Life is full of decisions, some decisions will be easy to make, and some hard. Some will be made in a couple seconds and others will take days of sleep from you, especially when you know the decision you make will affect someone else’s life. There was a time in my life when I had to make a decision like that and it changed my life and another kid’s life.

When I was walking home from school one day in fifth grade I saw the bullying. It was between your typical nerd looking kid; he had the big glasses and the button up shirt. I hadn’t seen him in school before so he had to be from another school. He was the kind of kid who you sometimes ask yourself, why is he wearing these cloths? He is just asking the get beat up, but he definitely doesn’t deserve it. The other kid was taller, bigger, and much stronger than the nerd kid, and you could tell by just looking, his name was Donald Hayes, but most kids called him Donny. I knew him from my math class and he was feared by all of the kids. Sometimes, I even thought that the teacher was afraid of him. He had on black jeans, a Megadeath shirt, and a knit hat that was all black. Just by looking at the situation you could tell that nothing good was going to come from it. As I walked by I heard their conversation.

“Hey geek, I know you got money on you and your gonna hand that over” said Donny. There was no response from the other kid, he didn’t even look up. It was like he knew this was coming and there was nothing he could do about. It was ineffable. The kid forked over the money, it couldn’t have been too much money because I only saw two bills, but you could tell he was upset about it. There was a burning in my stomach. I knew that I had to do something about this, I wanted to confront Donny and tell him what he was doing was wrong and stick up for the nerd, but he was probably three times my size and I would just get beaten to a pulp. So with the picture of a pulp version of me in my head, and that burning sensation in my stomach I just walked by and let this happen.

It killed me for the rest of the day that I just let that happen. I just kept replaying the whole thing over and over in my head, what the Donny had said, and the face on the smaller kid. It was a face of pure fear, not hatred or anger, but fear that was the only thing that I saw. All the kid wanted was to get out of there without any pain without suffering. And I just let that happen. It killed me. I couldn’t sleep that night I just thought about what I could have done differently. I told myself that if I saw this happen again that I would do something about it and that it was the right decision.

It didn’t take very long for this to happen again, it was only two days later and the situation look pretty much the same. Donny was towering over this poor kid, but this time Donny was after the kid’s Gameboy. I could just barely make out what they were saying.

“Come on Donny give it back! That’s the only one that I have!” said the nerd kid. You could tell that this kid was not going to give this up like the money. He wouldn’t risk fighting though.

“What are you gonna do about it huh? Gonna fight me for it?” said Donny as he mockingly held the Gameboy over his head. The nerd kid played out the fight in his head with a painful look on his face. He knew he had no chance, the Gameboy wasn’t worth.

I don’t quite know what happened after that because I was racing to the principal’s office that was just inside the school. My heart was racing when I there and the words just barely got out of my mouth. When I got into the office I was breathing really heavily and the attendant at the desk asked what was wrong before I could catch my breath.

“What’s wrong? Are you ok? Is there anything that I can do?” she said in a concerned voice.

“Ou-outside….there’s a ff….a fight” I couldn’t make the words come straight, but I got my point across. She ran outside right away.

When I got back out there, her and another adult who I had never seen before were trying to pull Donny off of the kid. When they finally got him off, they dragged him inside and asked me to bring the nerd kid into the office as well so they could talk to both of them. I talked to him on the way to the office, he was stuttering a lot because off all the crying he had been doing while he was under Donny.

“Th-thank you for helping me out, I d-didn’t think th-that I was g-going to make it” said the nerdy kid through all of his tears.

I told him that it was no problem and that I couldn’t just let that happen. Even though I was breaking down on the inside thinking that Donny was going to find me and beat me into the pulp that I was imagining just a couple days earlier. I found out that the kids name was Melvin and he did actually go to my school, he was just a grade level lower than me. When we got to the office, the principal asked him to come in and just before he left, he hugged me and walked in. From then on, I knew that I had done the right thing. I had made Melvin’s life much better and now I felt much better about myself as well. The burning in my stomach was gone and I knew I had made the right decision.