When I was in seventh grade, two eighth-grade girls made it their mission to make me feel small. Nothing dramatic, just the usual comments, the laughter, the way they’d look at me like I was something stuck to their shoe. I was already awkward enough just existing in junior high, and they knew it. One of them moved away and I never saw her again.
The other one was graduating that spring, heading off to high school. For some reason I still don’t fully understand, instead of being bitter, I bought her a box of chocolates as a graduation gift. Maybe I wanted to be kind. Maybe I wanted her to see I wasn’t the person she had been treating me like.
When I handed it to her, she completely broke down. She cried her eyes out and apologized for being a jerk. She said she knew she had been mean and that she didn’t really have a good reason for it. After that, we actually became friends.
The sweetest karma wasn’t her being embarrassed or punished. It was her realizing she’d been crappy, feeling genuinely sorry, and then changing. She expected payback and got chocolates instead. I have my own version of that story, though mine didn’t end in friendship.
There was a kid in my secondary school who used to mercilessly bully the kids in learning support. It was a small school, so they’d converted the old caretaker’s house into a safe space where those students could take their lessons and get the support they needed. It allowed a sort of half mainstream, half specialist environment for them. This guy spent years prowling outside that building, mocking the kids who went in and out of it.
He dropped out at sixteen after five or so years of smoking around the back of his house and terrorizing the learning support kids. Three years later, he ended up getting shot. The bullet left him with brain damage, memory issues, and problems with his dexterity. The only place he could retake his GCSEs was the same old house he used to prowl outside.
Life eventually signed him up for classes there. Another version played out in my family’s convenience store. A guy walked in tonight to buy a pack of cigarettes. I knew him from my days growing up in this village.
He and his younger brother used to give me a hard time. They were the racist type, the kind who encouraged others to pick on me and even turned violent against me. I hated him and his family for taking a part of my childhood. Tonight he was friendly, smiling at me and cracking crappy jokes that I smiled politely at but didn’t really respond to.
He counted his money with his injured hand, which had been badly damaged. Several fingers were missing, the result of a firework accident. I gave him his smokes and his change, said thanks, and went about my business. Before leaving, he stopped, hesitated for a moment, and turned around.
He asked if there were any job openings at the store. I thought I’d heard him wrong, so I asked him to repeat himself. He asked again, “You wouldn’t happen to have any jobs available, would you? ”
I explained that we were sufficiently staffed at the moment.
With my sister and me around for the summer, we wouldn’t be needing anyone else to fill in the hours, which were sparse enough as is. I told him to ask again in the fall when I’d return to Montreal and my sister would go back to university. He said it was okay, but that he needed something now because his wife had just left him. He said thanks anyway and walked out.
Memories of him being a jerk flashed through my head. Through them, a clearer picture began to form. When he had just graduated high school, his parents broke up in a massive way, leaving a fractured home for his younger siblings to grow up in. Sometime in his life, he’d had his hand mangled by an explosive.
His marriage was falling apart. And now he had to come asking for a job from the local kid he used to make fun of and claim superiority over. I’m half white and half brown, by the way. The villagers used racist labels for anyone who wasn’t white.
It didn’t feel good to see him like that. I should have enjoyed it, but I didn’t. I don’t feel bad for him, not in the slightest. But I also don’t feel like any kind of justice was served or that karma had given him his comeuppance.
The universe is truly neutral about right and wrong. This was just the way life played out for someone who did a lot of harm in his time. He could have been rich. He could have been powerful.
He could have kept the use of both his hands. But it didn’t turn out that way. Karma had nothing to do with it. There was no justice.
What occurred to me is that I’m not at all connected to this place anymore. Not even to the pain and harsh memories that stayed with me for years. I’ve become my own person, capable of sympathizing even with the scum of the universe who tormented my childhood. I just wanted to share that because I thought it was interesting.
A bully from my childhood who used to attack me and incite others to do so came into my store and asked me for a job. Life’s like that. I have another story about a red-haired girl. I befriended her in grade three or four.
She was new to school. Everyone already had their friends and no one accepted her. I didn’t have many friends either, so I gladly accepted hers. We became best friends.
Fast forward to middle school. She was still large, but she’d started wearing makeup and became popular. I was still the too-tall, too-thin awkward girl with a lisp. Everyone made fun of me, and she joined in so she could be cool.
