Two friends and I used to have this newspaper, Arbeiter Zeitung. It was an underground paper, founded because we hated our school newspaper (grammatical and factual errors galore; when a new issue came out, we would highlight the errors just to see all the yellow when the pages were flipped). The idea of this paper came from Jackass*, whose cousin has a similar paper at his school. He specifically approached Loverboy and me, saying “no one else has as much cynicism as [us] two.” So the three of us wrote the first issue, and all was good, save an argument about how a friend of Jackass should get to be an editor too, despite the fact that he didn’t write anything at all for this paper. The first issue went over really well with the students.
That was at the end of last year. At the beginning of this year, we got together to write another issue. This time, Jackass let his friends that he met over the summer write articles, even though they didn’t go to our school. I didn’t have much of a problem with that. Jackass also wanted to include pictures of himself smoking shisha, which is apparently legal tobacco. He thought people would find the pictures “outrageous” in a good way. I thought that people would either not care or figure that Jackass would do something like that. To avoid problems with the administration, Jackass included a note saying how it was perfectly legal and all. However, if this tobacco was legal, what makes him such a badass for smoking it? Why would people find that outrageous when probably a good third of my school smokes illegal stuff? I fought him about that for a while, until it turned out we had enough material that the pictures couldn’t be included.
Loverboy’s mom knows the owner of a local press, so he was able to get us a discount. He delivered the second issue to be printed, and consequently had to pay for it up front. He was supposed to be repaid by everyone (everyone being the friends of Jackass…he started adding whoever he wanted to the editorial staff, and I stopped fighting him on it because it was getting tiring); however, there are still people who owe Loverboy money (and it’s more than a month after the second issue was printed). The second issue came out, and it too was a big success. I heard a day later, though, that Jackass was telling people that I was only on the editorial staff because I was Loverboy’s girlfriend, which is NOT TRUE at all–Jackass approached me at the same time as Loverboy! So I became even more pissed off at Jackass.
After a weekend of shitty events, I started a fight with Jackass. (A former teacher of his came up to me and told me that he liked our paper, except that Jackass had an incredibly inflated ego. I thought it was hilarious that a teacher would say something like that to a student. Good ole Mr. F! Anyway, I mentioned it to Jackass, which was probably a mistake, but it seemed so deliciously stress-relieving at the time.)
Another friend of mine served as the liaison between Jackass and myself, since Jackass stopped talking to me. He mentioned that Jackass kicked me off the paper (thanks for telling me yourself, Jackass) and recruited a friend of his to write a FUB-bashing article. I wasn’t too worried, since I figured that Loverboy was still on the paper and would make sure that nothing bad about me would get published. (Even if they decided to kick Loverboy off the paper for some stupid reason, he got the discount from the press so the paper would pass through his hands before getting published.)
Scratch that last parenthetical comment. Jackass et al went behind Loverboy’s back to write a new issue and sent it to the press on Friday. It should be ready for distribution on Wednesday. I want to get back at Jackass for all of the shit he’s done. The only thing I can think of is making t-shirts for all of my friends and me that bash AZ or Jackass. Can you guys help me? I want some kind of revenge that won’t get me in trouble with the school or the law. I don’t want to take the upper hand and not respond–it would be viewed by Jackass as submission. I want him to know that I’m angry.
[sub][sup]*After much debating within myself, I decided not to use his real name. Not because I care about his anonymity or anything, but because I didn’t know if there would be a problem with using it on the boards.[/sup][/sub]