He’d largely been isolated from other children up to this point. There’d been play dates where his parents shoved him into a room to make awkward conversation with some other kid roughly his age. He’d seen others at the mall or grocery store but those were always brief acquaintances before his parents dragged him away in a hurry for God knows what.
There were twenty or thirty other kids in this place. He’d never seen anything like it. Kindergarten. It was a party even if half the crayons were either broken or missing.
He scanned the room for anyone he might know. He caught the eye of a girl with blonde curls who smiled at him sweetly. He smiled back. Then a boy twice his size appeared from nowhere and punched him in the stomach. Hard.
The same thing would happen twenty years later at the bar.
Seventeen times.