It got worse and worse until she started instigating it. She’d circle me with other girls and egg my house. Fast forward again to high school. I filled out a bit and got better friends.
About halfway through grade eleven, people started realizing how mean and fake she had become, and they turned on her. She was crying in the hall one day, and I went up to her, asked if she was okay, and offered my phone if she needed to call her mom. She transferred schools for grade twelve because she was being bullied. Funny thing is, I still feel bad for her.
Bullying sucks. Another one: in seventh grade, this jerk used to pester the crap out of me, insisting I was ugly and useless. Years later, he showed up on OKCupid. A few weeks ago, before I got into a relationship, he asked if we went to school together and told me I was hot.
He didn’t recognize me, clearly, but it was delicious to know he’d been searching for months with no one biting. I never went on a date with him. I just deleted his message. I take great delight in him being alone right now, despite all his try-hard and being on the actual website for months without success.
Then there’s the karate studio story. A few years back, I was the assistant manager of my dojo. It was a slow, quiet day when in walked Paul, my old buddy from public school. I wasn’t sure at first.
It had been a long time and it was hard to tell. I didn’t say anything. Paul was interested in joining the dojo, so I showed him around and discussed pricing. I didn’t treat him any differently than I would any other potential client.
At the end of the tour, Paul decided to join. He sat down in the office and filled out the paperwork. When he wrote his name on the application, I knew for sure this was indeed my old bully. A guy who used to torment me every single weekday, who made me kneel in dog crap.
I didn’t say anything until after he prepaid me for an entire year’s membership. As I walked him to the door, I smiled. “I’m really looking forward to training with you. ”
“Thanks, me too,” Paul said.
“You don’t recognize me, do you? ”
“No, should I? ”
“Yes. We went to school together, grade three through eight.
You bullied me every day. You made my life miserable. Can’t wait to see you in class. ”
Paul went white.
He walked out without another word and never walked back in. He willingly threw away a year’s membership payment, almost five hundred dollars, rather than be in the same class with me. My mom treats me worse than my younger brothers, and it eventually always bites her in the bum. A favorite example is the time she saw it coming.
When we were teens, my brothers were always allowed to borrow my mother’s car, but I wasn’t. My grandmother even warned my mother that she would need me one day and I’d tell her no. Mom blew her off because why would she need me? It’s not in my nature to say no.
Fast forward a few years. I have a car now, and my mom gets into an accident that leaves her temporarily carless. She never asked to borrow my car even though she wanted to, because she knew I had every right to say no. And she admitted it and apologized because she screwed herself over by not being nicer to me as a teen.
The thing is, it’s not in my nature to say no. If she had asked, I would have said yes. Her guilt was the karma. There was also the kid who bullied me in junior high who passed away.
I was the fat kid in my youth. I still retain some weight, but years of football turned it into muscle bulk rather than the butterball I used to be. When I was in junior high, there was this kid named Brendan who was huge. He could bench at least twice what any of the rest of us could, and he was rumored to have been involved in something inappropriate with a vulnerable girl.
Looking back, I think he’d been held back a year or two. He used to pester me and my mishmash group of misfit friends, grabbing us or beating us up. I remember he stole my crutches when I broke my ankle. I was always non-confrontational, but one day my friend Harry, a Japanese immigrant who didn’t speak much English, was running on the track with me during P.
E. Brendan ran up and grabbed him. He kept running, but when I helped Harry up I saw the skin had been scraped. This made me mad.
Knowing Brendan was a faster runner than both of us, I knew he would lap us on the track. He did as I predicted and laughed as he passed. When he did, I picked up a rock about the size of my palm and hucked it at him. It just barely missed but skimmed his ear.
Brendan lost his crap and started yelling at me and Harry. When I ignored him, he threw me to the ground. I fought like a coward, dug into his stomach with my nails, and bit him on the neck. My friend Isaac saw what was happening and pulled him off me.
By that point the teacher saw what happened and sent Harry and me to the nurse’s office and Brendan to the principal. I never saw him alive again. He was expelled after that. I held a deep hatred for him and the things he did to me in junior high, but took solace in the fact that I was able to get one good shot in.
