This one time, I totally fucked some girls in their econ class.
Not literally. I’m not cool enough to get away with a threesome, back then, or now, or ever.
This story isn’t exactly one I brag about. I vaguely recall telling someone about it a few years ago-- I believe it was told to someone from the prestigious Columbia Chronicle (Columbia's weekly college newspaper) and she said, “You told on them?” as if that was some new cardinal sin to do so. As if she had bothered to hear the context of my reasoning.
After that, I haven’t told a soul. I doubted my reasoning, but now, I don’t give a fuck. I ratted on a girl for being a remorseless stupid cunt. I ratted on her for being the reason the world seems so irrevocably selfish and beyond remedy. Unsalvageable...
On a Thursday night just as spring was blossoming, I was in the middle of a quarter-life crisis, not knowing who I was or where I was or why I was. But I was studying something or other, constantly reflecting on how much bullshit Columbia College was forcing me to consume. I hated my copy editing class, I hated my creative nonfiction teacher, I hated my media ethics and law class, and I was starting to hate the world at large. I wanted to rip all the celebrity tabloid magazines out of everyone’s hands and ask them what the fuck was wrong with them. I wanted to go up to every Columbia hipster with a loose-ended beanie winter cap and ask him if he knew that his cigarettes were going to end in a state of impotency.
So when a Columbia student died, I felt like he was one of the few people I didn’t hate. Him and his family who were all inevitably mourning, asking God why everything had to be so horrible in life.
So, as I was writing, it was a Thursday evening, probably around 6 pm, and I overheard some girls in the library talking about a quiz. They were worried that they weren’t prepared.
So, naturally, they started devising a way to get out of it—something I can’t say I haven’t done a million times in the past. So as I sat there, studying for my own dumb quizzes, and the taller girl really caught my attention—she came up with the idea to tell her teacher that she knew the boy that died the day before, Jay Polhill.
The anger button was hit like a honking horn and I felt like every word she said was a knife in my stomach twisting another 45 degrees. Pretending like you knew the boy? I stirred in my seat, thinking about all the dead people I knew, thinking about my dead, cancered-out father, thinking about Iraqis and Afghanis and everyone else who had no chance in this world. She took her lies to the extreme and openly told the girl she was planning on crying in front of the teacher to get out of it.
“Don’t you feel bad about that…like, even at all?” asked the first girl.
The sociopath replied, “No, not really… ok, maybe a little bit, hahaha.”
More bullshit. What a horrid person. What a waste of earth’s limited resources. She had no feelings except desire and loneliness, the latter of which inspired me to help her out. And unfortunately for her, she said her professor’s name out loud. “Mr. Alexander.”
So I thought about yelling at the girl, and considered asking her what the fuck was wrong with her childhood that she’d become so heartless. In my mind, I was thinking of Jay Pohill’s family too depressed to answer simple funeral questions—What color would you like his casket?
So at last, I decided to rat on her to Mr. Alexander. Only, it wasn’t just tattling like you would to the feds. It was me letting the cat out of the bag, and I hoped that cat would serve as a real-life lesson for the girl. The cat in the bag was a disease. She needed to be aware of it, like a guy with HIV needs to know he’s infected.
So I looked up the specifics—I searched Columbia’s Oasis course catalogue for the economics class taught by Mr. Alexander, and I found the teacher, and then I copy and pasted the teacher’s email address into my compose message page.
So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, making multiple drafts of the email until I was satisfied in knowing that my email would lead her to possibly repent. I wanted to breath a soul back into her decrepit life. I wanted a person who was entirely devoid of truth to be given a second chance.
I told the teacher the story exactly how it was, and told him that the last thing I wanted was for him to flunk her.
“In fact,” I wrote, “I think that’s the last thing you should do.”
I told him that I didn’t know what the best solution was, but I knew that calling her a heartless bitch wouldn’t wake her from her slumber, even though insults were my first instincts.
“Flunking her would be just as useless, as she won’t learn anything from it. She’ll rationalize in her head that she should have had every right to do so.”
People really are strange. I don’t know why evolution hasn’t given us a simple ability to step into the shoes of others. Evolution, wake up goddamnit. Empathy is the only way to a utopia on this fucking planet.
So I continued, advising him to let her know that he knew, in a very. subtle. way.
The girl is a Class-A example of a Columbia student who has had life handed to her on a silver platter. “Mr. Alexander,” I wrote, “I was hesitant about sending this to, but I think this would be a great life lesson for the girl. Life lessons will stay with her forever, and an F on her quiz will just leave her feeling sorry for herself and she’ll probably wind up taking it out on a bottle of vodka or something.”
I didn’t want her to be pissed off. For once, me winning wasn’t about stroking my own ego. It was about the greater good. I’m not a psychology major, but I know how people work, and I knew that there was at least a chance of her feeling remorse if she started crying in front of her professor about a kid she’d never known about until someone next to her was reading the Columbia Chronicle and asked her if she heard a student died. I can’t imagine her reading a newspaper or anything outside a text message. The girl shook me up and I could barely concentrate for my 6:30 class. I still remember feeling hatred as I sat at the table wanting to flush the world down a giant fucking toilet bowl.
The teacher replied about a week later, thanking me. I doubt he said anything to the girl, as most people don’t want to confront people like Jesus used to do back in the day. It’s hard calling people out on their hypocrisies. It’s hard looking at someone in the eye and telling them that they’re dead wrong. But I do hope something happened. I pray that it did. I pray that she saw herself in her own true light, saw the joyless monster that she’s become. I knew from our 10 minutes of being in the same room that her heart was void of any real emotion. But there is some reality behind all the masks she puts on… and the makeup hides the window to her spirit. It can still come out though. No matter what… it is within the realm of possibility that she’ll see her own state, her act, and not want to be that person anymore. Isn’t it? In all probability, she didn’t change so much as her panties the next day, but there’s hope as far as I can see and think and feel.
