Have a Happy Monday!

I know that most of you probably won't read this until work on Monday, so I thought I'd start your day off with a big bummer. But, to brighten things up, I'll let you know that I'm much better today, thank you. First off, I didn't die, and that's usually a good thing. Second, I managed to eat grits and eggs for breakfast (well, most of them anyway) and a bowl of Mueslix for supper, so I'm eating like four times as much stuff as yesterday. I actually feel fine, I just haven't redeveloped my affinity for food yet.

And now on to the post.

I drove a kid to try to kill himself once. It was a long time ago, and, to be honest, he deserved a large part of what my friends and I gave him. For his privacy and mine, I'll withhold his name and just refer to him as JE.

He was a part of my group of friends in sixth or seventh grade, a group so tightly knit that I'm still in close contact with all of them except JE. He was an awkward child. He was effeminate, had an excessively prissy walk and could be extremely strange at times. Those weren't the reasons we eventually turned on him, however. We weren't exactly the coolest kids in school either. We read too much, knew too much, and competed through writing short stories and competing in quiz bowls instead of fist fights and other feats of physicality. And honestly, we were all a little on the low end of average in the area of social skills.

Yes, I realize this probably surprises none of you.

What caused us to turn from friends to enemies was another aspect of JE's personality: he was spoiled and a little egotistical. He dressed preppier than us, put more crap in his hair, and had more stuff than us as well, and he wasn't afraid to rub our noses in it. I wasn't jealous of what he had, but I got a little tired of being belittled for my middle school sense of style and the fact that he made fun of our poorer friends for more or less being poor. Gradually, we all lost patience with him and, one by one, abandoned him.

We didn't realize this at the time, but we were apparently his only friends. I went to Hank's house one day during the summer after we'd all grown tired of him, and JE was there, invited at his mom's request. Reluctantly, we let him participate in the day's aimless wandering and four-wheeler riding, but that was the last time we ever even spoke to him. His personality was muted that day and he seemed almost submissive. Looking back, I think he already knew he'd lost us as friends, but was hoping he could earn his way back into our good graces.

By the time school started back, JE had gotten the message that he was alone. He no longer even tried to talk to us. He also wasn't talking to anyone else either, but in our adolescent narcissism and lack of social sophistication, we didn't notice. All we knew is that we'd finally excised that part of our group that made us feel like crap about ourselves. I honestly don't regret anything up to this point. We'd been rather polite about the split. There were no harsh words, no screaming arguments, just the gradual end to invites and greetings. Unfortunately, that didn't stop us from trying to hammer the point home more forcibly. Quite literally. With a music stand to the back of the head. Hank and I sat behind JE in band and we took turns "accidentally" bumping our stands into the back of his head. He said nothing, not to us or the band director and took the abuse quietly.

JE never came back to school after that day. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that we found out that he'd tried to kill himself. We were shocked. We had been too young to put the pieces together. He'd always seemed so cool, so sure of himself. We didn't realize his over-the-top attempts to grab attention were signs of something wrong inside. We didn't realize that going that far with Truth or Dare wasn't a sign of bravery, but desperation. It never crossed our minds that he'd had no one but us, and we'd abandoned him and then tortured him.

It's true that we shouldn't have been expected to know that something was wrong and that we didn't really do anything worse than what's done to most kids at some point in their lives. The whole music stand thing wasn't even enough to cause any real pain. I had been on the receiving end of worse as a kid. Despite that, I still carry a bit of shame about having been a part of that, and it's still one of the few regrets of my childhood.