By at least the third grade, girls in my school tended to express their affection for boys by means of chasing them down in a vagina-bearing mob on the playground during recess. Once they got close enough, they would grab the boy’s hair and violently pull until they fell to the ground, where the gaggle of she-devils would then proceed to repeatedly kick or punch him. Stranger still and twisted even further, all the boys seemed to secretly like it, myself included.

Looking back, there can be no hiding it from myself: this was elementary school sadomasochism, plain and simple.

No teacher, from what I can recall, ever said a word about this, but at least one delusional teacher apparently saw into a parallel reality where the roles were reversed. One day at recess, a kid was sent to fetch me, as one of the teachers watching over us on the playground wanted to speak with me. I came up to the building, where the teacher adamantly insisted that I had pushed a girl. I had not, of course, and the girl in question denied it was the case right along with me. Despite this testimony, the woman would not let up. She refused to let it go. She said she had seen it with her own eyes and proceeded to passionately defend the girl, as if she thought she was putting up a front because she was afraid of me or something. Eventually she gave up, as neither the girl nor I would waver from the truth.

It honestly befuddled the ever-living fuck out of me. None of the emotions I sensed from the woman made sense or added up. I mean, the girls would gather together and aggressively chase down targeted boys and give them a gang beating on a daily basis and no one had ever uttered a single word about it. No boys ever complained, not a single supervising teacher seemed to give a single, tootsie-roll-sized shit. Despite that, here was this teacher losing her shit over an incident that never even happened, however committed she was with respect to investing in the delusion.

For most of the time she was accusing me it seemed as though she was trying to convince herself of the reality of the incident as much as she was trying to convince both of us, as if that would somehow make it true, which for some unknown reason she desperately wanted it to be. Eventually, I considered that perhaps she had been recently cheated on or abused by her boyfriend or husband, or perhaps this had happened to someone close to her, and so as a convenient way to vent her anger she had seen what she wanted to see and was consequently able to express what she needed to express. Maybe she had witnessed the pack of prepubescent pink-holes hunting down the age-appropriate sausage-bearing beings on the playground that day but her personal issues had forced her to see it in a gender-reversing manner, as that rendition most easily aligned with her preconceived beliefs regarding the male of the species. Maybe the horrid selfishness inherent in that truth had dawned on her in the midst of her conversation with me, cast as the villain in her story, but by that time she was too committed to the comforting lie, too unwilling to back down for fear of seeming weak before two consenting, sadomasochistic third-graders.

While we’re delving into underlying, psychological influences on perceptions and behavior, maybe the girls at school had picked up their sadistic behavior from their parents, who used violence against one another and perhaps their children in place of empathy, and this was their way of expressing affection. Maybe the boys adopted their masochistic behavior for the same reason.

That didn’t track, however. After all, I happened to be one of these boys and my parents certainly never lifted a hand to my two sisters and I.

While there may have been a brief hiatus, given the teacher’s unfounded accusation, this by no means signaled the end of the wonderfully aggressive girls and their sadistic, circadian, playground rituals. Initially, there were two girls that seemed to lead the pack, too: one was a slender brunette named Kate; the other, a fiery redhead named Angela. They also featured prominently in my fantasies at the time. To call them sexual fantasies would be a bit too extreme, perhaps, as at the time I didn’t recognize them for what they were, and they had evolved from much more innocuous fantasies I’d engaged in slightly earlier in my youth. All these fantasies did undoubtedly generate what I would subsequently recognize as sexual feelings, however.

In any case, the fantasies I had regarding Kate and Angela were always essentially the same. Hidden in the mountains in the midst of a thick forest with ever-blue skies above, far away from civilization, I imagined a building. Inside, it looked like an abandoned school, like we might be in some post-apocalyptic landscape, though I would have had no idea what that meant at the time. Inside there were girls, just like the girls on the playground, but they had a clear objective — they wanted me to join their clan or group. The common image I have regarding how they did this involved being with Kate, their leader, in a dark room. My arms and legs were spread and strapped down to a table that was held at a slant, and Kate would stand right beside me, taunting me, trying to coerce me into becoming one of them, into submitting to her bliss and being her brainwashed slave.

Eventually, my value in both Kate and Angela were downgraded, however, as another, far more adorable and enticing little sadist entered my life, and she outshined them all. A pair of red-headed twins moved into the apartment complex across the street from my house, and they were in my grade. One was rather quiet and reserved, whereas Claire (not to be confused with the Claire I would meet later in life, who shares her true name), the brutal and outspoken one, was the target of my interest. Why I liked her was beyond my comprehension. All I knew was that she elicited a feeling in me that I could neither explain nor deny.

