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Jack Stuart was an enterprising young man.  He created and presided over "The Frog Club," a boy's club whose charter included only two goals:  first, to make the lives of all girls miserable, and second, since most of our teachers were "girls;" to be as difficult in their classrooms as possible.  The Frog Club theme song was "Joy to the World."  "JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG--” loudly sung.  The principal of Burtsfield School later told Jack Stuart that the Frog Club was the worst thing to hit Burtsfield Elementary.  Ever.  It certainly was the worst thing to hit me.

Being the second most despised girl in the fifth-grade class, it was Jack Stuart’s personal delight to torture me in small ways-- the kind of thing that the teachers never noticed.  Or if they did, they never said anything.  Never, in all my days of being a persecuted kid, did an adult ever come to my aid.  I'm not sure why things work that way.  I battled all of Jack Stuart’s unwanted attention with the only tool I knew of:  a stony silence.

Jack Stuart would sit behind me and whisper insults under his breath.  He'd follow me around the playground yelling taunts.  He led the other boys in the fifth grade to follow his example.  He made sure to sit behind me in every class in order to continue his reign of terror.  One day he spread blood-red ink all over the back of my chair, then asked me to turn around.  The teacher didn't seem to notice that my dress was suddenly covered with a dark red smear; my inner torment made visible, like an open wound.

I would come home from school in tears and my mother would ask me what was wrong.  I'd cautiously tell her of the daily torment.  She'd answer that the boys did these things "because they liked me."  I couldn't convince her otherwise.  She had been a cheerleader, been voted "prettiest legs in the high school."  She had gone to the same prom with two different boys.  She came equipped with all the proper etiquette for selecting, receiving, and allowing a man to light her cigarette.   The idea that her daughter could be unpopular was unthinkable.  The truth that her daughter was talented and intelligent was unimportant in comparison.

In the seventh grade, all the popular kids started "going together."  I was no longer the second most unpopular girl in school, but I wasn't the kind of girl that boys would cross the gym floor to dance "Nights in White Satin" with.  Jack Stuart started going steady with a girl, who became instantly popular due to Jack's attention.  A few months later, the hottest gossip in the seventh grade was that Jack Stuart had "gotten her pregnant."  She left junior high, had an abortion, and returned, her popularity lost.  She was one of "those girls," now, and the most despised girl in the school.  She knew it and was angry as hell, and in retaliation, told groups of hushed thirteen-year-old girls about the specifics of her abortion.  Her voice filled with the wonder and the fear of it.  We were terrified of her-- couldn't believe what we were hearing.  We knew it was true, but somehow our inexperience kept the truth from becoming real to us.  We shunned her.  Eventually she dropped out of school.  I never heard what happened to her.  Jack Stuart became known as the first boy in our class proven to have actually "done it" and his reputation soared.  In high school he excelled at track, student government, and academics, and after graduation he was admitted into a prestigious university.

By that time I had found a niche of people with whom to socialize, and I was no longer remembered as the second most unpopular girl in the school.  But deep down I remembered-- it lived in my personality like a ghostly twin, constantly reminding me of who I once was, who I could be discovered to be at any moment if I wasn't eternally diligent.

One Friday night in the autumn of my senior year, I went to a high school dance. I arrived at the dance feeling expectant and unusually fetching in a dress I had made myself.  Like a vision from my adolescent dreams, someone finally chose me, crossed the crowded dance floor to be with me.  In one of those cosmic moments that life hands you only once in a great while, I was thunderstruck to be asked to dance by one of the most popular boys in the school.  It was Jack Stuart.  At age eighteen, he was a good looking:  tall, muscled from his years running track; he had a quick mind with a flashing brown-eyed reply.  As we began to dance, I had a vision of myself, once the second most despised girl at Burtsfield Elementary, now dancing with one of the most popular boys in school.  I wondered who was watching.  I felt my status rise, like the heat between our bodies, in direct proportion to the number of eyes that saw us together.  For one brief moment I inhaled the pungent scent of having the past erased in the blink of an eye, in the act of being chosen. 

I was struck by the irony that my ticket to forgetfulness was in the embrace of my tormentor.  I turned to him.  "Do you remember how you used to torture me when we were in grade school?" I smiled beguilingly.  He thought a moment, considering the question.  His eyes squinted in concentration as his gaze drifted past me to somewhere deep in his memory.  After a moment he shifted, and his eyes found mine.  He gave me his most charming, boyish grin.  "No," he replied. 

We were still dancing, circling one another.  A slow dance, to something like "How deep is your Love?" from Saturday Night Fever, my arms reaching up to drape across his chest and my hands clasped tightly behind his neck. 

Then my long forgotten girl-self rose up.  I couldn't stop my voice as it plummeted out of my throat.  "Well, I will never forget.” I walked off the dance floor, left him standing alone, aware of the eyes watching me, aware of the choice I had made.

I have no idea what happened to Jack Stuart, and can only hope that karma is a bitch.  Sometimes I wonder what his childhood was like, to make him such a monster.  If the best revenge is a life lived well, I’ve certainly had my fill of that.  Served red hot and filled with flavor, thank you very much.