I used to hate my high school.
And I don’t mean that in the way normal kids sometimes say they hated school. I hated it the way few kids my age could hate anything. I came to believe the high school I went to was designed to punish certain individuals - people like me - who didn’t fit the definition of what was considered acceptable.
My experience at the school in question began soon after I turned fifteen. My parents split up around this time, and I moved with my father over to live in a somewhat remote town within Arizona. I was still struggling to cope with my parents divorce, which had occurred suddenly and abruptly enough to turn my life completely upside down. Given I was already dealing with anxiety, depression, and general emotional instability, I didn’t handle my parents separation, or the subsequent moving between states, particularly well.
My dad had secured a high profile job as a manager at a local specialized jewellery manufacturing business. My father, who had been emotionally distant before the divorce, seemed to now sometimes forget he was supposed to be a parent at all, and left me to take care of myself most of the time. I wasn’t going to get much sympathy from his end about the emotional issues my parents left me with. My mom was going through her own problems, which apparently left her unable to speak to me, let alone offer any kind of help or support.
I resumed my sophomore year at a well known and reputable high school for the area. It was, in many ways, very different from the place I previously attended. It was louder and more crowded. People there dressed differently and acted differently. The atmosphere of the school was harsh - almost oppressive, and stifling.
I felt instantly self conscious on my first day as I walked in through the school gates. With my carelessly thrown together appearance being glaringly out of place in the well dressed crowd, I was sure I must have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Certainly, it didn’t feel like the fresh start I’d been hoping for.
I began at the new high school with my twin sister, Grace. Grace - despite being my twin, in a lot of ways, was my complete opposite. She was pretty, popular, extraverted and confident. She didn’t act half as phased at the challenges our family faced as I did. She just kind of accepted them, taking each one in stride, like she did with most difficult things in her life.
I guess it’s kind of surprising that me and Grace got along, since we were so different, but we had a good relationship. I think I was just lucky to get a sister who wasn’t as miserable and self absorbed as I was half the time. She always seemed to know what to say if I was feeling down, and she was always there to lend an ear if I needed someone to talk to, even if she rarely had any idea what to say to help. She was, to be honest, one of the few positive things in my life, and one of the only people I was able to be emotionally close with at the time.
Being her brother, I always felt somewhat protective of her. She was usually too busy looking out for others to take the time to look out for herself.
Grace was beautiful for her age. Like me, her appearance made her stand out at school - though in a much more appealing way than my looks did for me. With her dark hair, almond eyes, and creamy complexion, she had a kind of striking beauty which immediately attracted the attention of quite a lot of guys at the school.
Among these guys was Dylan. A boy in our year, he possessed good looks, rich parents, and almost endless talents. He practically exuded self confidence and charisma. He was the type of guy who was used to getting everyone he wanted to like him.
Well, almost everyone. I didn’t like him from the start, and as it turned out, he didn’t like me much, either.
I’d seen past Dylan’s façade pretty quickly. To be honest, I had known a couple of guys like him at my old high school. If there was one thing I learned about them, it was how they didn’t truly care about anyone besides themselves.
I didn’t want him to lure in and then toss away my sister like a tool, an object of his desire, like I noticed he did with other girls, and I’d heard he planned to do with her. She deserved better than to end up taken advantage of by someone like him.
I told Dylan he should stay away from her myself, in an uncharacteristic attempt at being confrontational. Dylan didn’t react too well to this, and he told me, quite threateningly, to mind my own business.
I told Grace a couple of times what kind of person I believed Dylan was based on the way he acted around other girls - and toward me, and advised her to be careful around him. Though I’m pretty sure she could see what I was saying on her own anyway.
When Grace rejected Dylan’s numerous advances toward her, he hadn’t acted pissed. He sort of laughed it off and made a big deal out of being a gentleman about it. But he was pissed. Dylan definitely wasn’t the kind of guy who reacted well to not getting his way.
Dylan hadn’t been able to accept that Grace just wasn’t attracted to him. Instead, he had decided I was the reason that Grace had rejected him, that I had turned Grace against him.
To be fair, he was partly correct.
I should also mention, Dylan’s dad was the sheriff of the town, a position which gave him quite a lot of power and influence. Dylan frequently used this to his advantage. He was widely known for getting himself and his friends out of almost any kind of trouble. He understood all too well he could get away with almost anything. He would sometimes boast about how his status made him above the rules. It didn’t prove he was a terrible person, but it was more proof I was right about Dylan’s intentions toward my sister, and it would be more important for him later on.
