The Tradition

The alley smelled like piss and rotting bins. Rain dripped from the broken gutter overhead and mixed with the blood on the ground. I had my hand twisted in Marcus’s collar. He was smaller than me, soft-faced, sixteen maybe. The kind of kid who always hung around the younger girls.

“You think you can just do that to her?” I said, keeping my voice low. “A girl two years below us. You forced her.”

Marcus shook his head quick, eyes wide. “I didn’t. She wanted it. She’s lying, I swear.”

Liam laughed behind me. Short and nasty. “Lying. Yeah, course she is.”

Callum stood at the alley entrance, watching the street. He was the biggest but always hung back. Still, he had come. That was enough.

I slammed my knee into Marcus’s stomach. He doubled over and made a choking sound. I let him drop onto the wet concrete. The rain soaked through my hoodie fast. My knuckles already burned but it felt right. Clean.

“Get up,” I told him.

He stayed down, coughing hard. “Please. My dad will kill me if this gets out.”

Liam stepped in and kicked him in the ribs. Marcus let out a sharp gasp like air escaping. “Your dad should’ve taught you not to rape girls then.”

I crouched next to him. Close enough to smell the fear and sour breath. His eyes were wet and desperate. For a second something twisted in my gut. But then I remembered the girl crying in the common room last week. How she wouldn’t say his name at first. How everyone knew anyway. Marcus. Always smiling at the younger ones.

“You picked the wrong girl,” I said. “Wrong school too.”

I punched him in the face. His nose cracked loud. Blood poured out fast, mixing with the rainwater. He tried to curl up but Liam stamped on his thigh. Callum muttered from the entrance, “Keep it quiet. Someone’s gonna hear.”

“Fuck them,” I said. “Let them.”

Marcus started crying. Quiet sobs that made him sound like a little kid. “I swear. It wasn’t like that. She kissed me first.”

I grabbed his hair and yanked his head back. “You think that matters? She’s fourteen. You didn’t stop when she said no. That’s what she told everyone.”

He didn’t answer. Just bled and breathed in short, wet hitches.

We kept at it for a while. Not forever. We weren’t monsters. But long enough that his face swelled up proper and one eye closed completely. My hands got slick with his blood. My chest heaved. Every hit landed heavier. Liam took turns. Callum watched but didn’t join in much.

At some point Marcus stopped trying to fight. He just lay there and took it. That was when it started feeling worse. Not enough to stop me. But enough that I knew we’d gone too far.

“Enough,” I said. My voice sounded raw.

Liam gave him one last kick in the side. “Stay away from the younger girls. Next time we won’t be this nice.”

Marcus didn’t move. He just lay in the puddle, breathing through his mouth. Blood bubbled at his lips.

We walked out the alley without looking back. The rain washed some blood off my hands but left it under my nails. Callum lit a cigarette and passed it round. None of us talked much. The streets were dead this late. Just us and the water running into the drains.

“You think he’ll grass?” Callum asked after a bit.

“He better not,” Liam said. “Or we do it again. Proper next time.”

I didn’t say anything. My right hand throbbed bad. Probably sprained. But my head felt clearer than it had in weeks. Like I’d done something that needed doing. The girl wouldn’t have to see his face in the halls for a while at least.

We split up a few streets from my house. I walked the rest alone. The front door was unlocked. I stepped in and the hallway light flicked on.

Dad stood there in his dressing gown. His face tightened when he saw the blood on my clothes.

“Jesus Christ, James.”

I tried to push past but he grabbed my arm hard.

“What the hell did you do this time?”

“Nothing that wasn’t deserved.”

He slapped me. Not full strength but enough. My split lip opened again. I tasted fresh blood.

“Two weeks,” he said, flat and cold. “That’s all you’ve got left here. Then it’s St. Edmund’s. They will sort you out. God knows I can’t.”

I went upstairs without answering. Lay on my bed in the wet bloody clothes. The ceiling had a crack that looked like a river. I stared at it a long time.

