People like to believe childhood bullying fades with time, but some wounds don’t heal—they become part of you. I learned that at eight years old, when I realized monsters weren’t imaginary. Mine sat behind me in class. Her name was Nancy.
She never hit me. She didn’t have to. Nancy was precise, cruel in ways adults never noticed. Her words slowly erased my confidence, turning me into the quiet kid who ate lunch alone and avoided eye contact. To teachers, she was perfect. To me, she was ten years of misery. When I moved away for college, I thought I’d finally escaped her.
Then my brother called to say he was engaged. To Nancy.
I tried to believe people change. But at their engagement party, one look from her told me nothing had. She still smirked, still whispered insults no one else could hear, still called me the same loser I’d been as a kid. She thought I hadn’t changed. She was wrong.
I remembered something she’d never lived down in school: her terror of butterflies. So I planned carefully. As a wedding gift, I arranged for two hundred live butterflies to be delivered to their house the night of the ceremony, boxed beautifully and opened indoors.
At the reception, she publicly mocked me for not bringing a gift. I smiled and told her it was already waiting at home. She loved that.
When she opened the box later that night, the butterflies filled the room. Nancy screamed, collapsed, and panicked as her perfect image dissolved in front of witnesses—one of whom recorded everything.
My brother was furious the next day, until I reminded him who had been crying for years while no one cared. I told him the video would stay private as long as Nancy stayed away from me.
She has. She avoids me completely now. For the first time in decades, I don’t feel small around her. I feel free.