Spare the Boy

What I expected to be a typical school run on Thursday afternoon turned into a scene as dozens of kids watched their friend get dragged to his death sentence – and it was all my 12-year-old daughter’s fault.

Minutes earlier, she came running up to me with a smile that stretched past her ears.

“Dad,” she says. “Do you want to meet Matt?”

Matt is a boy that I only knew of through stories on the car ride home. As we crawl at a snail’s pace in Bangkok’s viscous traffic, my daughter carries on about Matt, the butterflies in her stomach, and how he makes her laugh. He is, by all accounts, her first crush.

I like that she feels comfortable talking to me about these things. In fact, my daughter and I promised each other to keep an open-door policy on these matters. She tells me everything that’s happening in her life. And I promise not to chase any of her crushes down the street with a Thai jungle machete, or dangle them from the roof of Bangkok’s Mahanakhon building.

Works out fair.

Anyway, I say “yes” to her question. After all, I’d been building up Matt in my mind to be the antithesis of who I’d want around my daughter – a bad seed, a ruffian, a future convict. I had to see if my suspicions were true.

“Don’t say anything mean to him, okay?” she asks. “He’s scared of you.”

I reassured her that I just wanted say hello.

She runs off to find Matt, and I could see from a distance she’s trying to convince him to meet me. He resists, but not for long, and not of his own accord. Classmates begin to gather around Matt and my daughter, and two boys wrap up Matt’s arms in their own and begin dragging his now limp body in my direction.

His head hangs to his chest and his sneakers drag across and snag the ground like he’s being pulled to his execution. He lifts his head and I make out his face. Matt’s cheeks are round. His glasses sit in front of smallish black eyes. His hair is jet black, unkempt, and flopping around. I chuckle. Not at my daughter’s taste, but at how wrong I was about it.

Matt has nowhere to go except forward. His friends refuse to let his arms loose, and a dozen or so kids tag behind him, pushing and egging him on. In front of him is me – a 6-foot-3 westerner, Big M’s Dad, AKA the executioner.

His neck can barely support the weight of his head as it swings left and right like a pendulum across his chest. To my surprise, Matt musters up enough courage to lift his head and make eye contact. His mouth is agape, and his head is still swinging. All the boys and girls on the schoolyard wait for what’s coming next. Thais, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese – they all want to see how the western father might handle these matters.

I smile and extend my hand. “Nice to meet you, Matt,” I say.

He reaches out, and we shake. The only thing holding him up now were his two friends (maybe enemies by tomorrow). My daughter’s cracking up laughing with her girlfriends, most of whom are clutching their hands at their chests. The boys jump up and down cheering with excitement, most likely from the relief that it wasn’t them wearing Matt’s shoes.

Only seconds had passed, yet I could see the life force being drained from the kid. I did what any just executioner would. Spare the boy, I told his friends. He’s had enough.

As I got into the car and turned the engine, I burst out laughing. The poor kid, I kept thinking. He’ll never live this down. But underneath it all, I was laughing for another reason altogether.

When I extended my hand toward Matt back on the schoolyard, it wasn’t just me inviting him into my world. It was my daughter inviting me into hers.