Ever Hear About an Old Schoolfriend Years Later? It’s Crazy What Some End Up Doing

When I was five years old, I was “friends” with a boy for a short time at school. I’ll call him B.

Back then when I was a kid, I’d have described B as “naughty”. Nowadays though, I’d probably use more colourful language.

Our school had a pond on the grounds, which had frogs living in it. He’d often catch them in the playground and kill them by pulling their legs off, so his hands were always covered with warts. They were gross. I didn’t like holding his hand when the teachers made us all pair up to walk the halls.

Once, we found a bird in the playground that’d been mauled by a cat. It was dead or dying. He stamped on it, and its gut squirted out. Noticing the look of disgust on my face, he picked some of the guts up and shoved them in my mouth suddenly, and I was too shocked to stop him. It made me cry. That made him laugh.

Another time, I took my new dinosaur book in for show and tell. Afterward, a kid in my class asked if he could read it, so I let him. B appeared suddenly and demanded I let him read it instead. I told him someone else was reading it first, then he could next. He didn’t like that, so he bit me really hard. That made me cry too.

You might have already guessed, but if you haven’t, this true story doesn’t have a happy ending. Consider this your trigger warning.

Another kid in our class, Freddy, had some kind of learning disability and didn’t really have any friends. One playtime, B dragged me over to the corner of the playground where Freddy was. He always hung out there, alone. Freddy had these different pin badges all over his coat that he liked, I guess he collected them. B tore one of the badges off Freddy’s coat and took it and bent its pin out at an angle. Then he grabbed Freddy’s arm and stabbed the pin into it, hard. It made this deep hole, but weirdly, not much blood came out. It must’ve really hurt him, but Freddy just stood there with this weird look on his face.

It made me realize I hated B.

I wanted him to stop and leave Freddy alone, I didn’t want anyone to think I did it too, not just because I was scared of getting in trouble, but because I knew it was horrible and wrong. But I just stood there like a fucking coward because I was scared of B.

Afterward, B threw the badge over a hedge and walked off.

Later, the teacher asked me what happened and told me she knew it wasn’t me. She just wanted to know where the pin badge was, so I told her.

Not long after that, B moved to another town far away.

Apart from popping into my memory sometimes, I thought nothing of B for the next thirty years.

Then late one night, I heard his name on the television.

His name was not uncommon, so I looked up to see whether it was him. As soon as I saw his face on the screen, I knew it was. His face looked older, but I could still recognise him.

The reason he was on television was that the national news was reporting on what he’d done. B had beaten his six-year-old daughter to death with his bare hands.

The most fucked up thing about hearing that news was that my first thought wasn’t how awful it was, but that it didn’t surprise me much that he would do something like that.

The second most fucked up thing?

It made me realise that people like B who do horrific things like that, although we might call them monsters, they’re not. They’re not some weird boogeymen that live in dark alleyways. They look just like you and me. Like normal people. The people that you pass in the street every day. And while something obviously goes wrong at some point in their lives to make them do the things they do, they were all just children once too.