later, I guess it made sense. Even though he was in Year Seven, Nanh was a little bit older than us — about fourteen, I suppose; he’d had a really mixed-up childhood, and his language problems had kept him back in school, but he was really quite small for his age, so he didn’t look older. And if you’re not too bright and you’re used to relying on force to get your way, you tend to rely on appearances a bit too much. Shane Thomas and his “Morons Anonymous” certainly did this time. Chris Walker, who was the only one in the group with even half a brain — even though he’d been hanging with “the Pain” for so long that he’d basically forgotten how to use it — made the mistake of thinking that just because someone has trouble using a particular language, it means that they’re stupid, or they don’t understand what’s going on. Or that they’ll just stand there and let you treat them like a victim and take what belongs to them without a fight. If he’d remembered how to use his brain, and thought about it for a minute, he might have figured that to someone who has spent the best part of his life having what belongs to him taken away or threatened by people with guns, or by desperate and hungry gangs, a bunch of zit-faced school bullies, even if one of them is the size of Shane Thomas, aren’t exactly a terrifying sight.
