How Can They Honestly Live with Themselves? – Early 2006

Towards the end of the semester, I sat in the gym with all three classes held that period to a couple of friends when, upon hearing evil cackles from behind, I turned around.

There were about six or seven of them, all younger than myself. The average Joe observing this group of individuals would easily be able to tell that they were considered the elite, the high and mighty, the rain forest of social geography. Jocks, cheerleaders, maybe even student government representatives were among that gathering of students. I had no idea, and I sure wasn’t going to climb up the rickety bleachers and ask them, “Excuse me, but aren’t you supposed to be setting an example for society?” I noticed all of them seemed to think very highly of themselves, as usually is the case with these not-so, all-knowing adolescents. These students were always revered, feared, disregarded, or downright despised. I never understood what makes people want to be like them, but to each his own, I guess.

However, one of the boys in the group stood out like Santa Claus in a synagogue. He was not as well-built as the other boys; to be honest, he was borderline chubby. He was not as tall as the other boys. He wore the same expensive clothes, all right, but they did not do him justice. His hair did not achieve the same gravity-defying heights everyone else’s hair reached with ease. He did not – according to the gullible – glow with the aura that attracted everyone to these self-proclaimed “gods.” And he was the only one in the group without a girl – an accessory, really – to put an arm around.

According to comedian Dane Cook, this guy would be a prime example of “the friend that nobody likes,” but I’m not even positive that these people were friends with him in the open, so who really knows why he even hung out with them in the first place.

I don’t even know what he was doing, but it looked like he was singing to some horrid rap song on a borrowed mp3 player. Even though I could not hear him sing, the cackles told everyone in the gym exactly how it was going. This was not innocent laughter among friends, and it certainly was not harmless mockery among classmates. This – to me, at least – was something much worse.

They were making fun of him. And the outsider of the bunch – partially from being an annoying attention-seeker and partially from being a bit oblivious – only sang louder when egged on by the others. In a sense, he was defenseless against them all. He was their plaything, and all of the masters were dying of laughter at his expense. He was embarrassing himself in front of everyone and due to his flaws, there was nothing he could do about it.

At that moment, all of my petty troubles – a looming chemistry test and questioning the actions and motives of a crush, to name a few – went out the window and were just that, petty. I couldn’t believe my eyes or my ears. I’m not naive; I am well-aware of the fact things like that happen everyday. It happened yesterday. It’s probably happening right now. And it will happen again tomorrow.

Sure, I’ve made fun of someone before. Who hasn’t? What I did was harmless fun – basically, the recipient knew that I was joking around with them. What these idiots did was worse, and the reason I know this to be is because I continued to eavesdrop on their conversation when the court jester went to the bathroom. Their prior ridicule was only a warm up to what came next.

“He is, like, so pathetic and retarded.”

“He put up a MySpace bulletin listing me as one of his best friends, and I almost died laughing.”

“That guy is so fat. We should really buy him a bra and put it on his locker. He really needs it.”

As the cretins tried to decide what bra size to buy this boy, my mind wandered off. I felt so bad for the guy. Yes, he is annoying – there’s no denying that, and I’ve been in school with him for a very long time. But this was just plain cruelty.

My blood boiled as I fruitlessly attempted to tune them out. I cannot explain why today in particular I felt so much sympathy for him and fury at the others (well, more than I usually do). Or why I felt so strongly about it. This happened EVERYDAY. Why is today different from all the others?

I wished that I could shake some common sense into the guy once he returned from the bathroom. I wished that I could ask him why he even hung out with them in the first place. I wished that I could go up to the popular crowd up behind me and call them out on their below-the-belt actions; honestly, if you have it set in stone that you are going to make a person’s life a living hell, at least have the decency to do it to his face. And I wished so much that I could gesture the group of teenagers to an invisible audience and say, “Now this is the reason why everyone things that we’re all snobs.”

I gave the group of “snobs” the dirtiest look that I could muster – not like they paid attention to me or anything since I pretty much blend in with the bleachers – while my brain went into overdrive, trying to figure out what was wrong with them. How do they do this day after day and go on with their lives as normally as everyone else? Do they feel guilt, and if they don’t, was it always like that or a gradual change? Do they care about anyone other than themselves? Who put their superego out of whack? Why is it their biggest thrill to humiliate everybody who isn’t an exact replica of their own robotic selves? How do they live with themselves and how are they able to sleep at night?

It must be really nice not to have a heart, I thought, giving my diagnosis.

I would have probably dwelled on this some more, but my friends sitting in front of my broke my train of thought. I almost thanked them for the interruption.

“Do you want to play ping-pong with us?” they asked, for the president of the Ping-Pong club and his followers dispersed from the tables. I agreed and promptly forgot about the entire incident.

Besides, let’s say that I went and told an authoratative figure. They wouldn’t believe me. Why would anyone believe that a trouble-maker was being ridiculed by the pride and joy of the school, especially if it came from the mouth of someone who was nothing more than a statistic?

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Author’s Note: This short story/ramble, although posted in a very early entry of this blog, arrives to its own page as a piece of my writing. Most writers are affected by things in their lives, and this is the case. Wanting to originally send this to Parallax I changed the gender of the victim, but practically everything else is true about this piece. Yes, the girl involved was a complete social disaster, but I could not help but feel bad/sorry for her.

Actually, now that I think about it, the boy is a combination of two people I had a lot of sympathy for at the time, neither which I see now that I’m in college. One is in college himself, the other is assumedly about to graduate. They’ve survived high school, so hopefully college is/will be better for them.

It certainly is for me.