II.
Eleven, and taller now; scrawny in the way of growing boys who care more about food as fuel than about the finer points of nutrition. Taller but it still didn't matter, because he was looking at the carpet weave in extreme close-up from across his father's knees as John House soundly paddled his only son's upturned, shorts-clad backside.
He was still too young for the wound to his pride to be greater than the sting to his bottom; and he supposed in his sulking way that he should have seen it coming.
Fifth grade, and again the new kid; like steps in a dance, like a formula that the universe finds so blackly amusing that it insists on repeating it over and over again. This time the beefy bully had been blond, blond and crew-cut and tall enough already at thirteen to terrify most of the younger kids. Greg had mostly managed to avoid him, old habits and the ability to be invisible when he needed to, but one muggy afternoon he'd found himself pushed too far and opened his mouth to retort. Words cut, he'd discovered already, words had a power that went beyond the sounds they made, and these particular words wound up having the power to result in the bully's fist pistoning sharp into Greg's still-talking mouth.
Picking himself up out of the dust, blood staining his new blue shirt, he'd let the laughter of the others drift over him, standing up and making sure he still could as if this were nothing to disturb him at all. But those who wallow gleefully in their own wrongly-earned power are often oblivious... and the blond bully had been quite oblivious when Greg had casually clocked him from behind with a fence picket.
In the ensuing scuffle of parents and shouting classmates his father had claimed him; the spanking, then, and well-deserved according to John. If you have to run your mouth, the logic went, then at least be man enough to stand up to the consequences and stand up to them fairly, not sneak around like a thief as soon as their back is turned. The lesson wasn't lost on Greg at all: it just wasn't the lesson his father had intended him to learn.
If you can't get them back in the open, he realized then, if they've got the jump on you then it's smarter not to slip up. Everybody's got a weakness, and sooner or later there'll be a way to exploit it. Evening a score was an art form, to be thought about and savored until it was as perfect as you could make it. And to do that, you had to pay attention. You had to notice things.
The next day John brought him home a punching bag. Greg mostly ignored it. He was busy plotting.
In the ensuing years to come, Dr. Philip Weber would never know what hit him.