Fast forward a couple of years to my sophomore year of high school. I like to read the comic pages of the newspaper in the morning. I saw a headline: “Local Area Teen Passed Away in Motorcycle Accident. ” I read deeper and my jaw dropped when I read “Brendan Shanks, 16.
” He’d taken his father’s motorcycle and was speeding along a residential road at about eighty miles an hour when a car didn’t see him and pulled out. The article recapped how difficult his life had become, getting expelled from the local high school and going in and out of rehab for substances. I looked at the picture of the debris that was now the bike. In the middle was a lone oversized skate shoe, the kind he had worn back in high school.
I let out a breath, and that was that. I no longer hold any hatred for the kid. He got more than any petty revenge fight could have. Another short one.
A kid I met in sixth grade became that kind of is-your-friend-but-is-really-secretly-your-pester-type of person. I knew he was going to fail sixth grade, the first grade in my school system that you could actually fail and get held back. He did. I saw him a couple of times in the hall after that, but haven’t really heard from him since.
He used to talk about how he wouldn’t mind being in jail at all because you get lots of coleslaw there and he likes coleslaw. Hopefully his wish came true. When I was eight, my parents moved us out of our hometown to a place with some room, a couple of fields, that type of thing. It was no more than ten minutes out of town, but because of the district boundaries, I had to switch to a new school.
The new school was about an eighth the size of my previous one, and all the other kids had been going to school together since grade one. Here was the new kid in grade three, and they didn’t like me for whatever reason. It started harmlessly enough, but over the next two years things escalated quickly. From random name-calling and a couple of pushy-shovy matches to rocks being thrown at the bus stop.
My parents had always told me fighting is not the answer, and I stuck to that while keeping my mouth shut about the bullying, until my little sister got hit in the face with a rock and cut her forehead. Everything came out after that incident, and the teachers didn’t do a freaking thing. My father finally had enough and told me the next time someone messed with me I was to fight back, no matter what. That started a two-year war.
I went home at least once a week suspended for fighting. I got knocked around a bit at first, but quickly learned I had a natural ability for fighting. Things got worse. Instead of fighting one-on-one, it would be three or four of them.
Once I was attacked badly enough that I nearly blacked out. My parents finally saw and broke it all up. Two kids got a talking to from the cops, and nothing more was done. It took actual threats from one of the kids on my parents’ answering machine to have him expelled from school.
Once that jerk got expelled, things calmed down. Fast forward three or four years. We’re in high school. That same jerk is basically a burnout, doesn’t do much, gets suspended, doesn’t show up.
I don’t touch substances, do my homework, and play sports. He pestered me a few times, but nothing too major. I shrugged it off. I was coming into my own in high school, good group of friends, that kind of thing.
To this day, I don’t know what possessed him to do this. A few friends and I were outside at a party our senior year. I’m looking at my friend talking, and he shouts, “Watch out! ” I instinctively try to duck and luckily bring my shoulder up a bit.
I caught a baseball bat to the shoulder, which jumped up and smashed me in the side of the face. I went down to one knee, majorly rattled, but still mostly with it, and turned around to find him holding a bat and looking at me like, “How are you even still conscious? ”
At that point I lose my crap. I came off the floor with a righteous uppercut that knocked him on his bum, then jumped on him and hit him repeatedly until people pulled me away while he feebly tried to block.
The final result was interesting. I ended up with a bruise on the side of my face and shoulder that hurt like hell. I went for X-rays; nothing was broken. He, on the other hand, ended up much, much, much worse.
The cops never got involved, and that was the last time anyone ever messed with me in high school. Fast forward about eight more years. Last I heard, he was on substances and selling them. He sold five kilograms to an undercover cop and is in prison for five to ten years.
It felt good to know that a scumbag like that wasn’t hurting anyone innocent anymore. There’s also a family karma story. I was about eight, and my brother was eleven. He got in trouble for punching a kid in the face on the school bus.
My brother claims he was defending someone else. I don’t really remember it all that clearly. My brother paid the price. He was banned from the bus for a while, faced repercussions at school, and my mom made him apologize to the kid he punched in person.
A couple of months later, the mother of the kid he punched decided to flip the crazy switch and sued my parents for mental anguish, claiming her son now had crippling emotional problems stemming from the incident. She showed up at board meetings, tried to get my brother expelled, painted a picture of my family as shady and my brother as a delinquent and violent. My parents ended up escaping the legal battle with a little dignity intact, but feeling ostracized in our community of ninety people. Fast forward.