Treating them both like the wild and feral creatures they were, I gazed at Claire, forever with her sister, only at a distance. Even as I stood one day a good distance away from her and behind a tree during recess, the little circle of outcasts that had only recently become my friends were quick to caution me. “Never look such a dangerous creature in the eyes,” went the general message, “for they will take it as a challenge and attack your feeble ass.” Undaunted, I continued to steal quick glimpses from just beyond the vertical horizon of bark. Their recommendation that I talk to her terrified me, so one of my fellow outcasts returned with the suggestion that I write her a letter — a technique that was far more my style, though ultimately I decided to draw her a picture. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go up and hand it to her, however, so the next issue was where in the apartment complex across the street she actually lived, so I could slip it under her door. As could be expected, no one in my newfound gaggle of geeks knew or had so much as a clue. When I began blabbing about how I liked Claire, however, Spitting Mike caught word of it and approached me.

He was this skinny, ugly kid with short black bowl-cut hair and goofy teeth. He spit a lot when he talked. He knew where she lived, he told me, because he followed all the cute girls home. Though I failed to inform him, I found this confession of his to be creepy as fuck, and his beaming pride over his serial stalking made it even creepier. Regardless, it was through this blithering saliva-sprinkler that I learned where she lived, and he offered to take me there himself, so I decided to overlook his rapey aura and let the drooling gremlin guide the way.

Following him home that day after school, he showed me right where her door was. Calmly, he asked if I wanted him to knock, which inspired an instinctive, pleading, “No.” He made like he was going to do it, so I bolted out the door and ran home.

Later that evening, I peddled back over there on my little black bike for some solo recon. Within perhaps a foot or two of reaching the door to the building’s lobby, the door swung open and the twins came barreling out on their bikes, the woman who I would presume to be their mom following close behind. The last thing I wanted was for them to see me, so retreat was reactionary. I was perhaps a bit too frantic about it, however, as I accidentally turned my front tire off the cement patio, hitting both the curb and the bumper of a nearby, rust-bucket of a car. The bumper made this loud, enduring, weird noise when I hit it and threw little rusty metal pieces about in a swiftly-expanding cloud. I turned my back and took off just as I saw the sister look my way, and I couldn’t manage to convince myself she didn’t recognize me as the guy gawking at them from behind the tree on the playground. Yet I soon realized that if she didn’t recognize me from school, she might now recognize me at school as the same weirdo who slammed his bike into a parked car outside their apartment.

In either case, this was not what I wanted my first impression to be. Not at all.

Despite that, I was intent on giving her that picture, so on the following day I returned with it in hand. It was a page from my sketchbook which I had filled with hearts, puppy dogs, and poorly-drawn renditions of Ziggy all about it, unsigned, as I still had some naïve hope she might not presume it was me. I was content enough to simply express my feelings to her anonymously without the threat of rejection or gross bodily harm.

It seemed to have worked in that respect, too, for a day passed and nothing happened. The ever-chatty grapevine on the playground had nothing to contribute. Something seemed wrong, and so the next day I went back to the lobby of her apartment. Finding my picture in the little slot below the mailboxes, where all the misplaced mail goes, I realized that I had put it under the wrong door. Cursing my stupidity, I put it under the right one, which was up the stairs and to the left.

Consultations with the third-grade grapevine on the playground just before school confirmed that not only had she received my drawing but knew that I was the amateur artist in question. Rather than assuming she had made the connection between the drawing and when her sister saw my bike hit that damned bumper, my brain decided to lay blame upon Spitting Mike, who it was easy to believe spilled the beans. To make myself feel less hate for him, I imagined that he had not gone up and told her blatantly, but had rather teased her with knowing who had drawn it but refused to tell her who. I imagined her pinning him to the ground in frustration and kicking him in the groin over and over and over again. I imagined that pathetic kid struggling, drowning in a filthy sea of his own saliva as he begged for mercy, eventually telling her, through his gurgling and bubbling, that it was me.

When I got home that day, it wasn’t even supper when I got what my mother has referred to as my first love letter, hand-delivered to me by a girl who lived across the street and who I had known when younger but had since distanced from. She handed the sealed envelope to me without saying anything and then ran off the porch. With anticipation I opened it to find a letter that read:

“Please don’t write me no more notes.”

Even back then, I could woo a girl.

More persistent now more than ever, the following day I went super-creeper, drew her yet another picture and slid it under her door again. At school the following day, all was silent for a while. This led me to worry that she had not received it, but such worries, I would soon find, were entirely unwarranted.

This I discovered during recess, when I suddenly found a hand drilling my face into the wood chips on the playground. A voice I knew to be Claire then asked if I had drawn her those pictures, and after a pause for dramatic effect, I confessed that I had. She asked me why I’d done it, why I’d made those things for her and I told her, through a storm of wood chips and pain, that it was because I liked her.

She stopped a moment, fist clenched around my shirt, and when that moment inevitably passed, finally spoke.

“That’s gross,” is what she said, and then she punched me in my stupid, fat head.

That summer we moved away and I never saw her again.

When I think of how she might have turned out, I find myself imagining she has become a delicious-looking, latex-skinned, whip-snapping, red-headed dominatrix out there somewhere…