He Told Me to Kneel Down in Front of the Whole School and Apologize. Forty-One Phones Were Recording. Nobody in That Gym Knew I Had Been a National Junior Champion, Including Him, and Two Seconds Later He Was on the Floor. Everyone Thinks That's the End of the Story. It Was Day One of Eleven Months.
PART 1
I want to start with the part nobody puts in the video, which is that I asked him to move.
I said it twice. Quietly, both times, because there were about sixty people in that gym and I had spent two and a half years at that school specifically not being looked at.
"Please move."
That's the whole sentence. It's on four of the recordings and it is not on the one that went around.
I'm Anna. I was seventeen, a junior, and I had been at Halstead High in Wichita for two years at that point, on a transfer, which is a thing you can do in that district if you fill out enough paper.
I wore a hoodie two sizes too big because my mother buys clothes at the Goodwill on Harry Street and because a hoodie two sizes too big is a very good way to not be a shape people look at.
My mother's name is Marika. She cleans offices for a contractor downtown, eleven p.m. to seven a.m., four nights a week, plus a day job at a dry cleaner three days a week. She came here from Ukraine in 2009 and she has a nursing credential from a country that does not count here and she has never once complained about that in my hearing.
We lived in a two-bedroom on the north side. I had free lunch. Everybody at that school knew I had free lunch, because at Halstead the free-lunch kids used to have to get their trays from the end of the line, which is a whole other story.
So that's the girl in the gym. Small, quiet, back row, hoodie.
And here is what nobody in that circle knew.
Between the ages of nine and fifteen I trained at a gym on North Broadway called Sifuentes Boxing, five days a week, two hours a day, under a man named Ruben Sifuentes who is sixty-eight years old and has forearms like bridge cable.
I had forty-one amateur bouts.
At fourteen I won a national junior title in my weight class in a gym in Kansas City that smelled like floor wax and I cried in a bathroom stall afterward because my father was not there and had not been for a while.
My photograph is on a wall on North Broadway. Third row, second from the left. It's still up.
I stopped at fifteen.
I want to explain that properly because it matters more than the punch does.
In a sparring session in April of my freshman year, I took a right hand I should have seen. Orbital fracture, left side. Two surgeries. And in the second one they found a retinal tear, and the retinal surgeon in Kansas City told my mother, in a room I was sitting in, that the eye had one more of those in it and that he would not be able to promise anything about the one after.
That's it. That's why I stopped.
Not because I lost my nerve, which is what people at that school decided when the story got out later. Because a doctor drew a picture on a paper towel of what happens to a retina and my mother put her hand over her mouth.
So for two years I sat in the back row.
Now, Brody.
Brody Cade was a senior. Six foot two, two hundred and five pounds, starting linebacker, and he had a partial offer from a school in Missouri that everybody in that building talked about like it was a family accomplishment.
He was not a monster. I need to say that early and I'll say it again later, because the version of this that went around the internet has him as a cartoon and it made everything harder.
He was a seventeen-year-old with a coach who told him he was special, a father who told him he wasn't, and a group of about nine kids who laughed at everything he said.
The thing that started it was so small it's embarrassing.
In fourth period, Mr. Vidal asked a question about the Missouri Compromise, and Brody answered it, and he was confident and he was wrong, and then Mr. Vidal called on me because I had my head down and he does that, and I gave the right answer in about eleven words.
Somebody in the back said "ohhh."
That's it. That's the whole crime.
He found me at my locker after fifth. He said, "Watch yourself." I said okay and went to class.
I want to be honest: it wasn't the first time that week. Tuesday he'd stood in the doorway of the C hallway stairwell so that I had to turn around and go the long way, and he'd laughed when I did.
I didn't report it. Of course I didn't report it. Nobody at seventeen reports a boy standing in a doorway, because there is no sentence you can say to an adult that doesn't come out sounding like nothing.
Sixth period is study hall in the auxiliary gym on Fridays because they're refinishing the library floor.
There were about sixty kids in there and one teacher, Ms. Prather, who had stepped into the equipment room to take a phone call.
He came across the floor and the circle formed the way circles do, which is instantly and without anybody deciding.
"So the smart one showed up."