In High School, I Was Told to Kill Myself

And I hope the boy who said it reads this.

Photo from Unsplash.

When I was in high school I had a playful arch-nemesis. (Let’s call him Gary.) He was a little cute, a lot annoying, and an excellent grindstone for me to sharpen my wits on. We traded quips and tossed insults at each other, and as much as he sometimes burned me up, there was a bit of a flirtationship there, and neither of us took the insults too seriously. I can honestly say that my high school experience wouldn’t have been the same without him because it was fun to have a very public rivalry that we both knew was a bit of a joke. Gary was pretty popular with the jocks and the debate team, I was the de-facto king of the nerds and helped run the school newspaper. The rivalry was fun because we were in no real competition for anything other than GPA.

One day in my sophomore year, I was walking around the classroom barefoot, as I usually did. I was a swimmer, so my regular footwear was flip flops, and I’m not overly fond of wearing shoes to begin with. Gary noticed and immediately piped up “Ewwww, put on some shoes!”

I quipped back with something brilliant along the lines of “I’ll wear shoes if I want to.”

His friend, however, joined in with “Yeah, you should just go kill yourself.” Now, I didn’t really know his friend. We were…