I’m now twenty-seven, my brother is thirty. My mom sends a newspaper clipping to him in the mail. It’s the indictment of the crazy mom from our childhood. Come to find out, she’d been embezzling money from her employer for five years, totaling more than fifty thousand dollars.
May have taken two decades, but she finally got what was meant for her. Growing up with racism definitely isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Aside from being bullied yourself, you have to deal with the fact that your siblings or your friends have to deal with the same crap. Nobody deserves it, but it exists.
I imagine seeing that bully as a complete wreck was one of the greatest moments of some people’s lives. Unfortunately, not everyone gets to see their childhood tormentors later down the line. I’ll tell you this, though: I felt amazing when I stood up to my bully in grade nine. How did I do it?
I don’t remember, to be perfectly honest. All I remember was a snarky racist remark. “Shut up, you’re insert-background. You don’t have the right to speak.
”
That’s when I lost it. I mostly remember grabbing him by the shirt and throwing him against a wall. Once he was pinned, I alternated between punching his face and making sure he stayed against the freaking wall. Details are mostly lost to me, but I definitely remember winning that fight.
I was suspended for the rest of the day. He was suspended for three days due to the racist nature of his remark. Possibly one of the greatest turning points in my life. There’s also a true story about getting bullied for roughly seven straight years daily in secondary school.
Kids told me I should pass away. I had my bum beaten, I was emotionally destroyed by everyone who treated me like the most useless, void piece of crap. I felt worthless. I sat at home thinking very dark thoughts a lot.
I always loved art, drawing, and writing. During my adolescence, I retreated to the internet. I didn’t want to go to clubs where those people were, yet I could still talk to people. I started posting animated flash cartoons and comics for critique.
Due to the bullying, I developed a rather sad sensibility toward life and an ability to quickly come back verbally at anyone who wanted to badmouth me. It was a defense mechanism for sure, but the tone showed through in the animations and comics I drew. Through all that, I made friends and eventual co-workers. I now draw a cartoon called Cyanide and Happiness.
The local papers write about me. That school held an assembly in my honor once recently. I was told this by a friend who now works there. I live overseas, and Jonathan Ross comes to hang out with me at Comic-Con every year, and pictures of us appear in the local paper.
My former bullies know all about this. The particularly bad ones now either avoid me in bars or try to be my best mate. And I walk around my hometown beaming. There was one kid in particular who would stand behind me in assembly every morning.
Each year, we were arranged into a line in the main hall, and he’d headbutt me in the back of the head for a laugh. The back of my head was severely bruised for months at a time, and early on it would leave me in tears from the physical pain and the lack of respect. I’d dread every morning. I’d hear them behind me snickering, discussing whether he should do it or not.
I couldn’t turn around to stop them because then I’d get yelled at by the teachers for not paying attention to the front. I’d have my hand at the back of my head to protect myself. I’d hear him say, “Come on, put your hand down. You’re safe.
” I’d eventually relent, and he’d do it anyway. This went on for around two years. That kid is now a hardcore drug addict and doing very poorly in life. Thank you, internet.
A guy I went to high school with friended me on Facebook. He was caught stealing from my house once back then, bragging about it to mutual friends who he thought would not tell me. After the incident, we never spoke, although we had the same circle of friends. I kept my distance.
He kept his. Fast forward twenty years to now, and we’re friends on Facebook. I have a pretty cool job in the music industry, good money, and I travel the world. I usually add these former friends just so they can see my life turned out pretty awesome while most of them are in our old hometown working crappy jobs.
Anyway, he updated his status saying he was devastated that someone stole something from his son, and karma this and blah blah blah. Amongst all the posts from his friends being sorry for him, I simply wrote something like, “Yeah, it’s really terrible when someone steals from you, eh? That must really suck. Karma does have its way of evening things out, though.
” I immediately started getting private messages from mutual friends congratulating me who remembered the incident in school. He unfriended me after that, to my extreme pleasure. My college roommate secretly slept with my boyfriend while I was at class for a year. I routinely took more than a full course load and was in math or science classes every morning.
