Theme Park at its Darkest

Haunted By the Ghosts of High School Past

A friend of mine once said, ‘You can earn a billion dollars and discover a cure for cancer, but when you go back to a school reunion, you’re reduced to being the same little dickhead everybody thought you were when you were fifteen.’

Needless to say, I’ve never been back. I rarely run into anyone I went to school with and maintain friendships with only two people from that time. I think friendship is something you entertain with someone you trust.

And it isn’t that I don’t trust S. especially; I mean, I like him, but he’s not someone I maintain a friendship with. The kids you went to school with have the power to drag you back to being someone you don’t want to be. Someone that you’ve hidden like the minotaur beneath the palace of your adult life.

‘J’s going out with V,’ said S, the day he rang to ask my advice about weight training. ‘You know V, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I replied.

‘Yeah, you know V,’ he insisted. ‘That bird from a few years ago.’

‘No, S,’ said I. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

I got off the phone and rang V immediately.

‘You need to tell J to shut his mouth,’ I told her. ‘He’s telling people you and I were seeing each other.’

I heard that J had hit the roof when V bought it up with him, and now both J and V were blaming S. The truth was that J was a moron and causing all kinds of problems because he couldn’t shut his mouth.

I had expressed an interest in meeting with J and V for coffee: I thought it would be a positive way to conclude my relationship with her and remove any sense of discomfort J may have felt. Clearly, the guy was such a dickhead, the smartest thing to do was avoid him altogether.

Present Tension

When I literally ran into J in the supermarket, my immediate reaction was to put my hands up. From my perspective, everything about this interaction was wrong and there was no way to escape it. If I struck him, the whole thing would no doubt be captured by security camera and the result would be a criminal conviction, possibly gaol.

After grabbing my nuts, he seemed to change gears; gibbering about something, as if we were friends. It was very difficult to follow what he was saying, let alone follow the shift from aggression to friendliness.

J explained that he’d watched me park my car outside, implying that he had deliberately followed me into the supermarket. Suddenly, he’d turned to wander off to get a roast chicken and some rolls to feed his kids for lunch and then, expressed a desire to do some training. He lifted his shirt to reveal a fat, bulbous stomach as he did so. 

The downright weirdness of the exchange had made me forget all about the sponges.

To make things worse, I next ran into him a few months later in Rebel Sport, on Chapel Street. This time he was with V, and he walked straight up and again reached out to grab me by the nuts.

He had this kind of bizarre repartee, making little jokes and talking over the top of me, seeking to make everyone laugh as a way of, I suppose, dominating me physically at first and then taking away my voice.   

This entry was posted on March 5, 2024 at 9:25 pm and is filed under The Duel with tags Chapel Street, High school, Rebel Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.