Donnie’s fists were clenched. He glowered around at the circling crowd, now surreptitiously retreating upon realizing that a teacher was bound to chance upon their violent scene at any moment. Nobody met his desperately confused blue eyes.

Eventually, he forced himself to pull his eyes back onto the bloody nose, the collapsed figure, and the eerie rolled-back eyes that occasionally twitched. He’d hurt her. He’d hurt her badly. And he knew it.

Then as the adrenaline pulsing through him slowly tired, and as his nerves regained consciousness and not-so-gently reminded him that his muscles were fiercely and rigidly clenched, his mind came back to him all at once.

There was his father, nearly the exact image of himself, but taller, with a harder face—and the same unnaturally blue eyes. And there, too, was his mother, on the floor in just the same way, her eyes twitching eerily in just the same way. His father took him into his room and explained to him that night. He didn’t soften the truth. He never did. women were made to obey—and when they didn’t, they had to be punished.

Back in the present, Donnie was now entranced by the silhouette of his girlfriend’s broken figure. Her eyes had found their way back to the right direction, and she was quietly re-realizing the situation. He acted quickly, and instinctively.

He stepped toward her and offered her a burly hand and she flinched instinctively. "I’m sorry," he said. "I really am. We need to talk."

The stubborn ignorance of an adult is callous, but the ignorance of a child is painful. Only the power of knowledge can stop that pain, and only before it fades away on its own.


…And his eyes finally turned brown.