My School Bully Tortured Me For Years. Then He Died — And I Didn’t Anticipate My Reaction.

I remember staring at the blue carpet in my high school computer lab for fear of making eye contact with a crook-nosed, slight boy named Forest Finney. He was presenting a PowerPoint assignment about what he wanted his life to look like. We were all used to this line of inquiry. Adults asked the essential question on repeat: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There were about 10 acceptable answers, and they were all careers: doctor, lawyer, fireman, astronaut. The question was never “Who do you want to be?”
Forest showed us slides of how he would “move out of” our suburban Southern neighborhood to attend a private college five miles away. There, he would major in business and meet his wife, who ideally would have attended our high school. Then they would “move back” to have children and work.
Forest was one of the cool kids. He came from a family of wealthy outdoorsmen and excelled at athletics. He ran a six-minute mile, threw a precise dodgeball and made every basket he ever shot. He was also smart. He read faster than a demon, did long division in his head and appeared to have a photographic memory.
Forest epitomized our suburb, which was every cliche about the early 2000s, the South and high school wrapped with a red satin bow. The popular kids listened to Garth Brooks and went hunting. The boys played football or led skits at pep rallies where they clowned around in cross-dress. The girls were cheerleaders or on the drill team, which performed eerily sexual routines to pop songs like “Barbie Girl.”
At our public school, Jesus was omnipresent. The principal framed New Testament verses, the coaches led a mandatory prayer before each game, and the cruelest boys wore shirts with the motto “Be like Christ.” Anyone worth anything had straight blond hair and clear blue eyes.
To say I didn’t fit in would be an understatement. I was Jewish, with frizzy brown hair and deep brown eyes. I rejected cheerleading for band, where I played first-chair clarinet. To take part in symphony band in the spring, I had to participate in marching band in the fall. At the required football games, I rolled my eyes at Jesus and read T.C. Boyle and Kurt Vonnegut in the bleachers, pausing only to pick up my clarinet for halftime performances.
This contrarian stance had long been essential to my identity. In fourth grade, everyone else in our mock school election voted for George H.W. Bush. I voted for Bill Clinton. Later that year, I wrote a paper about the hypocrisy of so-called pro-lifers who murdered abortion doctors. My teacher liked it so much that she made me read it to the class, which was the first of many social suicides.
My clashing viewpoints did not go without punishment. There were many torturers over the years, but Forest always held the top spot, if not for cruelty then for longevity. I met him on the first day of fourth grade, when I transferred from another school district. For the occasion, I had donned my best green biker shorts and matching green T-shirt. As I entered the cacophony of more than two dozen 9-year-olds shrieking their impressions of summer vacation to one another, I realized that the other girls were wearing white socks stretched over black leggings and had carefully groomed side ponytails with colorful barrettes. I had not dressed correctly.
Forest, who was a bit shorter and skinnier than others but who nevertheless seemed to be holding court with his subjects, picked me out immediately.
“Hey, you,” he nodded at me from the four-top table in front of the one I’d chosen. All the chairs at his were taken; all of mine were empty. The other kids quieted as he spoke.
“Do you like school?” he asked, pushing his blond, Zack Morris-style bangs out of his eyes.
“Of course,” I replied, not realizing the trap I had stumbled into. “I love it.”
“You LOVE school?” he sneered.
The classroom erupted with laughter.
This was the first of many slights. Usually they had to do with my weight. When we measured our heart rates, mine was slower than his, which he broadcast as proof of my “obesity.” When another boy walked me home, he tittered to his minions that we made a perfect couple because the boy was too skinny and I was too fat.
But mainly, Forest cheated off of me. Despite my best attempts to cover my papers during tests, he found a way to see them. This infuriated me not only because I hated cheating, but also because he was smart. He didn’t need to cheat — he just wanted to, a fact he taunted me with by shooting me a wink whenever I caught him looking.
This continued for the rest of elementary school and into middle and high school. Many of the other jocks fell away as classes were divided into pre-Advanced Placement and then AP honors, but Forest was intelligent and got good grades, so he stuck around. As his last name started with F and my last name started with G, we sat close together in every class. I diligently covered each line of my tests with a blank sheet of paper, and he diligently avoided his homework and cheated off me through senior year, winking whenever we made eye contact. I didn’t tell the teachers because our school had a policy that the cheatee was as guilty as the cheater, and I believed I would have gotten in trouble, possibly expelled.
Many people, especially those of us who did not peak in high school, have stories like this. Forest’s bullying wasn’t clever or remarkable in any way. By senior year I knew this, knew that his behavior was one of many parts of a culture I needed to escape.
I imagined all of the fellow weirdos I’d find at college, the people who would never be caught dead watching a sports game. I imagined my triumph over the small-mindedness of the popular kids at our high school. I would become a novelist and a poet, travel across Europe, have torrid affairs with handsome, intellectual men. Imprinted on my retina was the image of a lanky boy holding up his thumb and forefinger to make an L while laughing at me, but I would look into the sun long enough to blaze a new form.
It never occurred to me that forces beyond my control could influence what I became and how I got there. I also didn’t realize how much the place where I grew up and the people surrounding me would color my interior life.
I left for college, found those kindred weirdos, and experienced love and heartbreak. I wrote a popular blog that became a popular book, launched a startup, and became well-known in my industry. I felt like I’d proved I was more than that scared little girl. I felt successful.
