, and don't know what happened to him and Felipe.