Laughter roars in my ears.

I glare at my zoology teacher.

I’m aghast at the sight before me.

My inability to comprehend

The sight of teacher turned instigator

Renders me helpless.

The spectacle before me

Is incomprehensible.

The pure callousness of that smirk

Strikes a nerve,

And I am filled with such an intense urge

To forcefully remove it from her face.

I attempt to shake the intensity,

But lack the ability to do so;

The urge is so intense

I feel it consuming my morality

Engulfing me with searing hatred.

I raged inside

But I’m conflicted;

With protecting the loner- gothic boy

Victim of the popular crowd,

And their need to be entertained;

And protecting myself from expulsion.

 

When I returned to high school

After dropping out, junior year,

I was a nineteen year old student

Amongst seventeen year old students,

And younger.

Where their focus was solely the present,

My sole focus was graduation;

Paving a brighter future for me;

A future focused solely on success;

My success…

Which coincided with a behavior contract.

I was adamant,

In relation to my studies

An extremist to the point of insanity.

Anti- social described me almost perfectly;

But, so did eccentricity.

Stereotypically, I was labeled a loner- nerd.

It served a purpose just the same.

 

Presently my stance on popularity

Defies any sense of normality.

It is irrelevant.

To me it’s a pompous idea,

Instilled within a corrupt social mechanism

By bigots

With nothing better to consume their time.

 

Columbine flashed before my mind’s eye

As I became a spectator

To a cruel yet not unusual entertainment.

I was blessed

With immunity to the disease known as popularity.

The immunity brought with it

Empathy.

At that moment in my high school life,

My past revisited me;

All the times I was bullied

Flashed across my eyes

Projecting images of an eight year old child,

Lonely and crying;

Perplexed by her bullies motives.

Reminding me of the suffering inflicted upon me

For their entertainment.

At that moment I decided

It was now or never.

The popular crowd

Would not claim another trophy

In my presence.

 

The principle explained to me

That the popular crowd involved

Was not to blame.

The culprit was the victim.

The popular crowd were outstanding pupils;

And the victim was every teachers’ worst nightmare.

 

The zoology teacher

Must have dug her talons in him;

She and the loner- gothic student

Failed to comprehend the reason for the others existence.

Every class period

Which happened to be the last period of the day,

Erupted into an unnecessary argument

Between the two;

Zoology proved to be my least inspiring class.

 

A girl from the popular crowd “V”,

Was in the midst of it all

She had potential

I wanted to protect her too;

She reminded me of my sister;

Which brought up dreadful memories.

Unable to protect my sister,’

I vowed to protect “V”.

I slipped her name to the principal,

Not so much as punishment’

But rather a second chance;

A chance to redeem herself.

 

The other members of the entourage

Were a lost cause.

They discovered pleasure

In the company of suffering.

 

I walked into a sobbing “V”

She had just left the principal,

She was mortified

That someone thought she was a bully.

Every day after that, the loner- gothic boy

Was treated as an equal.

“V” spoke to him,

Even sat with him

While the others remained silent

And kept their distance.

 

To this day the surprise

In the eyes of the zoology teacher,

When I revealed it was I

Whose lips whispered the sweet truth,

In the ear of the principal,

Ceases to amuse me.

And to this day “V”

Is unaware of my role in the ordeal.

As for the loner- gothic boy,

He was a ticking time bomb,

The wrong move would have set him off

Obliterating any and all innocent bystanders.

I was protecting us all;

Not just him.

I was a silent protector

Performing damage control

And I saw the situation for what it was…

Dangerous, but preventable;

Repairable.

Any righteous human being would have done the same.