Chapter One
I was 17 the summer it all happened.
Even at a young age he was already a total menace, and had been tormenting me since we were just wee little kids in the sandbox.
Bobby had been bullying me my whole life.
He had other targets, too, of course, but I was his favorite.
Lucky me.
I’m not sure why, exactly. I’m not that interesting or unusual of a person, as I’ve said. Nothing that made me stand out as an obvious target for bullying, at least in my opinion. Other than my name, I suppose.
Billie was odd as a girl’s name. It was short for Wilma. Yeah, you’d go as Billie, too, wouldn’t you?
As for the last name, Starchaser, well, my parents were hippies, and that’s pretty much the end of that story.
We were poor, but no poorer than half the other families in Hell, Missouri.
My name was certainly a focus of some teasing, but by now most of my classmates had long since gotten over it. Not Bobby, though. He still called me “Billie Goat” and “Probe Chaser”, things of that sort. He was a creative one, Hunter was. The name calling was seriously the least of it, though. Mean names naturally evolved into mean pranks.
Snakes in my locker. Spreading rumors that I was a skank and had herpes. Not true, FYI!
There was one time I swear he and his cronies had left a bag of flaming poo on our doorstep.
In the 5th grade he tripped me on the school steps and I took a good hard tumble. Most everyone had laughed, except my two best friends. I still had a scar on my knee from that.
How had he gotten away with so much bullshit behavior over the years, you ask? I don’t know, how does it ever happen? Teachers looked the other way. The principal was too busy being drunk off his ass to give a damn about what was happening in his school. Our fellow students went along with it, no doubt afraid to get picked on themselves by the resident jackals.
Everyone in town was scared of Bobby’s infamous redneck family. They pretty much got to do whatever they wanted in this town, that’s just how it was. So the bullying went on, all the way into high school.
Now that it was almost over, I hated the thought that I had done nothing to ever stand up for myself. Oh sure, I threw rude remarks back at him - “dumb hick”, “inbred hillbilly”, etc. - but I had never really DONE anything.
Well, that was all about to change this summer. Going into our senior year, I would be able to hold my head up high and wouldn’t have to worry about anyone tripping me down the stairs. This summer, I was finally going to get my revenge on Bobby Blythe.
