Revenge Camp

This was not how they told me it would go. When I got the flyer in the mail and finally convinced my parents that I should be allowed to go, I was ready for things to change in a big way. That’s what the flier said, too. It promised that no matter how big or small the problem was, Revenge Camp would solve it. What they didn’t cover was the potential resilience of the target. That sometimes one act of revenge was not enough. They didn’t guarantee success. That should have been a huge red flag. To be fair to me, that was in incredibly small font.

I went because Sophie was a bitch to me all through school. I went for all the teachers that said that she would get tired of being a bully, or find a new person to direct her anger towards. I went because I got in trouble when I suggested to the counselor that she see a therapist. That, I never understood.

I didn’t want to ruin her life. I didn’t expect that I would. I simply wanted her to get a taste of her own medicine, not an overdose of it. Pulling skeletons out of someone’s closet as a form of revenge is a dirty business. Even though all I did was watch over someone’s shoulder as Sophie was getting “exposed” I still got dragged through the mud with her.

They taught us that it was better if it was someone that wasn’t involved doing the real exposing of the truth. That was not the case.

Sophie did have plenty of skeletons, though. It turned out that she had been posting racist, homophobic garbage on the internet that she masqueraded as “opinion”.

Her college acceptance got revoked. On the other side, while I was pleasantly watching her life burn to the ground, I was outed. My parents acted like that didn’t change anything. I would have known they were lying, even if I hadn’t gone to revenge camp.

The problem with burning someone’s reputation to the ground is sometimes you don’t throw the match fast enough. At the end of the day, no one cared about motivation. They just saw someone that ruined another person’s life. They didn’t care about the circumstances or the other people involved. Revenge camp didn’t swoop in to save the day, either.

It was just me, holding a box of matches, next to a girl whose future was burnt down around her.