Sweet Memery
"What is the worst crime you have ever been accused of by an authority figure, regardless of guilt?"
I don't even need to cut this: assaulting and nearly crippling somebody.
I had done the first, I hadn't done the second. I was in middle school, and was a target because everyone wants to bring down the big guy (I was only about 2 or 3 inches shorter than I am currently). A young man dogged my heels all the way from the locker room to the cafeteria after gym class, hurling every insult he could think of for no apparent reason except that he was around thirteen years old; after one arrow too many, I spun around and I picked up him by his shirt collar and told him to leave me the fuck alone.
He did. Instead of insulting me, he told the eighth-grade dean that I had attacked him. The dean found me the next day while I was waiting in line for lunch, walked up to me in front of everybody (including what I would have loosely termed my best friend) and told me I had shaken a kid and almost broken his neck, and that that "sounded like expulsion to me".
Recently, I learned that the entire staff of that school tried very, very hard to expel me, on the grounds that I was a bully. That would explain why the seven or eight complaints I made about people constantly making fun of me during math class, gym class, history class, and lunch never received an answer.
I don't even need to cut this: assaulting and nearly crippling somebody.
I had done the first, I hadn't done the second. I was in middle school, and was a target because everyone wants to bring down the big guy (I was only about 2 or 3 inches shorter than I am currently). A young man dogged my heels all the way from the locker room to the cafeteria after gym class, hurling every insult he could think of for no apparent reason except that he was around thirteen years old; after one arrow too many, I spun around and I picked up him by his shirt collar and told him to leave me the fuck alone.
He did. Instead of insulting me, he told the eighth-grade dean that I had attacked him. The dean found me the next day while I was waiting in line for lunch, walked up to me in front of everybody (including what I would have loosely termed my best friend) and told me I had shaken a kid and almost broken his neck, and that that "sounded like expulsion to me".
Recently, I learned that the entire staff of that school tried very, very hard to expel me, on the grounds that I was a bully. That would explain why the seven or eight complaints I made about people constantly making fun of me during math class, gym class, history class, and lunch never received an answer.