Fight, or Flight?
11/25/2019
Tom Murdough
11/21/19
English 9
Ms. Wade
Fight, or flight
It was a normal day at the Lincoln public school. I had a good day of school, a delicious, and nutritious lunch of Hawaiian pizza, and chocolate chip cookies, and it was a Friday. It couldn’t get much better for me. After school finished, I met all my friends at the field and we played our usual game of touch football on the field outside the school. We always made the same teams, my friends and I, against the fifth graders who were a year older than us at the time. We started with the ball and my friend scored on a run play because a fifth grader slipped on the mud while he was trying to two hand touch him. My friend thought he juked the fifth grader out of his shoes and ran backwards while pointing at him all the way down the field. The fifth grader took offense to this and immediately sprinted up to my friend and punched him in the face. He fell flat on his back and the fifth grader kicked him and jumped on him. My friends followed, and started a “mini-brawl” of sorts. They were throwing punches at this one kid that got up and punched my good friend in the face. I had never seen, or been a part of a fight, so I didn’t know how to react. My instinct was to go fight the fifth grader for my friend, but there were teachers and parents in the area. At first, I was a bystander, until the next play when the same fifth grader blindsided me and knocked me to the ground. I had reached my break in point. I got up immediately and got into a “fight” with the fifth grader. My friends were at the scene of the fight immediately and came to my aid. I punched, kicked, tackled, and almost brawled with the kid. From where the parents were sitting, it looked like we were just “play fighting.” They thought it was no big deal until the fifth grader went to the parents with a bloody nose and snitched on me. He portrayed what I did to what Myles Garrett did to Mason Rudolph. My parents were very unhappy with me, and I was banned from pick up football which is pretty hard to do. In this moment, I was defending myself, and my friends, but I really should have kept my cool and stayed out of it.