One day, I walked in on them because class was canceled. I moved out, more angry at her than heartbroken. I lost most of my friends through the breakup. Fast forward five years later, those two throw a crazy expensive engagement party at the guy’s parents’ beach house.
She caught him with one of the waitresses in the bathroom before the toasts. They still got married. I feel a little bad for her despite the karma balance. She feels like she can’t do better than being with a cheater.
He’s rich, though. When I was in high school, I was a small kid. I was also pretty poor, but my parents worked really hard to put me through a private school outside of our neighborhood. That was terrible on two fronts.
I’d be picked on at school for being poor, then picked on in my home neighborhood for being rich. There was a small group that were particularly bad, and I was the smart kid, so I always made it worse for myself. I worked in bars for around three years after high school, eventually ending up in management. We all wear the same outfits, and the only giveaway is the tiny in-ear earpiece that supervisors and managers and security wear.
One night, the douchebags and their groupies walk in. At first, they don’t recognize me. I’ve changed enough since high school and have learned how to dress myself. So they’re buying drinks and generally harmless, and one of them figures out who I am but doesn’t say anything.
Distinctive deep voice. The girls come up to the bar, leaving the boyfriends in the background watching intently. They order a Long Island iced tea, which is something most would be embarrassed to order at this particular bar. I love me a Long Island too.
I’m not a guy who dwells in the past. I don’t really care about people who’ve wronged me in high school because it was so long ago when we were stupid kids. Most are still living with their parents eight years after graduating and hitting on ex-classmates on Facebook anyway. But I was pretty satisfied when one of the girls spat the cocktail out across the bar and accidentally dropped the glass.
She starts asking to talk to my boss and how I shouldn’t be working there, blah blah. I mentioned that it’s impossible to screw up a Long Island, and I wouldn’t be manager if I didn’t know how to make one. Their eyes go dull at that point after hearing the word manager. Slowly, my hand goes for my ear, and I whisper a single word: “Security.
”
The look on their faces will never escape me. Being dragged out of a high-class cocktail lounge when people they knew were all around them had to be an embarrassing experience, and the looks on their faces certainly showed it. One of the boyfriends was yelling constantly at the security guard and was eventually pushed by the face out of the way before being grabbed by another and walked out. The remaining boyfriend separated himself from the others and hung around.
At that point I didn’t care about him. I headed back to let him know he had to leave in a second. I’m at the entrance to the bar ensuring that the women and the irate boyfriend don’t get back in. The irate boyfriend is asking security guards and me to fight him.
I’m getting bored and decide to head back in. Security know what they’re doing, and I turn around just in time to duck and miss a fist from the other boyfriend. I quickly move beyond him, drop my foot into the back of his knees sending him down, as the security guards jump on him and put him in a lock. They are then banned for life from one of the classiest lounges around.
The boyfriend who tried to hit me got to spend the night in a lockup. He later contacted me through Facebook and apologized for that night, but also for how he treated me in high school. Apparently, spending the night in a lockup is something he’d never done before, and it gave him a bit of a wake-up call. My ex-fiancé once hit me while I was pregnant.
He wasn’t the father of my baby. I told him I hoped he got hit by a car. Three days later, I found out he’d been hit by a truck while riding his bicycle to a friend’s house. He survived, but had to have extensive surgery on his bones to save his life.
He was uninsured, so now he’s stuck with crippling hospital debt from being in the ICU and having surgery. I did not have to wait very long for that one. He punched me hard enough that I had to go to the hospital. The cops were called, but it was chalked up as suspicious activity.
Still, he now has some sort of record in the shape of a police report against him. Here’s an example where I waited. From ages seven to twelve, an adult harmed me who lived with his mom. He used to hang out with my dad and pay him to cook food.
This guy was awful. I was forced on several occasions to do inappropriate things, and at the age of twelve, he tried to take advantage of me. He couldn’t finish, and my parents came home, so he stopped. He went to jail later that year.
He stayed in prison for five years. He got out and moved back in with his mom. He saved up and was finally able to buy a house in a nice community. Someone in the neighborhood homeowners association found out he was on the offenders registry.
The HOA rallied and was able to get him evicted. He came crawling back to my family’s home and asked if he could rent the room I had just moved out of. I was visiting at the time and got to see the whole pathetic scene. He apologized for what he did and said he only did it because he was lonely, then proceeded to beg my father to allow him to rent my room.
