He stares at me, then at the hot sauce sitting on the table in front of us, then looks my way again and laughs. I cry.

As I wipe my tears and allow the snot to run down my face, I realize I am an official crybaby. At the age of seven, it’s the worst thing in the world to be known as. Of course, I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. I was just a sensitive boy trying to eat a nice slice of oven pizza and now it had been ruined at the hands of my Evil Kenevil of a cousin, Junior. Who doused the slice with hot sauce while I was away from the table getting more Orange Kool-Aid.

Junior is visiting again this summer and with him comes the  barrage of pranks that he prides himself on. It’s always the worst two weeks of my summer and I long for the hot sun to fade away and welcome in the delicate fall that made West Texas somewhat pleasant following the hellacious summer.

Mom is no longer around, she moved to Southland last year. She met a man, they fell in love, and he took her away from me. I had grown accustomed to it though and now all I want is pizza. Now that has been taken away from me and on that summer afternoon, I had had enough.

Tears – be gone.

Junior isn’t nice. He’s the tough one who uses my weakness for his pleasure. “I need to toughen you up,” he says every afternoon as he pounds me with clumps of dirt left over from the turbine tractors in the cotton fields. “You need to be tough so you don’t turn into a faggot.” I have to admit, his intuitions were far keener than most seven-year-olds, but that still didn’t prevent the tears from falling from my face as clumps of dirt swells in my eyes and become a muddy goop that hangs from my eyelids. The tears only make him worse, I take it for only a few moments longer before shattering wails leap from my body.

I have no control.

The pizza, however, is my last vestige of wimpy-ness. The final straw. The last of hurrah!

It’s time to stand up for myself. The past two weeks, because I had become so much more sensitive since we last met, he had only gained power. During these two weeks, he has pushed me off the roof of our house, doused me with water grenades, and forced me to join him in the torture of a poor innocent frog whose only mistake was crossing his evil path on a soggy day after the rains.

He sure did toughen me up.

As his twisted dark head bounced up and down from his hysteric laughter, anger swelled inside of me like an over inflated balloon. The tears stopped coming and, even though I couldn’t tattle because who would I tell? Grandma is so wrapped up in her afternoon Telenovella she doesn’t have the time to deal with this hooligan at the lunch table. I’m on my own. This is my battle. I could take a stand or forever succumb to his evil twisted logic.

I do not regret the events that occurred on that hot summer afternoon. I lose no sleep over the mean spiteful things I said. The tears that fell that day dried from my mind as quickly as they were absorbed into the hot Texas sand as they fell from his face. The moment we left that table and we were out in the fields of cotton, alone, I tackled him down and wailed into him as if each punch were one of the many tears he once made me shed.

Sure, the power and force behind a couple of seven-year-olds may not be much, but to me, it was the ass whoopin’ of a lifetime. I gained power and pleasure as I grabbed his hair from the back of his head and shoved it into the hot sand. Spit, snot and blood became part of the ground where I jammed his face, over and over again, into the rows of plants where cotton bulbs had not yet bloomed.

I left him out in that field, baking under the sun, and ran to the bathroom to clean my hands of the dirt and blood. I could hear his crying and wailing coming from outside as I looked at myself in the mirror. 

I have no tears. I have no emotion. I take a double look, making sure it’s me.