I’d always hated Merrisa.


I had a rough childhood. I’m an orphan. My parents died in a car crash when I was three. I moved around from foster home to foster home all the time. Some people were nice, genuinely caring for me. Some people were not so nice, yelling at me, and hitting me for the time I was with them. When they did that, I had done my best to cause as much trouble as I could so they wouldn’t want me anymore. I tended to end up with more of these people. Either way, I wasn’t with a family for more than a month, before they passed me along.

I didn'tneed a bully on top of all that. I mean, come on. Why was I always the one with the bad luck?

She and I knew each other from when we were both four. She took an instant loathing to me. Don’t ask me why. I guess some people are just like that. Need someone weaker to pick on to make themselves feel better, maybe. I don’t know.

She liked to tease and make fun of me. When ever anybody even attempted to be nice to me, or be my friend, she shot them down. Apparently, I wasn’t good enough for her for me to have friends.

I hated her; why did she have to make my life so miserable? Wasn’t life bad enough? Why did she have to be so mean? I had never done anything to her!


We went on to middle school, and of course, the taunting followed.

As we got older, people started to change. What they wore. How they acted. What they said.

Why did you need to change everything about yourself to get people to like you? Was being yourself not good enough? I didn'tget it. So I didn'tgo with the flow, and did what I’d always done, dressed like I always dressed, acted like I’d always acted. I didn'tfeel this dire urge to change my entire lifestyle just to please people who didn'teven really like me. And I guess that didn'tgo well with everyone.

Merrisa was the most popular girl in the eighth grade, and I had never fit in with her narcissistic band of feeble-minded cronies who did what ever she said. Yeah, so I wasn’t a blonde, peppy idiot. Sue me.

Because I wasn’t like everyone else, I was always the lone man; the odd girl out. I was quiet and bookish and shy and I had a slight stutter. So what? That didn'tmean I had to be isolated.

I didn'tfit Merrisa’s “status quo”, and you know what? I didn'tthink I really wanted to either.

Now, for Merrisa, all it seemed was that she needed a better excuse to be extra vicious to me. She didn'thave to wait long for one.

Like it seems with all stereotypical mean girls, Merrisa wasn’t very smart. Too busy being mean and pretty, I supposed. To be blunt, she was an idiot. Evil, devious, and cunning, yes. Book-smart? No.

It was the last test of our mid-term finals. Worth a whole flotilla of points. Super important.

Merrisa cheated on it.

Somehow, she got her evil and perfectly manicured hands on a copy of test answers. Beats me how she did it. I sat next to her in that particular class. Just my good-luck working again, I supposed. I dropped my pen when I was putting it back in my backpack. I leaned over to grab it. Since the class was about to be over, and everyone was done with the final, the teacher had given us a free five minutes. Merrisa was over with her friends doing who knows what. Her bag was open next to mine. While I groped for my pen, I looked over at her bag. The sheet was lying on top of it. I, as subtly as I could, reached over to grab it. I shoved it in my bag, because the numbers and such on it looked suspiciously like the answers I had just put down on my test.

In the hallway, I looked at it. It was an answer key for the final! So on free period, I had snuck down to the office and ratted Merrisa out. It had only seemed fair to me, that she paid the consequences for cheating on the final and bullying me.

She was suspended for a week, and she had gotten a big, fat, red F on her final.

Somehow she figured out it was me that snitched. Or she just wanted someone to blame if she never really knew who did it.

She made my life a living hell after that.

Every day I was welcomed into the school halls with, “Hey, what’s up, Special!” or “Hey, why don’t you talk right, are you too mentally retarded?” or “Shut up, idiot, you’re too messed up in the head to make an intelligible thought, let alone a word.”

I never told anybody. Teachers ignored me, foster parents didn'tcare. I didn'thave anybody TO tell. And I had known that even if I got the courage to speak up, the bullying would get worse, or nobody would believe me. I had spoken up the last time, and see what good it had done me.

Nobody ever stood up in my defense, either. Because everyone had known that they would get the same treatment as I got if they did.

So I took it, quietly. Didn’t complain. It would only get worse if I did. I told myself that I was better than them, that they would be answering to me someday. This little pep talk didn'tdo much, but to me, it seemed like something that had to be done to prevent me from going insane.

