The headmaster is explaining to us the importance of broadcast programming. No more movies containing nudity or sex scenes. “Children need to be protected,” he tells us, “from the vices of our times.” I’m thinking how wonderful it is that there are people who take us, children, into consideration. No more hiding our faces when people in the movies start having sex. No more French movies at noon. The headmaster’s words sound prescient.

Children rejoice all around the world.

Math is not my forte: I just can’t deal with divisions because the numbers are asking me to take giant leaps and I can’t do that being overweight. Math makes me angry. Numbers feel as if I’m drowning. The teacher, a short plump woman whose hands tremble violently whenever she’s angry, doesn’t like that. In the eyes of everyone, my failure is her failure, so she asks me to stay after class. Tears run down my chubby cheeks while I watch the other kids head home. The lightness in their step feels like mockery. I sit at the wooden desk by the blackboard and watch the numbers commingle with the numbers on the page.

Why can’t I just be like all the other kids? I’m so ashamed I can’t look my mother in the eye when I get back home. No one mentions it.

The headmaster is a tyrant teaching biology. He sits and watches us as we return to class after the break and at the slightest sign of misconduct he grabs us by the baby fat under our chins and the hair. He slaps the girls at the back of their head as if to obtain cinematic effect: their ponytails startle and bounce. The shame of getting caught doubles the pain. It’s our way of learning math.

Later, the math teacher, whose thick glasses make his head look ovoid, laughs at my geometry homework in front of the class. “You can’t just say the base of the triangle is this long,” he stops and laughs raising his face to the ceiling, “you need to calculate it!” The room roars with laughter. Why can’t I just draw the triangle and measure it? I don’t tell him my father helped me with the homework because that would only make matters worse.

The headmaster enters the class and orders us to take out a sheet of paper. “THIS IS A TEST!” He’s angry at us because he is thirty minutes late for class. Question number one: “THE LUNGS! YOU HAVE 5 MINUTES!”

We’re going up the stairs after recess, and someone pushes a girl from my class and she’s limping because she’s had an accident and broke her femur. I stop to help her, but the headmaster sees me break the line and I instantly become his target. He levitates. He pulls me aside pinching my baby fat. I’m wearing overalls and I feel ridiculous because I hate them. I hate jeans. Other boys follow suit, all of us trespassers. I try to explain to him I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was merely helping the girl, but he won’t listen. The headmaster is adamant in his decision to have me punished. He tells us to wait until the teachers come.

Potato. Chicken. Worthless. Sheep. Devil. Not-amount-to-anything. We’re being called with all these names when we fail to understand the rules of our adults.

At times, I gave my classmate, A–, peanuts in exchange for his math homework. “This exercise is worth four peanuts,’ he says pointing to another triangle and the calculations that surround it, “it’s not cheap, I know.” Reluctantly, I pull out the four peanuts from the bag and give them to him. The math teacher with the thick classes leans down to look at my homework and nods in agreement. Behind me, someone says he didn’t have the time to do his homework and he receives a blow. Potato!

I use my fingers to count because unlike numbers, I can hold my fingers. Feel them. Counting them feels like progress.

Every once in a while, I go to A–’s place because he’s got nice hair and his thumb curves in a weird but somewhat sexually appealing way. And he’s very good at math in a mad-scientist sort of way. He shows me the ropes behind equations and complex exercises, but I need to stop him again and again because I don’t seem to understand why the parenthesis goes there and not all the way over there. I laugh heartily whenever he explains stuff. His mother comes into the room. ‘That’s why you’re so fat,’ she says smiling, ‘because you laugh too much.’

After another recess, someone pushes a kid and he falls and starts crying. A teacher asks who’s the culprit and the kid points at me. There are about a hundred kids around me but no one says anything because teachers cannot be contradicted. The teacher punishes me. I do my best to explain to her I had nothing to do with it, but she is adamant. Tears roll down my cheeks as I await my punishment. I am asked to stand with my arms raised in the corner of the class.

High-school. Our history teacher beats the crap out of one of my classmates because he smiled at something that was said. We don’t look at him doing it. We only hear the words and the teacher’s open palm hitting hard against the back of his neck. “Why are you laughing, you idiot!?”

I run out of fingers to count.