Physical education ends and I walk back toward the teaching building. A water bottle jabs me from the side. It is cold; it doesn't really hurt. The person holding it is laughing the way you laugh when the two of you have just played a good game.
I look back at him. He is still laughing.
Half a month, a complete repertoire
School started a little over two weeks ago, and in that time this classmate has assembled a set of moves. When I'm at my desk and he walks past behind me, he pulls my hair. In the PE queue he pokes me with his bottle. Once he pushed me from behind and I hit the door frame, and my shoulder ached for a whole lesson.
He didn't apologise.
I swore at him once. His face went shocked and innocent, eyebrows raised, as if I were the one behaving inexplicably. I still can't work that expression out. How does someone who has done the same thing to the same person for two weeks react with hurt feelings?
I laughed it off. He probably read the laugh as "fine".
"I laughed it off" is not "I don't care"
I laughed because I had done the arithmetic.
Blowing up at someone who treats rudeness as humour is expensive: a lesson's worth of mood, a week of awkwardness, and the label of the boy who can't take a joke. In my first month of senior high I don't want to spend energy there.
But not pursuing something and not minding it are two different things. I remember every instance, including which one happened in PE and which one on the stairs. That isn't nursing a grudge; it's bookkeeping. What a person is shows up in the ledger.
One more thing I've wanted to say for a while: the word joke comes with a condition — the people laughing should be both of them. When only one side is laughing, it isn't a joke. Someone not being angry is not permission to continue.
Scene two: "smurfing", in a classroom
One of our classmates is very strong at science. On the first weekly maths test he came first in the class.
Then the line arrived: "Filthy smurf."
Smurfing comes from games — a high-ranked player opens a low-rank account and kills everyone in sight. Calling him a smurf means: you scored that high because you don't belong in this class. It was a mismatch, not a skill. In our class's own phrasing: if you can't win with strength, win inside your head.
I understand that it was mostly a joke. I still think it's ugly, because it doesn't deal with his score. It deals with the speaker's feelings.
If you win, you're good. If you lose, your opponent cheated or should never have been there. Both explanations feel fine. Only one of them is true.
Different hands, the same mechanism
Put the two scenes side by side.
Someone does something wrong and won't admit it, so he rewrites the offence as a joke. As long as I say I'm playing, you are not allowed to be angry — and if you are, you're humourless.
A group of people can't match one person and won't admit the gap, so they rewrite "he's good" as "he's unfair". As long as we call it smurfing, we didn't lose.
One rewrites a mistake into a joke; the other rewrites a gap into an injustice. Both bend the facts to fit the person's comfort, and both send the bill somewhere else. The comfort is theirs; the bill is not. The hair is mine. The shoulder that met the door frame is mine. And the boy who came first has to carry the word "filthy" for no reason at all.
Why does this cluster at the start of a school year? Because a new class is a fresh ranking. Who sits at the front, who gets listened to, who is laughed at by the circle — none of it is settled yet. The people who feel least sure of themselves are in the biggest hurry to find a position, and stepping on someone is the cheapest way to take one.
Ah Q never went out of fashion
Lu Xun wrote The True Story of Ah Q in 1921. Ah Q gets beaten up, says "the son beat his father", and wins the fight inside his own head.
A century later, "I was only playing" and "he's a smurf" are the same craft. No fists, no sweat — you simply turn the scoreboard around in your mind.
The craft is popular because it is cheap. Admitting "I'm not as good as him" or "I was wrong" costs two things: face, and the obligation to change. Rewriting the facts costs nothing.
Except that a scoreboard you turned around doesn't change the score.
Nor is the craft confined to a classroom. It shows up on time when the marks come out, when class officers are elected, when someone posts a rank they're proud of. The only difference is whether it stays inside a head or gets said out loud.
What I plan to do
Someone will probably say: put up with it, he's a classmate.
I'm not going to put up with it, and I'm not going to fight either. Fighting hands him the scene he wants: proof that I can't take a joke. What I will do is widen the distance — no small talk, no joining the jokes, nothing that lets him imagine we are close. When he crosses the line I'll say so once, plainly, and go back to my own work.
I don't need an apology from him. Apologising is his homework, not my goal.
And then there are marks. I want to test into the advanced class. Not to prove anything to anyone, but to hand my own time to people who are worth it.
The evening I wrote all this down, my last line was "let him rot", followed by something even sharper about oxygen and carbon dioxide. Reading it back now, I don't want to spend even that much on him. Whether he rots is his business. Mine is to walk away.
PE will come round again. The bottle may come too.
I'll push his hand away, say the one sentence that needs saying, and turn back to my own road.
Half a month was enough to work out what kind of person he is. I have two and a half years left, and I don't intend to spend them correcting other people.
A note on method
This isn't a record of events. It's the version I saw in half a month — and a person only ever sees what their own position lets them see. Me included.
The people and the scenes have been merged and worked over: names dropped, details blurred, some incidents not from the same day, and possibly two people folded into one. So it is not a description of any particular person, and it is no verdict.
I wrote it to name a posture, not to point at anyone.