My father said no and kicked him out of the house. He’s now homeless, spending his time going from hotel room to hotel room and homeless shelters. I waited ten years for this day. Oh, I also found out he was engaged.
When his fiancée found out about his past, she dumped him in a quick second. A girl used to bully me and my brother in elementary and middle school. I hated her. Time passed, and I now co-own a fairly successful up-and-coming restaurant and wine bar.
About this time last year, the same girl comes into my place after about ten years of not seeing each other. She recognizes me, strikes up a friendly conversation. Seems she had forgotten all about the torment, but I hadn’t. She then tells me she has fallen on hard times and needs a job.
Nope. Seeing her face when I said no was incredible. That’s what you get for spreading that rumor that me and my twin brother were in an incestuous relationship. A boy at school was an absolute jerk to me and my group of friends.
I was raised as a fairly introverted kid and gravitated to people of a like mind. He could basically smell the pacifism on us and exploited it to no end. He kicked the crap out of my friends and me every chance he got, humiliated us in front of the class, and basically assigned us to the lowest social rungs for most of our schooling years. The relentless intimidation reduced me to hiding in my shell.
I would prefer to read in the library than play or eat during lunch, lest his roaming bring us into contact again. Without a word of a lie, I read over three hundred novels by the time I finished school, and it sparked a lifelong obsession with literature. Leaving school and going to university led me to become a much more confident person. Fast forward some eight years after school.
One Friday afternoon, he walked into my place of business looking for something we sell. Due to the nature of our business, he revealed that since leaving school, he’d been caught stealing a car, gone to juvenile prison due to age, gotten busted for substance possession, more convictions, and had been living at no fixed address. He’d been at a fairly expensive private school, so it wasn’t exactly a down-on-his-luck situation. He just never once stopped making bad decisions despite the opportunities given to him.
I projected an outwardly professional demeanor, internally gladly and gleefully denied him service, and sent him dejectedly on his way. The best part? He didn’t recognize me. He looked at the man serving him and only saw a man.
I’d grown and changed so much, and he had stayed exactly the same. I have one more story, and it’s also pretty harsh. I wasn’t able to draw any pleasure from it. Short version: I’m living with a woman and working two jobs, one full-time and the other nearly full-time, to put her through flight school so she can get her career started and I can then return to school.
Five months into her first job as a pilot, she meets an aircraft mechanic. She has an affair and tells me she’s leaving. I said, “Screw you. I wanted out way before you.
Good riddance. ” She leaves and gets pregnant within four months. I never wanted children, and I didn’t know she did. Fast forward five years.
She contacts me through a mutual friend and says she really would love to see me and catch up. I agreed to dinner. She arrives forty-five minutes late after already eating at her sister’s home. She’s super anxious and scattered, which is so unlike her character.
Turns out her new man had dumped her and the child. Post-pregnancy, she gained weight, and after three years decided to lose it. Her husband said, “What are you losing weight for? ” She said, “No one.
I gained weight during the pregnancy and I feel fat. Why would you say that? ” His reply: “How did we meet? ” He left her and said, “You take the child and nothing, or I’ll fight you for custody.
” He owns a company and makes a substantial income. So I meet up with her, and she’s a wreck. She’s living in her sister’s basement, not flying. She works with her mother at a minimum wage job she did in high school.
Basically, she’s back at seventeen but with a child and declaring bankruptcy. She only agreed to the dinner so I could gloat about how happy I was and how well my life was going without her. I had a few drinks with her and said I had an early morning and had to leave. She said she never stopped thinking about me and how it felt to be loved the way I loved her.
I told her that’s nice and I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. I had nothing. I was beat. I wanted to gloat and brag and rub crap all in her face for the way I sacrificed my life and all my effort for the life we were supposed to have.
There were years of resentment and anger which simply melted away. All I had for her was pity. She wanted to come home with me, and I said not tonight. A few weeks later, she called me saying she was randomly in my neighborhood with a bottle of wine.
I told her to stop contacting me and have a good life. All the hate and loathing I had for her and the things she did seemed insignificant compared to the place she was in. I moved on and grew and experienced life, and she basically went backward. Seeing her so defeated and ruined didn’t make me pleased.
