I always wondered why nobody I knew was like me. Not that the people I knew were weird, they all had hobbies and friends and so on, but none of them were really like me. As a result I would do things on my own. And because no one else really wanted to come with me on my expeditions, I didn’t have any limits. I remember one cold morning in the winter of my sophomore year of high school. I was walking to school and I noticed a kid biking past me, I could tell he wasn’t incredibly stable, probably because of his bulging backpack, and maybe also because he was a nervous little freshman. So I watched him as he biked on ahead of me, and then without thinking I jumped into the road and pushed him out of the way of a car. It wasn’t until long afterwards that I was able to make out the series of events in my mind clearly. What I remember now is that I had seen in my periphere a car coming on far faster than the speed limit of the road, and in my main focus, I saw the kid wobble a little bit too far and begin to fall off his bike. The rest was the result of an instinct I didn’t even know I had. In the aftermath, the kid thanked me, his parents cried and insisted I come over for dinner every saturday night from them on, and I got away with only minor scrapes and bruises. But that was only the first time. Incidents like this began to happen more often. I began to realize that the notion of fear had become distant to me, and as my fear faded, my sense of purpose increased. Slowly but surely I began to feel as if I had a set place in the world, that I was a protector of people, and a settler of problems. The first time this caused me any real harm was a day in mid May. Kids were beginning to feel the excitement of the coming of summer. The weather has suddenly turned warm from an unusually cold April, and people’s spirits were high. And so were mine. I was talking with a couple of boys from the football team and one of them began talking about how he had stolen a teacher’s wallet that he didn’t like. I thought he was joking at first, but he pulled it out and showed us. The teacher's credit card, as well as one hundred and fifty dollars in cash and other various things. I asked him if he was going to give it back and he gave a little laugh and said he would'nt. I told him that he should at least give back the credit card and other necessary things that he couldn't use anyway. He gave me a dirty look and turned to walk away. I wasn't about to stop, I put my hand on his shoulder, that was when he lashed out. He turned around and hit me; hard. I was not a weak person, but he was a football player and I didn't have very good odds against him. He hit me again, this time knocking me over, then, standing over me, he kicked me in the face until I was thoroughly bloody. I couldn’t tell what happened after that because my eyes were filled with the sting of tears and drops of blood, but I assume he and his friends left the scene quickly after that. I went home that day and straight to the bathroom where I closed the door and tried to clean off my face, but it was no use, I couldn’t hide the fact that I had been beaten up, so instead of face my parents, I left. It was at that point that my better judgement really left me. I decided to live like a nomad, moving around from place to place. My ideals were more important to me than my standard of living, or the feelings of my family. I would go around and find people wronging others, and fix it, sometimes successfully, other times, not so much. But I never stopped trying, I all but forgot about my family and my friends. I know now that a huge search began for me, one that lasted for more than a month. But by some miracle of fate, I was never found. I still don’t know  how far I ended up wandering in my quest for universal justice, but the incident that ended my life as a nomad happened in a town about 85 miles west of where I had started. I was walking at night, it was a particularly cold night, especially for June. I would have guessed it to be about 30 degrees fahrenheit. As I walked I could see my breath in the air, illuminated by the street lights, at least the ones that worked. This town was forgotten. I had gotten the impression as soon as I saw the sign for it as I walked across the border. It was the kind of place where the old die and the young leave, and you’re left with nothing more than a populated ghost town. As such, this was the perfect place for me to settle down for a few weeks and do my best to help. Violence seemed to be a particular problem, and that night was the most violent of my life. As I walked along, my hands in my jacket pockets. I heard raised voices from around the back of the building, something about money. I sped up my pace and ran around the building to the back just in time to see one man pull a knife on another. For a moment, my instinct failed me, I had never been faced with the prospect of being killed by another person. But I rushed in anyway to stop blade from stabbing into the other man. Both men seemed startled, but the stabber didn’t stop, his blade sunk into my flesh and I fell to the ground, unable to move, all I could do was sputter and occasionally scream. Everything became blurry and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I woke up in a hospital bed, with my wounds all but healed. I was told by the police department that they found me and a man that they were unable to identify, both stabbed on the ground, there was no sign of the third man. I had been unconscious for about six weeks and the doctors said it was a miracle that I had survived. I was questioned about the circumstances surrounding my stabbing and I had no desire anymore to hide. I told them what happened from the start to the the end, from saving the kid on the bike to the moment I got between the man and the knife. I was returned to my parents, it turned out it was just days before my eighteenth birthday. They cried and celebrated, but I don’t think they ever forgave me for what I did to them. As for me, I lost my reckless need to make things right. I spent the next 9 months cramming all the school I had missed in, and then took a job at a local Burger King. It’s been ten years now since I was found, and I am almost finished getting my college degree. I look back on the choices I made over that period of time, and while they were undeniably foolish, I learned so many things from that, most importantly perhaps, is that you never realize how important it is to have the people you care about until they are gone.  

