I’m totally a Carrie, guys. No, not from Sex in the City. From the Stephen King book/movie. You know, the girl who kills almost her entire senior class after showing everyone her dirty pillows? That’s me.
Now, I’ve never been named prom queen or been bathed in pig’s blood, and my mom isn’t some crazy Christian zealot that locks me in a closet. Though, I do come from a pretty interesting background. My dad is from Iran and my mom is Mexican and Native American, so I get all the best parts of being a western kid with some of more obscure socially conservative expectations of being brown. Also, my telekinesis is pretty underdeveloped and way delayed, if I’m being completely honest. But it’s there.
Proof:
When I was in the seventh grade, I was in love with a boy named Sven Bort*. He sat in front of me in Mrs. Skaggs’s first hour science class. He had the requisite 90s bowl cut and wore JNCOs and he once came to school bragging about how he stole a Creed CD from the Randy’s M&M’s on Second and Santa Fe. Basically, he was the bad boy after which 13-year-old Marisa would spend her nights pining.
But there was a problem!
I was (and still am, y’all) a super nerd. I was inexplicably achievement-driven. I had to make As. I had to be student of the month. I had to be on the varsity softball team (though, I was never a starter). I also had the unfortunate habit of nerding out before nerding out was a phrase people used. So, I would become obsessed with things–The Hobbit, the WWF (before it was the WWE), and writing short stories where the main character’s stepfather kills her mother by repeatedly bashing her head in with the clawed end of a hammer (I don’t know why, there are just a few notebooks with short stories that have that ending)–until I was sick of them.
So, while Sven was off skateboarding and probably making out with/fingerbanging the popular stoner girls (the social hierarchy had many niches at Sequoyah Middle School), I was in my room reading whichever T.A. Baron-penned Merlin book I had picked up that week at the library, as well as voraciously reading every teen magazine that promised to tell me 1.) how to be a great kisser, 2.) how to know if someone was “THE ONE”, and most importantly, 3.) all the intimate details of Leonardo DiCaprio’s personal life.
This meant our paths only crossed in science class, and on the school bus.
Sven lived in my neighborhood, and one evening, while my then-best friend and I stood in a field that backed up to his backyard, he came outside and began to throw rocks at us. I’m not talking pebbles or decorative river rocks that line your garden. I mean great big honking red rocks that you find in the Oklahoma earth. And he wasn’t so much tossing them at us, as getting a little too into it and flinging them much in the way a thick-thighed German woman would hurl a discus.
We didn’t get hit. We were too far away. But I remember relishing the attention. HEY! SVEN IS PAYING ATTENTION TO ME AND MY FRIZZY HAIR AND MY CROOKED AS HELL GAP TEETH! THIS MUST MEAN HE LOVES ME AND HE’LL PROBABLY ASK ME TO MARRY HIM SOON!
In science class a little later in the year, he turned around to talk to me during a test. He asked me for the answers. You would think that since he was my one true love at the time that I would’ve gladly given him the answers. You’d be wrong. Again, super nerd, and I wasn’t about to do something that was wrong. Rules are rules, and he had just as many opportunities to become familiar with the structure of a cell as I did. He would just have to take the test on his own.
He then called me a bitch. I believe that was the first time anyone had ever done that. (The next time it happened, it was from a 4-year old. I worked at a daycare when I was in high school, and some little shit named Colton liked to kick the teachers in the shins and say “you’re a fucking bitch, teacher.” I like to think he grew up to be a juggalo.)
Anyway, when the next test came around, he asked me again. And rather than have the love of my life call me a bitch one more time, I just gave him the wrong answers. He thought I had legitimately helped him though, because he thanked me a week later when we got our grades back. He had made a D+, so clearly the return on taking the risk of cheating on a test paid off for him.
By the time we got to freshman year of high school, I didn’t see Sven anywhere at all. I was in mostly honors/Pre-AP classes, and I’m pretty sure he was taking classes on rock throwing, or how to know if someone is legitimately helping you cheat on a test. Part of me still had a crush on him, though in the purely physical sense. He was hot. That was all he really had going for him. But the rest of me hated him, and the fact that he was so good looking while basically being king of the turds made me seethe. My malice grew, and I spent way too much time thinking about him, especially since I didn’t see him at all.
Then, it happened.
I was at softball practice when it all went down, but I found out later from my friend, Spam (I’ll explain that someday, but yeah, we call her Spam), that Sven had been hit by a bus after school and that everyone had to walk home that day since the driver was being questioned about the incident.
Immediately, I knew. I did it. My ill will toward him basically manifested itself as the school bus that hit him. I was drunk with power, or at least, pretty stoked.
Before you assume I’m a monster, know that he was fine. He just broke his leg, and his super sexy BMX bike (I love boys on BMX bikes, who even knows why) got pretty smashed up. But he lived, and came back to school within a week.
During his recuperative absence, a cheerleader named Hilda* (who also had dark brown curly hair–only hers wasn’t a massive tuft of frizzy nonsense…that bitch) asked me if I wanted to sign a card they were making for him.
A smug rush of satisfaction made my cheeks flush. I shook my head no. That was my way of rubbing salt in the proverbial wound. I didn’t care if he knew that I thought he should get well soon.
So, it’s been about 14 years since freshman year of high school, and I can say that I haven’t seen Sven Bort at all. Someone told me that they ran into him at the Wolf Trap (bar none the best bar in Edmond, Oklahoma–stop in and play pool with my dad and his friends!) and he had just gotten out of jail for some meth-related activity.
Attending school in one of the richest and whitest suburbs in Oklahoma, I encountered quite a few mean boys and girls. I relish the fact that the girl who called me fat in the first grade is now married to a man who cheats on her. The girls from my middle school softball team who told the popular boys that I did lesbian porn now stand by hot tubs at the state fair and wave as a career. At the very least, the people who have lied to me have some pretty unflattering Facebook pictures. I like to think I helped this. Yet, I only made a bus hit someone once. I haven’t gone all Carrie on someone ever since. But then again, no one else has ever thrown rocks at me.
*Names have been changed to protect those assholes I used to know in middle school.