In middle school I used to know this guy name Joe T. Nobody ever really picked on him cause nobody really noticed him. There was one instance that he was picked on. Well, two actually, but I only know the outcome of one. Somebody thacked his ear and he attacked them with a pencil. The assailant grabbed his arm, probably scared to death. Joe just smiled and walked away. He was average height, skinny, had glasses and dark curly hair and pale skin. His lips were always cracking and peeling, must’ve been dry skin. Joe was big into fantasy books, D&D, possibly computers. He always was carrying around some big 700 page Dragonlance novel around with his school books. Joe’s big thing was this trick he would do with his wrist. The joints in his wrist were funny and if he moved his hand around there would be a loud popping. Sometimes he make it so the joints in his wrist would cut of circulation to his hand. I would often see Joe sitting in class with a purple hand.
Elementary school: Kevin Sasso. He pulled so much crap, most of which I can’t remember, but I do remember the incident that finally got him sent to the alternate school. He settled a dispute with a classmate by sneaking back into the classroom at recess and pouring the contents of a gallon jug of Elmer’s glue into the other boy’s desk. That might not have been enough to get just anyone sent to alternate school, but for him, it was about the fortieth strike. (A few years ago, Mr. Rilch brought home a bottle of Sasso brand olive oil, and couldn’t understand what I thought was so funny.)
High school: Chris Namechanged (don’t want to put the Chicago Reader in jeopardy). He was the classic Dahmer type: thin, well-groomed, well-spoken, and utterly without affect. When we were in eleventh grade, he told me, without batting an eyelash, that he was failing everything and didn’t care, because he was in all advanced/gifted courses, and “Colleges don’t care how you did in a class; they just care that you took it.” :rolleyes:
I wouldn’t call him a suck-up, but he did have most of the faculty snowed. The net result of this was that he was the student officer of the Chemistry or Physics or some kind of science club. A teacher trusted him with a key to the lab, and other teachers generally trusted him to be in the school after hours. Shortly after our conversation about how it’s okay to fail AP chemistry, he stole a bunch of stuff from the chemistry supply closet. It didn’t take long to trace this back to him, and he was expelled.
The local newspaper printed an article about the incident (they didn’t use his name because he was still a minor). This was in either late '86 or early '87, so I’m not sure what prompted me to think that he might have been planning to make a bomb. The article listed the items that were stolen, so I showed the article to my dad and asked if my theory had merit. He said, “Yeah, those could be bomb components…but, if the kid’s flunking chemistry and physics, he probably wouldn’t know how to make a bomb!”
I saw him once after his expulsion, and he bragged that he would be going to Interlochen. Double :rolleyes:. As if Interlochen does not have a waiting list a mile long just for people who want to get in as freshmen, let alone midyear transfers who were expelled for stealing dangerous chemicals. “They encourage free thinking there,” he claimed. Yeh.
Also, in twelfth grade, another guy I knew who was taking a psychology course at the junior college showed me a checklist for the symptoms of a psychopath. “Look at this!” he said in a tone of horrified awe. "Chris fits every one of these!
College: Loony Linda. She was reputed to have OD’d on heroin but not died. Maybe, maybe not, but something was not right. I could tell stories, but you really would have to see and hear her to fully understand, so I’ll give one example. She was a dance major, and towards the end of one semester, told me that she didn’t think she’d fully mastered jazz dance or some such. Her solution was to cut some classes and screw up in others during the last few weeks, so that she would fail and have to take it over again; then on her second time around, she would get it down pat! :smack:
Elementary school again, but I’m only putting it in a footnote because I’m not positive it was a kid. The school’s roof was being repaired, and for whatever reason, this was taking a long time. In fact, work might have been halted for a few days or weeks. So we all come in on a Monday morning to find that barrels of tar have been upended and allowed to drip down over the windows in the main hall. Not only that, but someone had managed to paint “F— you school” with the tar before it had dried. They even took the trouble to do it backwards from the outside, so we could read it—and fall about laughing—as we trooped down the main hall to our classrooms.
One teacher said dramatically to my class, “That child may have failed the school…but in my opinion, this school has failed that child!” I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, that was practically the only time I heard a teacher in that school say anything contrary to the general attitude of the faculty, which was that we students were not good enough to attend the school, and were wasting the teachers’ time. But I don’t know for sure that this was done by then-current students.
My mom thought it more likely that it had been teenagers on a rampage. Granted, high school students are better able to get out at night than elementary students, but that’s a long time to hold a grudge. My theory was that it was the builders*. As I said, I think the work was suspended for a while, and maybe the contractor thought he and his crew were being ripped off by the school district. (And maybe they were right.) So it’s possible that the builders got liquored up and did this. After all, they would know better than anyone how to get access to the roof. And I never heard of any kid getting charged with this, and I’m sure I would have, had they been.
*Advanced thinking for eleven, you say? Yes…but I got that mindset from my dad. “Beauracracy screws over the working man…The first thing we do: kill all the lawyers…Every millionaire stepped on a thousand people on his way up.”