Ugly

Last Friday, there was a fight at school at the end of lunch, a horrible sweating screaming affair in the foyer of the school immediately adjacent to the cafeteria. Although my office is only about fifteen yards away, I was late getting to the scene because of the mob of bystanders (other students) blocking the entranceway with their staring and laughing and jeering and cheering. "Mob" is the appropriate word here, because a fight brings out the worst possible side of students, the bloodthirsty voyeur. Some will try to help (one girl ran to tell me it was happening), some will flee the scene, but the majority will press around and watch. Violence and curiosity evaporates empathy evaporates in a second. Can you blame them?

Such obscene rubbernecking always happens during a fight, although it was much worse than usual this time because it happened in a central location in the busiest time of the day: prime time viewing, fightwise. By the time I squeezed my way through the crowd, the two girls who'd been punching each other in the face were separated, hair sticking in all directions, dazed on their feet, adrenaline and fear and rage jangling their faces into nasty masks. One was still being restrained by teachers as she shouted belligerent things, the profane threats she was yelling rendered tinny and incomprehensible by the roaring of the crowd.

Fights aren't an everyday thing at our school, but they're not exactly rare either. They usually involve two girls and they're always fucking stupid. Although the school administrators investigate such an incident with plenty of interviews and eyewitness statements in an attempt to apportion blame and premeditation, it's a little pointless to try to unravel a meaning to such a fight. Whatever the she-said-this-she-did-that causality of the gossip and sniping leading up to the event, the facts always boil down to some escalating series of perceived social slights. In this case, the two girls involved are both good, kind, hardworking students, kids who return lost items found in the bathroom and help other students with their homework, kids capable of introspection and critical thinking. For one of them, it's her third fight so far this year and she's up for expulsion.