I think there were a couple of events which further encouraged Dylan to target me as frequently as he would do. For instance, he was clearly very pissed when I got paired up with him in a science class and my work didn’t match up to his standards. Another time I had gotten his friends into trouble for smoking cigarettes right outside of the school. Little things like that, they had helped seal my fate in what was soon to come.
Dylan - and after him, the larger part of his wide circle of friends and people in his clique, punished me for my actions by doing their best to make my life at school a literal, unforgiving hell.
Dylan himself wasn’t your typical kind of bully. If he could, he preferred not to get his own hands dirty. He had plenty of other people for that. What Dylan did was, he made as many people hate me as he could, through whatever means he possessed at his disposal. Lies, rumours, manipulation, or just outright bullying because I was different. Whatever worked.
For me, the targeting began from Dylan’s friends. Rumours I was a creep, someone with social issues who had been expelled from a previous school due to repeated inappropriate behaviour. He claimed it got to a point where my parents had trouble finding another school willing to accept me, and I’d even contributed to my parents’ marriage problems.
It wasn’t hard for most of them to take hold, given I was already unpopular, and somewhat of a social outcast, struggling to make any friends. I had also moved through a couple of schools due to less serious issues. The other stories I heard similarly had a seed of truth - or falsified evidence - to support them.
Soon enough, Dylan started discussing my apparent ‘disability’ with anyone who would listen and told everyone he could that I wasn’t mentally fit to be attending a regular school.
I just tried to ignore all of it. I hoped, after a while, Dylan would get bored of tormenting me and move on to single out someone else.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Soon even this form of humiliation wasn’t enough to satisfy him, and the lies he thought up became more sadistic and twisted.
One time, Dylan sought to have people believe I was a pervert who spied on and took compromising pictures of girls. This claim was evidenced by the fact I carried a camera around for a day, which I was planning to use for a school assignment. Apparently, Dylan had caught me trying to sneak into the girl’s bathrooms with it at some point and confronted me about it. Of course, this was totally made up, but not a lot of people wanted to hear me, the weird, awkward loner, trying to defend myself from the popular chad guy who everybody liked and looked up to. The evidence was flimsy, but the people presenting it were what really mattered.
For those who didn’t believe these types of lies, none dared question them or call them out for what they were, for fear of drawing Dylan’s attention on themselves.
Seeing the effectiveness of this new theme, he and a few of his close friends proceeded to create fake accounts online, through which they themselves acted like creeps, targeting random girls attending the school with inappropriate comments and other forms of harassment. They then claimed this as further evidence of me being a stalker and a pervert. Dylan used this to expose me publicly, presenting me in the worst way he was able to with the falsified information.
At that point, Dylan himself didn’t have to do much more work. He’d succeeded in destroying my social image enough that people would continue hating and bullying me from then on without any further needed encouragement.
When I tried to stand up for myself, I was labelled as a liar and a manipulator. When I got angry, it was used as evidence of my ‘mental issues’ and my ‘instability’. No matter what I said, my words would be turned against me. There was nothing I could do to escape the image Dylan created for me.
I suspected even the teachers started to buy into the image which now defined me. They certainly became very quick to get me into trouble, or pick on me during classes. On more than one occasion, I was sure a few particularly unpleasant teachers went out of their way to embarrass me in a class for their own and other other more respected students’ personal amusement.
It wasn’t only the hate which got to me, though. Besides hating me, many more people liked to have a figure to look at and remind themselves they were better than, placing themselves on a pedestal above them. I happened to be unlucky enough to turn into a well used target for this activity. An unpopular or unliked individual at the school could always rely on making a joke at my expense to earn a few laughs, or a bit of praise for their actions.
Dylan and his close friends - and whoever else felt like joining in at the time - ended up making sure there was absolutely no chance of me making any friends. He managed to turn me into a social freak and a pariah through his efforts to make enough other people hate me.
My relationship with my sister was beginning to suffer as a result of all this. She initially tried to defend me from what rumours she heard being spread about me. There was only so much she could do, though. She started to be singled out too when she took my side, though perhaps to a lesser degree, and Dylan made sure she understood I was to blame for it.
That was another thing he did; actively working to sabotage the one good remaining relationship in my life. And it was working. At school, me and Grace were becoming more distant, and in general I was becoming more closed off to her, not wanting her to see any more of the kind of person Dylan made everyone think I was. I thought, at least, she might be left alone if Dylan saw he’d succeeded in ruining our relationship like he wanted to.
Grace was later offered a place at a performing arts school near the end of the school year and she’d decided to accept the offer. It would mean she was safe from Dylan. But it would also act to further solidify the distance forming between us.
