LOTF: Before and After

Piggy

The glistening tears welling in his eyes behind the glasses that made his blue eyes pop told them everything they needed to know. How every much he heard, it was more than too much. They stared at him in silence as Pieter finally found the courage to move his legs, drop his books on his bed, and walk out without speaking a word. He didn't know exactly where he was going, just that he had to go somewhere; anywhere. As Pieter closed the door behind him, he heard the silence break between the two boys inside.

"There goes Piggy the fatty!" Jamie's friend started laughing again, laughing at Pieter.

Pieter finally let the tears fall from his eyes. They trickled down behind the frames of his glasses, down to his chin and neck. His skin felt hot with anger and sadness as he walked swiftly through the hallway. He opened the door to the communal washroom, relieved that nobody was there to bear witness to his first of many emotional breakdowns of this school year, and however many years he had left at the academy.

It took about a day and a half for Pieter to become Piggy across the campus. It started with just a few boys he recognized as Jamie's friends, and then more boys in their grade, and then some from the grades just below and above them, and eventually the majority of the school. For the second time in his life, at the second school he'd ever been to, his identity was attached to his weight like a conjoined twin. His name wasn't his name, his heart wasn't important, his mind didn't matter. All he was was his appearance, his weight, a name that wasn't really his name. No value was placed on who he was on the inside, no, only what he looked like on the outside.

Any chance he had at just being another boy, at just being a student, a cadet, a friend was gone. Pieter was gone too, leaving Piggy the fatty, Piggy the target, Piggy the outcast, in his place.

Military school wasn't different after all. In fact, the only thing that was different was the part of the state he lived in, and the names and faces of the kids who dictated what little value he had.

Piggy might not have gone to school with good people, but he came from good people. Well, one good person really. His birth father abandoned the family when he was just a baby, less than a year old. He was an only child, and his mother struggled to stay on her feet for the first years of his life.

Cynthia Kingston spent the first three years after Piggy was born working minimum wage jobs for forty-five or sixty hours a week just to make ends meet. She left her son with her own parents who were retired most of the time. They also lived with the boy's grandparents too, given that Cynthia couldn't afford to pay rent at the time.

She met her second husband when Piggy was just four years old. They got married a year and a half later, a marriage that lasted less than three years. The man who became like a father figure to young Piggy was having an affair with an ex-girlfriend, and Cynthia caught him cheating after he mixed up their numbers and dialed Cynthia's by mistake, thinking he was calling his mistress. She and Piggy were on their own again after that. But only for about a year or so, before Cynthia met the next man. She didn't marry, and instead dated around for a couple years before she finally met Robert Dingledine. Robert was a major in the army, and a family man without a family. His previous wife died of breast cancer about seven years before he met Cynthia and Piggy.

This one, Cynthia told her ten-year-old son, was a good one, a keeper, a real gentleman. Piggy heard his mother say that about half a dozen other men before Robert Dingledine. At this point, the boy wasn't exactly convinced. He might've been young, but he wasn't stupid. He rode this merry go round before, and he knew that it usually ended with him saying goodbye to another father figure, wiping his mother's tears as she grieved another failed romance.