I ran into Theo Barneveld at the Large-Mart. He caught me by surprise when he backed into the parking spot next to mine. The last I’d seen of him was high school graduation. It had been good riddance to him and his cronies. If I had been smart I would have stayed in my car. Maintain the invisibility I’d worked so hard at cultivating in school. But, it has been thirty years, he was an adult now and so was I.
He did a double take when I stepped out of the car.
“Theo Barneveld, right?” I’d asked him. “We went to grade school and high school together.”
I should have stayed invisible. His mother called him Teddy and he was anything but. More python, hyena or even crocodile. A predator, not a stuffed bear. The insolent sneer was the same, the words out of his mouth just as hurtful.
I should have stayed invisible.
He had not matured. He was still a bully, and the thing with invisibility and keeping one’s mouth shut is that anger grows and grows with each barb, every injustice. Until it explodes. I didn’t know it was lying dormant just below the skin and had been all this time. Covid stress hadn’t helped.
I punched him, punched him for my fifteen-year-old self and four years of hell. Right in the temple. I aimed for his nose but he turned at the last second. Dear Diary, it was horrible. He crumpled in on himself, his back smacking against his van as he slid to the ground into the snow and slush.
I had killed him with a single punch. Me! I had killed a man. I didn’t know what to do. Large-Mart has cameras all over their parking lot and they had me on tape murdering a man.
A distance of three feet separated our two vehicles and the nearest camera was two aisles over, so the chances of them recording everything was slim. Dear Diary, I’m not proud of what I did. Self preservation kicked in. Now was not the time for invisibility. I screamed and I screamed until people came running and crowding around.
“He grabbed me,” I lied, sobbing into my hands. I sold it for all it was worth. “So I hit him and I didn’t mean to hurt him but I was scared and he collapsed and now… please call an ambulance.”
So dear Diary, I had to go to the police station. Spent the rest of the day there giving my statement. But they believed me. Seems Teddy Barneveld, adolescent bully, had a record. He’d gone from terrorizing those around him on the school bus to assaulting women and getting into fights. I was free to go home.
