Artist: Olivia Steen

I want to put a memory here that haunts me.

When I was in grade school one of my classmates got bullied- not only did some of our classmates bully my classmate, so did our teacher.

Our teacher would hold up my classmates school work and use it as an example of how to do something wrong. Our teacher did not do that to anyone else. From the front of the classroom our teacher mocked my classmates clothes, her hair, picky, mean things that the other students picked up and ran with at recess.

I sat next to my classmate who got bullied and on the days it was really bad, my classmate would sit at their desk with their arms folded over their chest and smirk.

To be honest, that would kind of weird me out- if I had known the word back then I’d have called  that smirk feral, maybe I’d have said it was almost skeletal looking.

So lets spin to a good twenty or so years later and I was watching the news and I swear to God, that was my classmate on the news. This person had been convicted of bashing their victims head, repeatedly into the ground. The victim died soon after the assault.

I couldn’t say for sure that was my classmate- their name was a common one- but when the camera pulled a close up and the just convicted murderer, I saw that non smile and my  blood ran cold.