As a Sixteen-Year-Old, I Carried a Knife With Me to School Every Day
Would I have used it? Yes! But I wasn’t always like that. I wasn’t always so angry.
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TW: murder, blood, violence
In my early teens, I was what my friends at the time referred to as a “nerd.” I would tie a bedsheet around my neck like a cape, and jump from sofa to sofa. If wasn’t risking my life, I would be glued to the television watching Beyblade. I was the kid who believed in Santa longer than I should have and slept with the light on.
By sixteen-year-old, the only change was that I had moved to a less affluent part of the city after my parents divorced. Maybe there was some residual anger from that, but at the time, it wasn’t significant enough to make me change who I was.
Then I witnessed my first stabbing. I held my cousin in my arms as he choked out his final words while drowning in his blood.
There had been a spike in knife crime in the UK.
Everyone was on high alert because the in the next town over, a teenager was stabbed 24 times on his way home from school. My mother had sat me down for these talks every morning. She would look into my eyes.
“Be careful.” she would say. “If anyone asks for your stuff, just give it. Don’t fight back!”
The highlight of my 16 year-old life and going to a new school was that my favourite cousin, Levi, attended the same one. It seemed that long before I arrived, Levi had told everyone about me. So when I entered the school, everyone was expecting me.
Seriously, my name was “Levi’s cousin” for most people. I guess some people would have been mad about, but I wasn’t. That was Levi. He was friends with everyone, and he had this air about him that when he spoke, people hung on his every word.
Levi was infectious. He was freakishly tall, but he walked with a slightly hunched back because all of his friends were always shorter, and he had to bend to talk to them. He smiled with his face, and his laugh was so abnormally loud that you could catch the laughing bug a fair distance away.
I remember sitting there in my living room, watching the news after. And the way the broadcaster characterised Levi’s death:
“A young teen was stabbed today in front of the local shop 1 mile away from his school. So far, the police are investigating to find out…
There is some speculation that this had to do with retaliation for the stabbing of the teenager in…
Police are asking anyone who knows more to step forward to help with their investigation.”
And there was no mention of his infectious laugh or how kind he was. Or how he still watched Beyblade with me because he was the one who told me about it when I was younger. It took one news cycle to move on to the next thing. He was another statistic.
I still woke up in sweats months after he was gone. I was back in school, acting normal. My existence was as an act. Because when I got home and entered my room, behind my door, I was still running out of the store to Levi on the ground. I was still there holding Levi as the brambled words escaped his lips. I was still trying to staunch the bleeding with my shirt. I was still screaming for help.
I’d seen school counsellors and therapists, but after a few weeks, the revolving questions of “Are you okay?” felt mundane. Four months after Levi’s death, I walked into a local shop at the end of the street and bought a flick knife, the kind Boy Scouts used in the woods.
On my seventeenth birthday, I stopped carrying the knife.
Stood at the centre of the festivities. I watched as my family gathered around to sing Happy Birthday to me.
I missed Levi. Of course, I did. But for a brief moment, I forgot about Levi and let the happiness of the moment come into me. It was like I was standing over the whole party and I could appreciate from a bird’s eye view the amount of love that still existed in the world.
I was lucky I never had to brandish my knife. I was lucky I found love again. But I’ve always thought about those who did not. I’ve always thought about those kids in similar positions, living in impoverished neighbourhoods, who out of fear also carried the knife and used it to save themselves. Those who suffered from PTSD and who out of fear also did what I did.
All of this reminds me that life isn’t as black and white as it seems.
