we may all eventually leave high school, but i don’t think high school ever really leaves us. here i am about to start my third year at university and i’m still encountering people — menacing, immature people — from high school. people living around me who still do stupid high school things, and i’m sick of it. these are people i graduated with, people i hardly talked to let alone forged any sort of animosity with, yet i came face to face with them last night as they carried out an act of vandalism on my family’s property.

what angers me the most is that they appear to have a personal grudge against me, as this is not the first time this has happened. but i don’t even know them; i’ve talked, maybe what, five times with them during my five years at high school. i never uttered a slight insult to them, never a disagreeable word. and, still, at almost twenty-one years of age they’re skulking behind bushes and shrubbery, carrying out various forms of neighbourhood harassment.

i’m usually a pretty meek and submissive person, i’ll admit that. but last night, when i saw them poking their heads around the corner, delighting in their handiwork, i felt a surge of confidence that made me call to them, telling them to come over and face me in person. one guy managed the gall to walk over to me, pretending he didn’t know me. (fuck yeah, you know me! i graduated with you, dipshit!) i refrained from swearing, which is hard for me to do, and instead attempted to calmly put them in their place, telling them this has been going on for a while and i have a pretty good idea that they have been behind it all. i’m not sure if i was able to get through to them (it probably didn’t strike a chord in their cold hearts), even with what i believed to be a pretty forbearing performance on my part; considering the circumstances, i think i would have been perfectly justified if i tarred and feathered them. i felt like friggin’ sherlock holmes: i heard the loud noise, i stood in the middle of the street and saw the suspect, forced him to speak to me, looked him straight in the eye and began interrogating him in a relatively calm manner (i.e., tears did not spill down my face). he even pretended to be looking for a friend, didn’t give any explanation as to why he and his buddies were hiding behind bushes at two in the morning, and then used my name after he claimed he didn’t know me.

i could have called the police, i could have walked around the corner and most likely seen a few more high school faces, but i didn’t. i don’t want to settle things that way; i want them to see just how ridiculous they are without beseeching the authorities. if it happens again, i’m honestly not sure what i will do. i know where they live, i could just do the exact same thing to them, but i know i probably wouldn’t. it comes down to human decency, which is a quality i am not so certain they possess.

i never thought i would feel the way i felt last night. in all my years at high school, i was never picked on, never teased, never cast out. i feel personally insulted that someone, whom i hardly know and to whom i’m connected only through fading high school ties, would come to my house and try to mess with any part of it. i’ve lived in my house all my life, and never have i had to worry about what someone would do to it. and it’s not just me who’s being affected, it’s my family: it’s my parents and sisters who don’t even know these people who are also experiencing this belated high school hazing. it’s been almost three years since i graduated from high school and i’m just now starting to understand how someone who has been socially trampled on for years can walk in with a shotgun and start firing.