Shawn had never been one for playing at war; usually the war just came to him, with what felt like an entire army of classmates waiting for him fall. The guidance counselors at each elementary school he attended had jokingly remarked to their colleagues that the average amount of enemies that a small boy could make at school had grown significantly larger since the Hunter boy had entered the school system. He could not have known that he was the subject of water-cooler conversations, the punchline of gentle jokes tossed between adults who no longer had to brave the lunch line each day at 11:30. Thank heaven he never heard, thank heaven that salt never touched his wounds, poor little elementary school soldier who could not find an infirmary that would treat the injuries dealt by boys with money as their weapon.
Years later, Shawn would write those lines in a notebook he would let no one read from, in a poem that was his story and no one else's, not even Cory's. He remembered nine years old, too-large hand-me-down shirts from his father that swallowed his tiny little-boy-bones, crinkling empty chip bags at the bottom of his backpack that were incriminating evidence of hunger, and orange vouchers that were universal symbols of not being able to pay for his own damned lunch. Nine-year-old Shawn stood small in the lunch line, hoping for invisibility as other children filed in behind him; unfortunately, he was never very good at fading into his surroundings, and the bullies always found him in the end.
"Trailer Boy," a bigger boy would greet him after he collected his tray, "like my old man always says, 'Whoever heard of a free lunch?'"
The first day, Shawn spoke up in a loud voice, telling them exactly where they could go, but his little rebellion did not last through the third day. Through threats and beatings that the lunch monitors either didn't see or didn't care to stop, he learned to stop resisting when the boys dragged his tray from his hands and dumped his government-given lunch into the nearest trash can. He continued standing small, trying very hard not to take up more space than a trailer kid deserved, and soon he found that his best option was not to enter the cafeteria at all. If he wasn't there, he couldn't be singled out and stripped of his pride; he did not pause to think he might be losing worse, until an unusually hot night in early spring led him to sleep without a shirt, and his mother shrieked with panic when she realized that she could see every one of his ribs poking through his skin. She wept as she forced him to produce his unused lunch vouchers, and soon had the truth from him about his starvation. Soon after a discussion with the school's principal, she and her husband assured their son that the boys who had tried to break him would leave him be. Shawn did not bother to tell them that they were fools for thinking their words would change anything. As he regained the flesh between his ribs, he made sure he never slept shirtless again, for fear that his mother would discover the bruises delivered by fists also hoping to fill the space. There was no such thing as a free lunch.