Ms. Hansen was basically the worst teacher you could have. Not just for Chemistry, but for any class. She didn’t explain anything, she was incredibly moody, and she would take out her personal problems on the rest of the class. Today was especially bad, we were in lab, experimenting on samples. She walked by our station and her sleeve brushed a glass beaker, knocking it to the floor. It shattered and she turned to look at us and yelled “How could you be so irresponsible, this glassware costs the school money” The three of us at our station stared at her dumbfounded, we all knew she had knocked it over, and she did too, but she told the rest of the class that we had done it. Each of us had to play $10 to cover a third of the cost of the beaker each. It was then that I decided that I had had enough. When she had her back turned, I tiptoed over to her desk and took her wallet, and her keys. I slipped them into my backpack and then finished class. At lunch, I was talking with several of my football friends, and a non-football kid walked up and said hello to a couple of the guys there. I figured he was cool since they knew him. Then I remembered what I had done. “Hey you guys, so you know that jerk Ms. Hansen?” several of them gave nods and said similar derogatory things about her. I continued “Look what I took from her” I pulled out her wallet and her keys “What do you say we take her car for a ride?” The non-football kid spoke up “Are you gonna give it back?” I laughed, thinking he was joking, but he asked again. “No” I said “She’s the worst teacher ever, today she blamed my lab group for breaking a beaker that she broke herself” The kid shook his head “Yeah, but she doesn’t deserve to have all her stuff taken away for that” Then, I don’t know why, but I snapped, I beat the guy up, punching him time after time. When I was satisfied I left with my friends. None of them seemed to care. ***** The boy was in the newspapers, he had disappeared, the same day that I had beat him up. I wasn’t sure what to feel, at first I didn’t care, I was glad that someone with such a lack of balls was not at my school. But within a few days I began to feel guilty, maybe I had sparked something in him that had caused him to run away. Or maybe he was kidnapped in his defenseless state after I had hurt him. Within about a week I had reversed my thoughts. I began to think about the position Ms. Hansen might have been in, and I decided that I would take responsibility for what I had done. The next morning, about ten minutes before school started, I walked into her classroom. She didn’t say a word as I took her wallet and keys out of my pocket and put them on her desk. She stared at me and then picked up her phone. Within a couple minutes the school security guard took me to the office and I given a long talk by the principal. After that I was suspended for a week and given community service hours. Looking back I learned a huge lesson that day, a lesson that I would never have learned if that boy had not disappeared. As it turns out, he ran away on some quest to make the world a better place. They found him months later in a hospital in some ghost town almost a hundred miles away. He was brought back to his parents then, but I haven’t seen him since the day I beat him up. Maybe one day I’ll get to thank him.

The boy had a name, but it doesn’t matter for the purpose of this narrative. He was a dreamer, but in a short term way, he believed in helping others, no matter the personal cost. There were days in which he would recklessly endanger himself for the sake of another. One such incident happened on behalf of a teacher he didn’t even know. A boy at school, a football player, had told him that he had stolen a teacher’s wallet, keys and important personal items. He had tried to get the kid to give it back, even when he was warned off, and was beaten up badly as a result. He never learned, but his actions, and his subsequent disappearance caused the teacher’s belongings to mysteriously reappear on her desk. But about his disappearance, he was not one to tell his parents about his personal life, he didn’t believe they could understand him, so instead of letting them see his bruised and beaten face, he ran away, seeking to do justice anyway he could. He wandered from town to town, become something of a legend, because no one knew who he was. Law enforcement tried to find him for the first month or so after his disappearance but their efforts eventually tapered off. He eventually found himself in a town close to one hundred miles from his home. This was an old town, one that was slowly dying, and one that had a problem with violence. This was perfect for the boy, it was a place where he could really do good. In the end it was the place that would end his nomadic existence. There was a night when he was walking and came across two men arguing about finances, one man pulled a knife on the other. The boy intervened to save the man and was stabbed himself, almost to death. The other man was also killed. He woke up in a hospital, and after being questioned, was sent back to his parents. He lived with them for six years before going off to college.