I lay there on the bed for a long time, the damp clothes sticking uncomfortably to my skin like a second layer I could not peel away. The blood from my knuckles had left dark smears across the sheets, and every small movement sent a fresh throb through my right hand, a steady pulse that matched the slow beat of my heart. The rain outside had eased into a gentle, persistent patter against the window, the kind that could almost lull you if your mind was not racing in a hundred different directions at once. I stared up at the crack in the ceiling, tracing its jagged path from one corner all the way across to the light fitting, wondering how long it had been there and whether the whole house might eventually split apart along that same line.

My thoughts kept circling back to Marcus in the alley, the way his body had curled up on the wet concrete as the rain washed his blood into the drains. Part of me still felt the satisfaction of it, the clean sense that we had done something necessary, but another part, quieter and more persistent, kept asking if we had crossed a line that mattered. He deserved it, I told myself again. That girl was only fourteen, and the fear in her eyes when she finally spoke his name in the common room had stayed with me for days afterward. No one else was going to touch the problem. The teachers gave their usual talks about responsibility and then looked the other way, the same as always. So we handled it ourselves.

That was the pattern with me, had been for years now. I started pushing back against my father when I was around fourteen, small rebellions at first that grew sharper with time. Skipping lessons just to make him receive another call from the school office, pouring out his whiskey bottles down the sink not because I cared about the drinking but because I wanted to see that flash of helpless anger in his face when he discovered the empty glass. I smashed the window of his car once after he missed my birthday for the third year running, and another time I took his credit card and spent the afternoon buying stupid things I did not even want, just to force him to deal with the mess I left behind. Each incident widened the crack between us, and each time he responded with colder silences or sharper slaps, as if he believed he could hammer me back into the shape he preferred.

But it was not only about getting back at him. Some of the things I did came from a deeper place, a sense that certain wrongs needed answering even if no one else would step up. Like the older boy last summer who had been slipping pills to the thirteen-year-olds near the football pitch. I waited for him alone after practice one evening, metal bar in hand, and made sure he understood that it would not continue. His broken arm kept him away for months, and though it got me expelled, I never regretted it. Those moments felt different from the petty revenge. They felt like balance, like pushing against the rot I saw around me before it spread further. My father called it being out of control. Maybe he was right in his own way, but I had stopped caring what he thought a long time ago.

I shifted on the bed, feeling the cold seep deeper into my bones through the wet fabric. The house was quiet now except for the rain and the occasional creak of the old timbers settling for the night. In two weeks I would be gone from all this, sent away to St. Edmund’s, that ancient boarding school tucked deep in the countryside beside a wide, dark lake. I had heard enough stories over the years to form a picture in my mind. The main buildings dated back to the eighteen hundreds, solid stone structures covered in ivy that looked almost alive in the right light, surrounded by dense forests that stretched for miles and cut the place off from the rest of the world. Winters there were supposed to be brutal, with snow piling up against the walls and the lake freezing over so thick that students sometimes walked across it during the coldest months. It carried a reputation for taking boys who caused trouble elsewhere and pressing them into a stricter mold through early mornings, long disciplinary walks, rigid uniforms, and an emphasis on tradition that went back generations. Rich families sent their problem sons there when ordinary schools finally gave up, expecting the isolation and structure to do what parents could not.

I wondered what it would actually feel like to step into that world. The long corridors lined with portraits of stern alumni, the constant pressure of rules that seemed designed to smooth out every rough edge a boy like me still carried. My father spoke of it as the final solution, the place that would finally sort me out and turn me into something useful. I was not so sure. Places like that had a way of either breaking people or teaching them to hide their cracks better, and I had no intention of letting either happen without a fight.

Sleep came eventually, heavy and restless, pulling me under while the rain continued its steady rhythm outside. When dreams arrived they were fragmented and uneasy, full of stone walls and endless corridors that seemed to watch me as I moved through them.