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Diabolical Retribution

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There’s two sides to every story. You know; the witch just wanted a nice meal, Hansel and Gretel wanted some candy; Cinderella wanted to escape her vindictive family, the prince just wanted a bride; Rumpelstiltskin wanted a baby, the girl just wanted a life.

‘Good’ is an ambiguous term that was coined primarily for the purpose of describing the person with the ‘right’ morality in the fable. The Queen in Snow White was an elitist who wanted to be more beautiful than anyone else, and yet thousands of teenage girls in the world today are all the same aesthetically focused fanatics. Even so, these people are revered by their peers and condemned by the rest of the community – the typical hated-heroine case.

‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ – the kid is made out to be a psychologically deranged fabulist, when really, the wolf is at fault for eating the kid in the first place. Never mind the fact that it was doing humanity a favour.

Such is the case with us. Society should be thankful, not tormenting us with an extra six months of detention, on top of the three weeks we received when we tried to blow up Dagwood Cromwell’s rat in biology.

In my defence, the residuum alone was more than enough punishment. Having rat guts smeared in your eye is not exactly fun – especially when you try and get it out with your finger, only to create a more potent mixture of eye juice and rodent intestines.

Although I do have to agree with Driscoll when he says that Dagwood’s reaction was completely, utterly priceless. Not just the shock on his face after he realised that we’d drawn the battle lines, but the sight of him trying to remain dignified, even as innards slid down his face was a sight that I’ll at least be able to amuse myself with for the remaining four months of solitary confinement (also known as ‘singular detention’).

It’s an honour that hasn’t been bestowed upon a student at Elwood Secondary for the last fifty years, according to our principal. The only reason we’ve graciously accepted our fate is because we got caught red-handed, with what the cops described in their official report as, and I quote, ‘an enigmatic white substance’.

The rest of the report was rather boring and consisted of droll terms such as, ‘the victim alleges that he was harassed by fellow students with a multitude of materials including: eggs, a crayon, and a musical melody’.

Honestly, can we help it if he’s so frigid Olivia Newton-John’s Physical makes him blush like an innocent school girl? Surely he would have gotten used to it after we played it outside his window twenty-four hours a day for a week?

Nevertheless, if Dagwood Cromwell’s twice-weekly visits to the local psychiatrist are anything to go by, Doctor Everleigh definitely gets to ‘hear his body talk’. Of course, his father slapped my parents down with the two hundred dollar an hour bill, seeing as how I’m one of the alleged ‘tormenters’.

But that’s not really the point here. I freely admit my guilt. I’d yell it from the top of the Rialto if I were paid enough (and I have a chronic fear of heights). I, Avalon Allison Andrews, stalked – for lack of a more accurate word – and harassed a fellow scholar at our esteemed learning facility, despite the faculty’s best prevention plans. (That’s the testimony I have to give, according to our solicitor.)

Apparently it only crossed the line into stalking when we poured fifty packets of jelly into his pool and sat there, looking over the fence for four hours, waiting to see if he’d swim in it. I guess he never knew about the time we went snooping in his bedroom and through his personal effects.

It was a necessary evil. We needed dirt on the bastard if we were going to win the war. We may have started the battle, but we’d be damned if we weren’t going to see it through to the gory end.

Although to be fair, we never knew just how gory the end would turn out to be…

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