My sophomore year started off with various people ‘accidentally’ tripping me in the hallways in between classes, shoving past me on their way up the stairs, or, if they were feeling particularly self righteous, throwing rubbish and used food wrappers at me in the corridors.
I read through a list of abusive Facebook messages each day about what a horrible person I was, telling me to leave the school, telling me to go kill myself, even sending me occasional threats. I don’t know why I kept looking through them. I guess I kept hoping one person, just one, might be on my side, might choose to question all the lies and assumptions people - now a whole list of people - were ceaselessly using to attack me.
If there were, I certainly didn’t see them. The things I heard about me were becoming so popular they weren’t entirely restricted to the inside of the school anymore.
I became even more withdrawn, more convinced of my own complete self worthlessness and more full of self hatred with each passing day. The nightmare I endured within the school, along with a lack of any friends outside of it, and my family issues all combined together to deteriorate my mental state to a low below anything I’d ever experienced previously.
This was the state of mind I was in when I first met my future friend, Casper. Depressed, angry, feeling like my whole life was steadily falling apart around me, convinced I had no real future. But Casper, he understood all of that. Casper had been Dylan’s favourite victim before I arrived at the school. Dylan used similar tactics with Casper which he did with me, and he’d quite possibly had an even worse experience with him and his friends than I did.
‘You’re sure pretty insecure for someone who likes acting so tough.’
Casper muttered those words as three of Dylan’s close buddies; Max, Lochlan, and Taylor were walking away. This was right after they shoved him down and shouted various threats at him for having made Max’s girlfriend laugh at a clever joke he made during their previous class.
I had happened to be nearby at the time, waiting for the same class as Casper was as this happened, and had let out a stifled chuckle in response to his muttered comment.
Apparently, neither of us were quiet enough. Max, the tallest and largest of the three, spun around and marched toward us, an action quickly echoed by each of his friends.
‘Want to repeat that to me again?’ Max demanded us, his mouth peeling back in a snarl. I could smell the stink of cigarette smoke on his breath as he stalked close enough.
Casper, to his credit, didn’t back down. He eyeballed Max coolly. Around us, the other students nearby retreated slightly as they observed in solemn silence.
‘I can’t believe someone hasn’t kicked you both out of this school yet. You’re disgusting,’ Max spat. Casper’s comment, apparently, had hit a little too close to home for him.
Max subsequently left both of us that day with lightly bruised faces.
About a month or so after that, I allowed Casper to copy my math homework during one lesson, when he claimed he would get into trouble if he didn’t get it handed in by the end of the class. Casper had seemed almost a little surprised when I actually let him. He had thanked me, and, at the conclusion of the lesson, he and I ended up sitting together in the cafeteria at lunch. It had been the first time I could remember anyone specifically wanting to sit with me; the first time anyone sat with me at all since at least the beginning of the year.
We became instant friends. Casper was surprisingly likable, when I got to know him. He was funny, insightful, and easy to talk to. We bonded over common interests and backgrounds, with both of us engaging in a similar lonely lifestyle and both having divorced parents. Even more than that, we bonded over how much we hated the school, and in particular, the clique of popular and privileged kids Dylan was a part of.
Like I said before, Casper had it almost worse than I did. One time early during our friendship, I remember him telling me a story about how he was caught by some of Dylan’s friends while walking home along the edge of the woods. They shoved him to the ground, hard, and started interrogating and then attacking him, all because Dylan fabricated a completely false story about Casper sending inappropriate pictures and messages to another guy’s girlfriend over Facebook.
The only reason they didn’t hurt him worse was because they thought they saw something, someone, in the woods as they were getting into hitting him, and they ran away in fear of getting caught.
Casper had to go to hospital to get one of his legs stitched up from the fall they caused him. They’d given him a minor concussion, too. He hadn’t told anyone what really happened because he expected to get into trouble for the things Dylan falsely accused him of. I wish I could say he was being overly pessimistic, but I understood by then from my own experiences my friend was probably right.
With neither of us being able to make many, if any, other friends at school, we spent a lot of time together, first inside and then also outside of school. We became close fairly quickly.
Casper and I didn’t exactly have the healthiest relationship, from the beginning. I understand looking back we were both stuck in a very depressed and angry state of mind and it reflected in our conversations, in which we often traded disturbing or inappropriate jokes, offensive comments about other students or people we knew, and whatever dark takes we had for what was currently going on in our lives or the wider world. Casper and I would also frequently dare each other into doing stupid and often self destructive things: stealing, drinking, provocative pranks, whatever entertained us the most in the moment. We got into trouble a fair bit, but that didn’t bother us much. It wasn’t like either of us figured we had anything to lose. We were just embracing a small part of the image which had been created for us by others at the school.