I simply wanted to forget and leave the past where it was, which sadly she couldn’t do. Karma bit her so badly there was no room for anyone else to enjoy the way things turned out. There’s one more I like. This happened to my uncle, and I still think it’s hilarious every time I hear it.
My uncle is a really, really smart guy, the kind of kid who doesn’t have to try in school at all. Unfortunately, this made one other kid, let’s call him Bob, see my uncle as a target for bullying. He got bullied from basically sixth grade through high school. They parted ways, and my uncle went to UCLA and later UCLA med school.
Fast forward thirty-something years. My uncle is now fifty, and so is his bully. He’s living in the Bay Area when, what do you know, his high school bully is the patient he’s seeing that day. They both recognized each other, but the bully kind of blew it off and acted like they were old chums.
Anyway, Bob came in because he had a little lump in his sack, and after the examination, my uncle, who by the way is an oncologist, gets to tell him he has testicular cancer. Bob reacts by getting angry and saying my uncle is lying because of all the bullying. My uncle tells him it’s for real. Bob gets a second opinion.
Second opinion says the same thing. Bad luck, Bob. To this day, my uncle is still kind of ashamed of himself for finding so much joy in telling him the news. In eighth grade, a kid threw a wooden block at me, probably thinking, “Let’s pick on the punk girl.
That’ll be hysterical. ” I blacked out for a good ten to fifteen seconds after it clocked me in the head. When I came to, he and his friends were all on the ground laughing. I ended up having to go to urgent care and couldn’t participate in gym class for a few days.
His mom was on the school board and had a large role in the financial decisions of the school, so the administration was afraid to punish him and did nothing. My math teacher, who was also this kid’s football coach, made him run extra while everyone else got to take a food or water break. That was the only justice I got. Fast forward two years.
Everyone is freaking out that this guy can’t play football for the JV team that year. He ended up spraining his back and breaking a few ribs from an intoxicated escapade into the woods the week before sophomore year started. And the concussion he sustained from this was severe enough that a second concussion could have caused serious mental damage. Two years isn’t that long of a time, but considering there were witnesses and the kid should have been arrested and suspended at the very least, it seemed like a long time.
In middle school, I knew this juggalo kid named Eric who was a pretty big jerk to me. He was older and had failed a couple grades. Because of his style and the fact that he would show up to school with clown paint, he was known as Clown to most. He pestered me as often as he could, once lighting part of my hair on fire at the skating rink, and he pretty much stole my first girlfriend from me.
He ended up getting expelled for decking an older female teacher in the face. Fast forward to my senior year of high school. I’m hanging out with some friends, and a preview for the nightly news comes on. The top story that night was about a man who committed an unspeakable crime against a very young child who later passed from her injuries.
The Clown is now doing life without parole. Finally, there’s the bus story. A high school bully humiliated me on the bus. It was the last stop, so there was always a lack of seats.
I got on and spotted one empty seat next to someone. I walked over and sat down. He turned to me and said, “I didn’t say you could sit there. ” I replied, “There are no other seats.
” He repeated his previous statement. I just ignored him. Then he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Get the hell out of my seat! ” I was taken aback.
I couldn’t believe he just shouted at me on the bus. Everyone started looking in my direction. I froze, weighing my options. I knew I couldn’t take this guy in a fight.
He was crazy. As I’m still pondering what to do, he shouts again, “I said, get the hell out of my seat! ” Then he kicks me out of the seat. I stand up in the middle of the bus and am met with roaring laughter from all the other kids.
The bully stands up ready to fight, and I just walk away. Even if I could beat him one-on-one, I knew he was the type to come back the next day with five friends. I walked to the back of the bus and sat in the half seat with a mentally challenged kid. I wasn’t about to let things end like that, though.
I started catching the city bus to school instead of the school bus to avoid further humiliation. Things blew over eventually, and everyone forgot about that incident, but I didn’t. I waited until one day I saw that bully on the bus with a grill lighter, smoking grass. He took the grill lighter and smacked the guy next to him in the face with it, and the kid started crying.
I knew this was my chance. I created an anonymous email address and sent an email to my school officials. I told them about the bully smoking grass on the bus and smacking that kid in the face. I made sure not to say anything that could give my identity away.
The school investigated and found the evidence they needed from eyewitness testimonies. That bully was expelled from school, and I was free to ride the bus in peace.