Drop-Kick Kid

Snot-Nose—I then refused to dignify him with a name—was only six years old when he became my mortal enemy. I was nineteen. Hatred knows no age. 

It started with normal, albeit infuriating transgressions. When I went to pick up my little sister from school, he tripped her on the sidewalk. When I went to get her the next day, he had taped a sign that read “LOOZER” to her backpack. By Friday of that week though, he had reached full infuriating drop-kickableness.

But here’s the difficult part about condemning Snot-Nose for being drop-kickable: you were once a drop-kickable sort of kid. It’s a cardinal truth I’m afraid. We were all once a drop-kickable sort of kid for at least a moment. When you told your mom her food tasted bad? Drop-kickable. When I threw a frisbee so cleanly into the living room window it spider-web fractured and fell out of the pane? Definitely drop-kickable. But no one, and I truly mean no one, was as much of a drop-kick kid as Snot-Nose in the moment I saw my sister walk out the front door of the school crying like someone had murdered her pet hamster Buttons the Third in right in front of her.

When she got up to me on the sidewalk, I tried to get her to talk, but every stuttering breath just produced another bubble of snot and spit. She finally managed to shove a tear-smeared, crumpled up piece of paper towards me, and I pulled it apart as well as I could. Only some of the words were legible through the holes her crying had carved into the page, but I was able to understand enough. I didn’t even think for a second before I had my fist wrapped up in the straps of my sister’s backpack, using the leverage to tow her behind me like a three wheeled trailer with two flat tires. 

I charged us back into her school with God, the devil, and the whole Roman Pantheon on my side. I was rage incarnate, the fury of thousands of generations of women in my veins. I was unstoppable. I had a WWE-level-verbal-smackdown brewing at the back of my throat, a twitch of the lips away from being released at whatever principal had let this boy make my sister cry and then prance off, unpunished. 

But when I walked into the school, I didn’t see the principal or Snot-Nose. All I saw was this tiny, knobby-kneed kid sitting on the cinder block and two-by-four bench wearing Snot-Nose’s face and a plain-sad expression.

Snot-Nose had his head down, fists kneading into his own legs, with the school counselor sitting next to him, murmuring something about how his dad would be there soon. That was felt the oddest about this whole thing. Snot-Nose should have been on his way home already. He should have been laughing in the back seat of a car or tucked up against the window on a bus halfway to the other side of town. The buses had already left, and the carpool line was empty. My sister and I walked home, so we were always among the last to leave—the school’s way of reducing the risk of pedestrian accidents. No one else was out in the front lot with us. I didn’t know how to add two and two together to make it make sense.

But when my sister and I walked over to him—to do what I’m not sure. Confront him? I couldn’t confront this kid. He was tiny, a knobby boned runt who looked seconds from bursting into tears—I learned a few things that made the whole equation come together. 

One: Snot-Nose did in fact have a name—Luke—and he had been in my sister’s kindergarten class too. They’d even been friends sort of, kind of, she admitted. She didn’t know what had happened. He said he heard from someone else that she called him stupid, and it made him sad-mad. She said it was probably Lucy running her smart mouth and telling lies again.

Two: Luke and his dad lived not too far from us, just a few houses down the road; we were close to the school, yes, but too far to walk alone at that age. The next year his dad would decide that wasn’t the case; the principal would harshly disagree, and Luke would join my sister and I on our own walk home. 

Three: His father wasn’t answering his phone—this was not the first or last time either I’d find out in the coming years—and his mom, well no one was sure where his mom was. I’d find this all out a few years later when his father went to jail, and I started to read up on adoption processes in Missouri.

And four, the lesson I was probably the most due to receive: Even though we’ve all been drop-kickable at some point, very few kids are ever really drop-kickable. It’s way more likely that they’re just really emotionally-illiterate, kind of dumb, lightly jostleable kids with drop-kick parents.

Lillian Durr (she/her) is a Springfield, Missouri-based writer and poet. She is a current graduate student at Missouri State University, pursuing an MA in English. You can find more of her creative work on Bluesky @lillian-durr-art.bsky.social.