Imagine being a 12-year-old boy walking through your neighborhood to get a Slurpee at 7-eleven. If another kid threatened you and said you couldn’t walk through his “turf,” would you turn around or scare him away?

In this story, one kid is in this exact situation, and he doesn’t back down to the bully. In fact, he ends up scaring the bully.

Keep reading for all the details.

If You Ask for It, I Will Give It to You

When I was in middle school in the early 90s, I was just a normal adolescent boy with a bicycle and a powerful desire for a Slurpee.

I lived in a complex of condominiums that were divided into multiple “courts,” composed of a rectangle of buildings with gaps in between, allowing for an easy cut through.

I lived in Court 7, and in order to get to the back entrance of the complex, near where the 7-11 was, I had to go around the lake and cut through Court 2.

Some kids from school lived in Court 2.

On this particular day, though, all the boys that lived in Court 2 were outside in a circle of bicycles.

I knew these kids from school, and no one was unfamiliar to me, so my being there shouldn’t have been a big deal. In fact, the weirdest thing to me is that before and after the events of this story, we were all sort of friends.

For some reason, though, the de facto leader, G, came over on his bike to block my path.

G wasn’t having it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“7-11”

“You can’t come through here. This is our turf.”

He explains why G seemed to have this attitude.

I believe that, because this was the early 90s, G’s attitude was directly attributable to the media’s fascination at the time with gangs, colors, turf disputes, and anything to do with that particular flavor of youth violence in general.

In addition, most of the kids in this complex were children of Eastern European immigrants, and at the time, no one in America–other than the reporters and politicians, of course–seemed to be as fascinated by ideas of American gang culture as many of the Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian children that made up the neighborhood in suburban Illinois in which I lived at the time.

The parents had come over from the old country seeking a better life in what was widely touted as a “land of opportunity,” but the kids had just watched translations of Menace II Society and Boyz in the Hood in order to help prepare them for what America would be like.

He tried to explain.

“Come on, G, just get out of the way, please. I just want a Slurpee.”

Sometimes, when I am very polite in conflict, my effort to maintain civil discourse is misread as weakness or fear. I could tell I was not projecting what I meant to.

“Go around,” he demanded.

“Or what?”

“Go around, or you have to fight us.”

He was NOT going to go around.

At this point, I noticed that the other boys, about a half dozen in total, had circled around behind me. It was about to get real, and there was little I could do to stop it.

“I really don’t want to. I mean, you know me. We’re friends.”

“We aw fwends,” he answered and mimed rubbing tears from his eyes. The other boys laughed.

Well, in hindsight, I suppose I could have turned around and circled Court 2, but I felt this would have set a bad precedent. If I went around that day, I would have had to go around every day, and there would be no convincing them that they didn’t make me. There was nothing for it but to do exactly as I was told.

He decided to start the fight.

I turned as fast as I could, grabbed the nearest kid, and pulled him bodily off his bike.

My thought was that I would get the worst of it, it being a six on one fight, but I silently vowed that at least one kid besides me was going to have his work cut out explaining the bruises at the dinner table.

I wrapped my left arm around his head, anchoring my fingers against his nose, and pulled as hard as I could, offering me unrestricted access to his cheek, which I then started pummeling with my right fist.

Fortunately, 12-year-old kids are basically made of rubber, and one can’t permanently hurt another one without more effort than most other 12-year-old kids can even muster with their little Nerf fists.

G wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be.

The kid I caught, L, started crying loudly, and I realized that I didn’t have it in me to hit a crying kid again.

I also realized that his buddies didn’t rush me, per our clearly defined arrangement.

I had held up my end of the deal, but G and the rest had left poor L to take the beating they had literally demanded from me.

The courtyard was empty save the two of us.

Now, G knows not to mess with OP.

I stopped hitting L mid swing. I picked him up, dusted him off, and asked him if he wanted to get Slurpees with me.

We hung out for the rest of the day, and I showed him how to make the flint from a lighter explode, which we both thought was the coolest thing we had yet seen in our young lives.

The next week, I saw G hanging out in Court 7 with some of the neighbor boys from my court. I slung open the sliding glass door to the patio and shouted, “What are you doing on my turf, G!?”

He didn’t say a word as he got on his bike and pedaled like his face depended on it, while the Court 7 boys laughed like crazy, having already heard all about G’s last attempt at being hard.

Wow! He did some quick thinking, and I like that he hung out with L afterwards and that they seem to be on good terms. Yet, G learned not to mess with OP. That’s the most important part.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person was given similar advice.

It was definitely a drastic change!

I hope he paid.

Another person changes the names of the movies OP mentioned to make it fit this story.

That boy wasn’t nearly as tough as he pretended to be.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.