It was senior year that everything changed.


His name was Cody Hallot. He was a new student. Didn’t take crap from anybody. He was the only one who decided to be my friend. He was nice, and thoughtful, and would never tease me like everyone else. We became best friends, doing everything together. And then I fell in love with him.

We dated a steady eight months. He didn'tcare that people teased him, telling him he was dating “Retarded Girl”. He defended me whenever he was around and people taunted me. He knew that I was too shy to stand up for myself, and he was okay with that.
Everything was perfect. Until Merrisa took it too far.

One day after school, Merrisa and two of her friends approached me on my walk home. She taunted me in her usual way, calling me names, saying I was stupid, ugly, fat, blah blah blah. I was trying to get away when she told me, and added a whole new level of pain to the conversation.

“It’s just too bad that Cody stoops to the level of being your boyfriend. He’s SUCH a great kisser.” She told me. I had whirled around. There is no way, I had thought, she was just trying to rile me up. Well, consider me riled up.

“What?” I said as icily as I could.

“Oh, is Mrs. Retard getting hostile? Didn’t he tell you? Two weeks ago, we made out in my room.” I stepped back in shock. “And you know what? He kissed ME.” she whispered, obviously enjoying herself. Something in me snapped then, irreparably. I had finally broke my limits, been pushed over the edge. She smirked and turned to walk away.

When I stepped forward, she turned around and said, “Want to say something, Special?” When I didn'tsay anything she laughs. “Thought not,” Still laughing, I punch her in the face as hard as I can. No, there was no shy, little bullied girl left in me. In fact, I didn'teven recognize myself. All I knew was that this, this, ABOMINATION, was the reason of my suffering and therefore had to suffer herself.

“You WITCH! You ruined EVERYTHING! You ruined my entire life, and I’m SICK OF IT!” I screamed at her. Touching her bloody nose she snarled, and slapped me. I pulled her hair. She punched my stomach. She grabbed my arm, and twisted behind my back as hard as she could.

SNAP.

She broke my arm. Trying not to vomit/scream, I staggered back. But she wasn’t done with me yet. With the help of her friend, she threw me on the ground, and I hit my head on the sidewalk. I could feel my head bleeding, badly.

She turned around, obviously through with me. Thirteen years of bullying, and now she went too far. She had really injured me, but I didn'tcare. I use my good hand to reach into my pocket and grab my pocket knife. On the verge of unconsciousness, I didn'ttake time to think through all the bad ideas of doing this. But the monster inside me, the monster that had just been set free, didn'tcare. That monster threw the knife at Merrisa and it buried itself in her back. She stiffened, and fell to the ground. I had time for the monster to dissipate, and think, Oh my god, what did I just do, before I blacked out completely.



I woke up in the nearby hospital two days later. My arm was broken and I had a minor concussion.

I had then found out that Merrisa was dead. The pocket knife hit the bottom of her lung and she bled to death internally, dying in her sleep.

They didn'tpress charges on me. One of the friends had videotaped the entire encounter with her phone, and when they had reviewed it, my actions were put to ‘extreme self-defense’. Because I had been hurt so badly, people assumed I was trying to get her back.

I didn'tmean to…..kill her. Yes, I had hated her guts, and during particularly bad times I had thought to myself I wish she was dead, but I didn'treally mean it, did I? I know I didn’t, but I knew that that little monster inside me had enjoyed punishing the girl who made my existence horrible. It enjoyed her being dead, that miniscule part of me telling the main that it was her consequence. But for the most part, the me, was very upset about it.

That same, small, nagging part of me told me the world was better off without her.


I was now, I had thought numbly to myself, a murderer.


It may have been accidental, it may have been self defense, and she may have even deserved it just the tiniest bit.

But I still killed her.

I wish I knew why she hated me so much, why she teased and bullied and taunted me, called me names. I never got to find out, because I was too scared. And that scared little me had killed her. Maybe, if I had found out, and stopped it, she wouldn’t be dead right now.

And, what scared me the most, was that if I was able to hurt her, kill her because she bullied me, that that kind of monster was pulled out of me, is that who knows what other kids being bullied would do to their tormentors.