The Butterfly Effect
I went to school with this kid who used to torment me. He was awful. He would shove me down the stairs, hit me with a baseball bat, basically give me bruises and broken bones. He also used to do other awful things to me. I got a brand new NFL coat for Christmas and was wearing it in class. He wrote a horrible word on it with a sharpie, ruining it in the process.
No one did anything about it because 1) I went to a private religious school, 2) His father was the head pastor and school principal, and 3) The school told my parents I used to self-harm. It wasn’t true at all, but when you are 10 and every adult in the system tells your parents that there is something wrong with you, it is difficult to get them to see any different.
Sometime later my parents put me in a different school for unrelated reasons. I start to excel, make lots of friends, no more broken bones, etc. But then the nightmare happens. About a year later the guy shows up because my old school had to shut down. He starts taunting me, telling me he is going to make my life miserable again.
But then later that afternoon, we found out they brought a dog to start doing locker searches. My friend was freaking out about the stage he had…but it gave me an idea. I knew immediately that I wanted to set that guy up. I had the whole class period to think about it. After the bell rang, I caught up to him in the hall and stuffed my friend’s stash in his bag.
We could have just flushed it, threw it out, but I wanted to get back at him. It all happened so fast from there. I didn’t actually get to see it but after lunch he was detained, expelled, and I had no idea what happened to him…until years later. His parents were forced to send him to a boarding school. Only, this started a shocking chain of events.
While he was there, he contracted a serious infection in a minor cut and had to have his leg amputated. While he was at the hospital, his father perished a car accident on his way there to see his son. A friend of mine dated his sister during their senior year when all of this happened. After high school, she said he struggled with a lot of the lingering effects of the amputation.
His health never made strides and she always suspected his guilt over what happened to their father had something to do with it. He is in constant pain, every day, and refuses to walk with crutches or a prosthetic and has confined himself to a wheel chair. In the wake of his father’s passing, he has become even more of a fanatical religious zealot.
He has become vice principal of another private school in the area. She doesn’t speak to him much anymore because he is just too depressing and since his detainment has become an unapologetic jerk.