The Smartest Girl In My School Bullied Me For Three Years — Then I Found Her Secret Journal

Part 1

The smartest girl in my school made hating me into an absolute art form.

Three years of perfectly timed eye rolls.

Three years of her publicly tearing down every answer I gave in class.

Three years of her telling anyone who would listen that I was the most insufferable person she had ever met.

The worst part was that Megan was genuinely brilliant.

She sat at the very top of our class ranking with perfect scores on literally everything.

She was the kind of person who could make you feel completely stupid just by existing in the same room.

And for some unknown reason, she had decided very early on that I was completely beneath her.

I never actually knew what I did to deserve that kind of targeted treatment.

We had exactly one argument during sophomore year English class.

Mr. Harrison had asked about the symbolism in The Great Gatsby.

I cautiously suggested that Gatsby was a sympathetic character.

Megan turned around in her desk and looked at me like I was an absolute idiot.

Apparently, that one mild disagreement was enough to earn me three full years of open hostility.

Every time I raised my hand, I could feel her glaring at the side of my head.

Every time we were paired for group projects, she would let out this heavy sigh that echoed across the room.

I eventually just accepted it.

Megan hated my guts.

The sky was blue, and water was wet.

It was just a fundamental fact of my high school existence.

Then yesterday afternoon, she dropped something.

We were walking out of advanced literature.

The hallway was packed with students rushing to their next period.

Her heavy black backpack was partially unzipped at the top.

A small, dark blue notebook slid out and hit the linoleum floor with a soft thud.

She just kept walking down the crowded hallway.

She did not even notice it was gone.

I bent down and picked it up.

I should have just chased her down right then and handed it back.

I really should have.

But the notebook fell open in my hands.

There was my name.

Tyler.

Underlined twice in thick black ink.

I should have snapped it closed immediately.

I should have handed it back the next day and pretended I never saw anything.

But my name was right there on the page.

It was underlined in the middle of a sentence that started with, “I can’t stop thinking about.”

So I took it home.

I sat on my bed with the door locked and I read it.

One entry became two.

Two entries became ten.

The whole journal was basically a meticulously detailed timeline of Megan’s secret breakdown over me.

There was an entry from last month where she complained about my academic performance.

She wrote, “He’s not even that smart.”

But then she immediately followed it with, “Okay, he’s smart, he’s really smart.”

She ended that paragraph by calling my intelligence a massive problem.

I turned the page and my heart started hammering in my chest.

There was an entry where she described my hands for an entire half page.

My hands.

She wrote about the specific way I tap my pen on my desk when I am thinking.

She noticed the exact way I run my fingers through my hair when I get frustrated with a difficult math problem.

Then she wrote, “I watched him open a water bottle today and I genuinely needed to leave the room.”

I had to put the journal down for a solid five minutes after reading that line.

I picked it back up and flipped to an entry from earlier this week.

She finally admitted why she always corrected my answers in front of the whole class.

She wrote that she only started doing it because she desperately wanted me to look at her.

She literally wrote, “Negative attention is still attention.”

She called herself pathetic.

She called herself a straight-A student acting like a middle schooler with a crush.

I could not process what I was reading.

This girl had spent three years making me feel like dirt.

She had humiliated me in front of our friends and teachers.

And she did it all because she liked me?

The very last entry was dated two days ago.

It was about a moment in the hallway right before biology class.

She wrote that I smiled at her.

I was not even smiling at her, I was just smiling at a joke Craig told me.

But she wrote that she was intentionally mean to me in bio right after that happened.

She ended the entry with a line that has been echoing in my head all night.

“I don’t know why I do this, I like him so much it makes me stupid.”

I am sitting in my dark room right now, staring at the cover of this notebook.

Three years of thinking she hated me, and now I have all the answers in my hands.

Tomorrow morning, I am going to walk straight up to her locker and show her what I found.