I found him on a lonely stretch of Rural Route 12 — a ten-year-old boy walking with his head down, his shirt torn, his knuckles scraped, and his face blotched with the quiet kind of crying kids learn too young. He flinched when I approached, a big bearded biker in a leather vest, but the fear in his eyes wasn’t for me. It was for the things he wouldn’t say. When I asked what happened, all he managed was “nothing” before the truth spilled out in trembling pieces: two years of bullying, stolen bus money, cruel taunts about his mother...
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