We moved here when I was 14. I’d heard that it wasn’t easy coming to a new school, but nothing prepared me for how awful it was.
My problems started in PE. The boys’ PE teacher took a very hands off approach to discipline. He didn’t care what happened, just as long as it stopped short of boys killing each other. “Boys will be boys!” he’d say. Thus, the gym was virtually a war zone.
The worst part of PE wasn’t getting hit hard by a dodge ball. It was the other boys bullying me in the showers. They’d make jokes about my body. They regularly snapped me hard with towels. And someone would urinate on me at least twice a week.
I tried skipping the shower. Which resulted in more bullying from the others. “Afraid to shower?” they’d taunt. And Mr. Brown would scream at me that the shower was required. “We don’t want the school smelling like your sweat!” he yelled. Even though PE was the last class of my day, and I went straight home after.
Somehow, I lived through that time. I lived through it, day by day. I lived through it shower by shower.
Even outside PE, my school life was miserable. I had no friends. Everyone knew that associating with me would mean attracting the attention of the boys who bullied me in PE.
Somehow, I managed to survive high school. I had regular thoughts of suicide—but I was always able to stop myself simply thinking of how happy my tormentors would be to learn of my death.
The memories of high school hell raced through my mind as I drove through the detour that day. I was pulled back to the present when I saw a curve coming up. After I went around that curve, I knew I’d see my old high school. I braced myself for what was to come.
After going around the curve, I saw heavy machinery at work, demolishing the school. Soon, there would be no sign whatever that this school had ever existed here.
I just wished that my terrible memories of a terrible past at that school couldn’t be totally demolished, too.