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He didn’t understand what was going on. Sure he got the broad strokes, 7 schools and you notice the similarities. A couple dozen kids trying to hold on to power taken from other power hungry kids. The details always tripped him up, it’s not like he was dumb, he just… it’s hard to tell. Everyone lies and everyone has different standards and holding on to the motivations of others is hard. A lot of people think they’re right and a lot of stuff can be called acceptable by people who hate everyone enough to smile about it. And so he never knows what’s going on.
Bullies are everywhere, they’re simple. The jocks hate the nerds and vice versa, that’s pretty standard. Stuck up rich kids aren’t a surprise, public schools have those even. The greasers are new. Well, He’s new, and the new kid always gets beat unless he can prove he’s too much trouble to hit. He can always prove he’s too much trouble to hit.
And so he’s stuck at a new school and he’s pretty sure that he doesn’t have friends, again. Gary says he’s a friend and it’s pretty easy to be the person that Gary wants him to be. “Feeding time at the zoo” these are people to be mean about. Make a rude comment. This is the only time Gary calls him smart, well observant. It’s as close as he’ll get. Gary approves anyway. Cruelty never feels like cruelty when other people don’t act like it is.
Petey might be a friend, he seems to go out of his way to be nice to him, Petey seems to be friends with Gary. Mean friends maybe, but surely they must like each other. They hang out. On Halloween he’s dressed up and taken around campus. It’s kind of like trick or treating, when he pulls pranks. They seem broadly harmless. He’s been hit, and pushed, and tripped. So he tosses some marbles, makes Gordon itch, and beats up Chad. He supposes the big prank is funny, Gary seemed to think so.
Gary betrays him and he thinks that maybe, if he knew to look, he could have seen it coming. But he never thinks to look does he. He has to be told why he’s standing in an arena. So he has to fight. Fighting is simple. He never has to think about lying in a fight. Either he wins and people stop doing whatever they were fighting about, or he loses and well, he never loses. Russel is simple, his motivations are clear. There’s no room for manipulation. It’s nice, to not have to worry.
With the Preps it seemed at first like they wanted something else. The things they did included him. They were meaner, but to his face. Which was better for reasons he couldn’t really define. Gord asked him to come try out boxing, really just fighting for points, and he did too well. Sometimes being good at something isn’t what they want. Gary lies to them, but in a way he can’t completely dispute. He thinks about the way Gary twists words to his advantage while he bikes back to the dorm, covered in slowly drying raw egg. He wonders if they’d have liked him if Gary hadn’t said anything. He has to be told about the race. He causes more trouble. Now they hate him. Fighting solves his problems again. The way Petey said they would. He has to be told. The bruises take a while to heal. The way they did after fighting Russel, the way they always did. Now the Preps listen to him, they complement his clothes, when he wears what they like. He doesn’t really think that their opinions have changed though. Being nice to him is enough.
The Greasers, he didn’t know what to expect. He thought they might be strong, to be able to wear something so strange. Johnny Vincent is angry at him, talks in accusatory fragments. He feels more lost than ever. Johnny explains, not exactly clearly, but he asks a favor. Lola’s cheating, not with him, but with Gord. There’s a setup, and again things seem to go well. He thinks that perhaps the Greasers like him. Trust.
He makes mistakes. It falls apart. The preps ask him to take revenge for Gord, and he’s pretty sure he’s agreed to something he shouldn’t have. Lola asks him to do things, broadly innocent but collectively subversive. The greasers don’t like him anymore. Lola kisses him. He thinks again to Gary, the way he manipulated the people around him. Lola tells him about the fight. It all ends in a fight, it always seems to end in a fight. The chain gets pulled across his bike wheel and he remembers the trap he set for Gord. Another thing he could have seen coming. He wins. The fight isn’t about what he thought the fight was about. He has to be told. The Greasers listen to him like the Preps listen to him, there’s no trust.
Now he’s always doing things for other people. He’s pretty sure they’re not friends. He thought the nerds might like him, he does stuff for them and they never seem to attack him. That’s almost like friends. The favors only went one way. There was no trust, he has to fight. He tries to explain to Earnest. He says he understands, but it’s a lie. Then they asked him to do something and it didn’t have a purpose. Earnest just wanted to be gross and he did it anyway. Trust. Now the Jocks don’t like that he did it so it’s all his fault. Mandy tells him what’s happened. He helps, she treats it like a Favor, but it isn’t, he doesn’t tell her what he did “They’re actually sneaky bastards” he takes down the Jocks and it feels like he’s a pet. Someone strong and dumb doing the dirty work. It doesn’t feel like favors. It ends in a fight and he wins, like always. The Nerds are overly nice to him, in a way he eventually realizes is a lie. He doesn’t think they ever liked him. The Jocks, he thinks, might be afraid of him. They all listen to him. Nothing can bother him. He’s the king.
He’s king of the school, he gets distracted. Forgets that he didn’t want to be king, forgets all the lessons he learned about looking to see if something’s coming. He’s mean to Petey, mean in a way he thinks is nice, they’re friends, but he’s not good at the friendly kind of mean. The people he forgot aren’t his friends suggest something and he agrees, another favor.
It falls apart, it always falls apart and he’s so frustrated. Petey has to tell him. Everyone hates him, in a way that’s different than they did before he was king. Things get worse, and he’s blamed. He helps the nerds again. He helps the Jocks. It’s not a favor. They still don’t like him. Johnny Vincent is missing. The Preps’ trophy’s are missing. He finds both and still they hate him. There’s no fight this time. He can’t fix things, he just gets expelled for the eighth time. “He passes through Bullworth on his inevitable journey to prison”
Alone, he realizes that he was an asshole. That’s something it should be easy to realize, but around others who he is is moldable. So who he was, was the King. Now he’s nothing. At least Russel likes him. He tries to fight Edgar. He doesn’t really know why but he thinks it’s his best hope of… something. He wins. He’s not sure if he likes fights or just what fights get him. He likes that they’re simple. It is hard to win a fight in a way that makes you lose, the way conversations can be. Information can be used as a club but he never wins when he tries to use it like one. Gary can, Lola can, even Pete can, he knows enough about everyone that his plans work. Jimmy couldn’t ever make that happen, so when Zoe tells him there’s chaos at Bullworth he does what he does best. He fights. He fights Johnny Vincent, who was always unstable. He fights Ted, who took out his aggression on others. He fights Derby, who put himself above it all, refused to stop anything until he was inconvenienced. He fights Earnest, power hungry Earnest, who was convinced that he could be in charge.
He fights Gary last. And Gary says a lot of stuff that really isn’t new. That he’s dumb, that he’s easy to manipulate, that he can’t win. But Jimmy never loses a fight.
It works. He’s reinstated, Gary is expelled, everyone likes him. He doesn’t think he made it happen though. He thinks Pete made it happen. He thinks Gary made it happen in his weird way. All Jimmy does is fight.