Out of the Blue
I used to go to a public high school where the majority of students were low to middle-class Italian-origin kids of immigrants. I was not. It was tough going, to say the least, and I used to get bullied by a guy called Renaldo.
Over the years, we had a few scraps, either verbally or fisticuffs. I was always the type of guy who wouldn’t take other people’s shenanigans.
Regardless, even though others balked at giving me a hard time—particularly when I went through puberty and became one of the tallest, largest guys in school—Renaldo somehow always managed to give me a hard time.
But I paid my dues early and learned from a stern father that if people punch you, you punch back harder, and then you’ll know if they are men or not. Then came the twist of fate. As luck would have it, Renaldo and I went to the same college, and he always managed to still be a little jerk to me.
But what made things worse was that we both fell for the same girl, Andrea, who eventually became my girlfriend for over four years. Everyone knew Renaldo had feelings for her, and it shook him to his core that she was with me and not him.
As the son of a wealthy father who owned his own construction company, Renaldo had nice cars, lots of money, and a bunch of things that I didn’t have…things that I—coming from a low-income family that had problems making ends meet—had to work hard to earn over the years.
So, he’d always try to “seduce” Andrea with random calls and emails. Renaldo was a constant issue, and we had several conflicts during the first year of my relationship with Andrea.
Then years later, after college and shortly after I broke up with Andrea, I received an e-mail that shocked me. It was from him and it was out of the blue. It was weird because I’d never corresponded with him before online.
In an epic letter that droned on for far too long and using terrible English (no wonder he never finished college and dropped out to work with daddy), he swore at me in excess and basically just told me, “No one liked you in college, so screw off”.
I hadn’t seen him in well over two years, nor did we have any real friends in common. I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of getting me mad, so to keep my cool, I never responded to his emails (he sent several). But I also couldn’t let his taunting go without any consequences.
So, I went online and Googled his name, and after searching around for a bit, I found just what I needed to exact my revenge. I easily found a complete profile of Renaldo regarding his career, where he worked, and what type of work it was.
His father recently passed, and Renaldo now owned his father’s business and had a team of employees working for him. I spied a bit more and hung onto the address of his place of employment for several weeks while I plotted.
Then an idea came to me. One day, I went into a local adult shop and purchased the largest “toy” I could find. Then I went home, wrote a special note for him, and packaged it all together in a standard box that couldn’t be traced back to me.
I then sent it to Renaldo’s workplace via priority mail, which would require him specifically to sign for it. The note’s message was incredible.
The message read, “Since you have so much time to search out people who never cared about you to begin with, I figured you’d have enough time to go screw yourself with this”!
A few days later, a mutual acquaintance who worked for Renaldo during his “internship” dropped me an email detailing what happened after my package arrived. Apparently, the package arrived while Renaldo and his staff were preparing to head out for a team lunch on a Friday.
He was very excited to open the box because he was expecting that it was something he’d ordered online that would “make it a good weekend”. Then, he opened the box and pulled out…a giant toy. He’d opened it in front of a number of his co-workers. Priceless… chabaz