I’m not popular at school. My area of town is super upper class, making me the black sheep of the school. And kids are mean. I know, that the truth is it was never really personal. They just found a reason to dislike me, and put all their anger into it.
My particular bully, Skye is the type of bully you’d expect. Shes pretty and athletic and her only real flaw is her unbelievable privilege. Maybe if she’d ever had to work a day in her life, she wouldn’t turned out the way she did.
I walked into class, settling into my seat and putting my head down to rest my eyes for a minute. I whipped around, upon feeling someone tapping my shoulder to see Skye walking away snickering at me. I just turned back around, continuing my little nap.
I, along with being bullied was also shy. I’d never confront her, afraid of the further torment that would follow.
As I was dozing off, waiting for class to start I was quickly jolted awake as the class erupted in giggles. I turned around, feeling my face turn flushed as I met the eyes of the whole class.
“On your back.” The quiet girl, directly behind me whispered sheepishly. I pulled a piece of paper off my back. “Trailer-trash” was written across the paper with a caricature of me drawn poorly. Mortified, I excused myself to the bathroom.
I sat in a stall on my phone, texting my mom telling her I had a stomach ache and needed her to come get me. I wanted to sink into the floor, through the earth’s crust and curl up in its warm center and just sleep forever.
Scribbled across the bathroom door, “RAY IS SUCH A SLUT” The idea came to me, a I grabbed a sharpie out of my bag and wrote “SKYE IS A STANK ASS BITCH.” on the wall of the bathroom. I knew it wouldn’t help anything, but it felt good to take my anger out on something.
I composed myself, and returned to class. The entire room smelt putrid, like something crawled into the walls and died. “God what is that smell? It must be Marie, she probably doesn’t have water running in her trailer home!” Skye remarked, giggling.
The next day, the bullying continued. Including by the boy I had a crush on, Kai. We used to get along really well before Skye spread rumors about me sending nudes to him. Of course, this drove him away from me.
I walked into class, yet, for once the attention was not on me. “Dude, Skye, you reek!” Her best friend, Naomi blurted out covering her mouth. “I’m sitting by Ray, it stinks over here.” The class, for once, erupted with laughter but not at me.
I was in the bathroom, washing my hands later on the day when the same girl who alerted me about the note on my back stomped into the restroom. She was paper thin, and so pale she was almost translucent. Her appearance was all to similar to a ghost, and I wondered deeply how she was never targeted or bullied either.
I could her the squeaks of her sharpie, as she furiously wrote on the wall, sniffling. Moments later, she came out puffy eyed. Once she left, out of curiosity, I peeked into the stall. “SKYE IS A WORM.”
I laugh softly, the insult was sort of funny. I wonder what Skye did, as I never knew they had any sort of complications let alone even acknowledged each other’s existence.
Screams blare from my classroom right as I step into it, everyone crowded something in the corner of the room. I notice her, the quiet girl Leah stood in the opposite corner of the room watching silently. Eerily unbothered.
I step into the crowd, getting a better look at what it was they were all staring at. On the floor, was a worm the size of a cat or dog. It writhed and wriggled around, emitting wet slopping sounds as it did so. A girl stepped back, bumping into me and another guy before throwing up on the floor right in front of me.
The worm lurched forward, suctioning itself onto Ayden, Skye’s boyfriend. He wailed, kicking his leg back and forth. “Shit, guys get this thing off me holy fuck!” He yelped, falling to the floor.
“She really is a parasite.” A soft whisper came from behind me. And that’s when it hit me, I turned around, face to face with Leah. I pushed her to the side, making my way through the small crowd and rushed into the bathrooms, wetting a paper towel and scrubbing the marker off the wall.
It took me a good few minutes, before it was totally gone. I panted, and sat down on the toilet afraid to go back to class and face it again, if it hadn’t worked.
The stall door opened, and Leah stood in front of me. “Oh my god, you knew didn’t you?” I scream.
“Mhm. I did. Sort of, I guess. I didn’t know if that would work, exactly. But I’ve used the wall before.” She said, stepping into the stall and closing the door behind her.
“Wait– please don’t do anything to me, I won’t tell anyone I really wont–” I begged, watching her pull a sharpie out of her pocket and begin to scribble something vigorously on the wall. She raised her two bony fingers to her lips, shhing me and winking.
She turned and left the stall, without saying another word revealing what she’d wrote. “No one can save you.”
Those words sunk deeply into my mind, as I recounted the torture she’d put me through. The mental torment, as she slowly and meticulously derived plans to isolate me from everyone. The after school beatings that no matter how much I’d report, they’d go unnoticed due to her “bright future.” I thought of every student who aided her in her bullying, who turned a blind eye, who watched her beat me.
I then thought of my mother, at home drunk on the couch with an empty pill bottle at her side barely alive and my father in some new city with some new girl in some new apartment, with an eviction notice hanging from his door.
“SKYE IS A PIG FACE, AYDEN IS A COWFACE, NAOMI IS A RAT FACE, KAI IS A DOG FACE,” and I continued my list, as I listened to distorted versions of snorts, moos, squeaks, barks, meows, a grotesque mix of human screaming and animal.
I believe I am doing them a favor. There is no place for any of us in the world, I truly believe. I think we are all evil. And I won’t stop until every last one of us is what we were supposed to be from the very begining, savage animals.