I had no doubt that in a parallel part of the world, Forest was accomplishing his plan, living his charmed life. A video from a decades-old NBA game — he held season tickets, his seat behind the home bench — seemingly confirmed it. In the footage, he’s chosen to shoot hoops at halftime. With a chance to win more money with each shot, he eggs on the crowd as he scores a layup, a free throw, a three-pointer and then a half-court shot. As the ball makes it into the basket, the crowd cheers and claps wildly.
I remember the first time I watched the slow-motion replay of him making those lucrative shots. It confirmed everything I already felt about the conditions of the universe: There were people like Forest, and there were people like me. People who made the half-court shot at an NBA game, and people who got hit in the head with the basketball during gym class. We had to coexist for the world to make sense. It wasn’t good versus evil or right versus wrong; it was simply the way the world was.
But the world likes to take what you think you know and blast those rules into a pile of dust. Because I’m burying two ledes here. One is that by the time I found that video, Forest had been dead for eight years.
A story in the local paper said he’d died less than 40 miles from where we grew up, when a small plane he was riding in crashed, killing both Forest and the pilot. Below the headline, a full-color photo showed a decimated plane, its bent aluminum wings above a carcass of wire rubble and fire. Smoke blew across the frame.
I read this lying in bed, after searching Forest Finney’s name on Facebook and coming up empty-handed. The article was the top result in a Google search. Forest Finney couldn’t die, could he?
But here was his obituary, as real as my fingers trembling as I held my phone close to my face and read. It said he had been a successful businessman and was survived by his wife, who had also attended our high school, and two small children. It featured a tiny headshot of him smiling in an open dress shirt and jacket, his hair neatly gelled into a tasteful faux-hawk. It was the only photo I could find, even after hours of Google-stalking.
Some people might have felt that he got what he deserved. I didn’t. I not only expected him to be making half-court shots and winning money with his blond family in tow; I also wanted it. His death set the universe’s rules on fire. He was only 30 years old, really at the beginning of everything. He’d only been married for a few years. His kids were still babies. It felt not only unfair but also senseless. Wrong.
The injustice felt familiar. It felt like my own story.
Because, yes, while I can tell a version of my life with the headline “High School Loser Garners Success,” another version is that I’ve been living with autoimmune disease for 18 years.
At 23, I was hospitalized with a rare illness that almost killed me. My condition stabilized, and I had a handful of somewhat normal years. Then in my early 30s, my back began hurting so badly that I couldn’t stand or walk. Neck pain kept me from turning my head to the right, and migraines became a daily occurrence. Fatigue pressed in, exhausting my body so that even walking to the bathroom felt like I was trekking through mud. Eventually I was diagnosed with a second autoimmune disease and started on the correct medications. By then I’d been in pain for so long that it had turned chronic, which is much harder to alleviate, even when the root cause has been addressed. I watched my ambitions sail away like a cruise ship as I sat immobilized on the shrinking ice cap of my illness.
After I learned about Forest’s death, I began dreaming about him. In the dreams, I’m back at our high school. From across the soccer field, I see a tiny figure. It’s Forest! No, he died, my brain tells me. But there he is, alive and well, about to score a winning goal at practice. Through elaborate circumstances that would be boring to everyone but me, the dreamer, I discover that it has been a practical joke. Forest can’t die. He’s alive. He will always be alive. I wake with a sense of relief, like the world has found its correct order again. Then, when I realize it was a dream, that Forest is still dead, agony sets in.
I’ve spent years trying to decipher these dreams. I think it comes down to this: When we’re young, we have these ideas of what our lives will be like. When reality falls so far from ambition, it’s too jarring to accept.
I had grand plans for my life, plans that illness forces me to rewrite. Here is what my high school PowerPoint presentation would look like with the revision of reality: I would go to an Ivy League like Brown a state school and major in English and creative writing. I’d get an MFA from Iowa, take a year off, almost die, then work a 9-to-5 job for health insurance. I’d publish an acclaimed novel sit in doctor’s offices, travel the world get blood drawn, try new foods wait for test results. I’d fall in love, though I wouldn’t would get married because that was too pedestrian I always secretly wanted to. I’d publish poetry in The New Yorker get my MFA 15 years after first applying and maybe even teach at my Ivy alma mater be unable to work because I was too sick.
Now my days are consumed with the task of staying alive. Before I even open my eyes in the morning, my first sensation is a throbbing in my head. I reach for medicine, then an electrolyte drink, then a vagus nerve stimulator that’s supposed to help with migraine and autonomic dysfunction — a newer, nasty symptom that affects my heart rate and my breathing. Each day I mete out my energy, weighing how much it will take to shower versus make a meal for myself, whether I have enough bandwidth to talk on the phone to a friend and pick up a prescription from the pharmacy, or if I must choose one or the other. An in-person doctor’s appointment will take up the entire day, and sometimes the energy for the next day, too. Work has paused. Even this essay has been written in small bites over many weeks. I didn’t die, but I feel like my life has ended.
My dreams about Forest let me imagine an alternate world. He’s still cheating, but in a different way. He’s pulled a prank on death, gotten one over on it like he used to get one over on me. The dreams let me wonder, if he were still alive, would I get another shot too? We could both start over, or at least start from where we were a decade ago, before my pain started. Who would we become?
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It feels like neither of us had the chance to find out. But unlike Forest, I’m still alive. Here I am, writing this sentence. I have the chance to find out — if I’ll let myself. It will take work to accept the fact that being sick is a part of what it means for me to be alive. To acknowledge that things don’t turn out the way we thought they would when we were 9. To live anyway.
Note: Some identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals discussed in this essay.
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