Once when I was sixteen I asked the girl who sat in front of me in my English class to be my date for an upcoming school dance. Now, I was never one to be forward with my romantic intentions. In fact, even speaking to a girl without the conversation wandering into awkward ramblings about the necessity of socks or the process of growing cranberries was nothing short of miraculous. So working up the courage to actually ask a girl out happened as often as a meteor crashing into the planet and ending life as we know it.
It took me weeks to figure out exactly what to say her but eventually I had my plan of attack completely figured out. I would intercept her after class and ask while she walked to the cafeteria. I had gone over exactly how I was going to do it a thousand times in my head, and I even managed to make it through a few practice runs where I would ask out the empty space beside me. If all went well I would use my best dapper voice and suavely sweep her into my arms and carry her into our future filled with wedding gowns, children, social security checks, and eventual death and abandonment.
That afternoon I followed my plan exactly, but as I approached her I suddenly realized that I hadn’t actually worked out what I was going to say to her and it dawned on me that I had planned the situation as if it were a military strike. I planned on moving in, destroying the target, and moving out before the enemy had enough time to put together a halfway decent counterattack. I never took into account that I might actually have to put some thought into what I had to say when asking someone out. I was flying in with no missiles and by the time I realized it I was already past the failsafe point. Before my eyes my flawless attack for romantic bliss suddenly turned into a kamikaze run of my social life.
“
By the time I got home I had gotten over the rejection for the most part. She told me that she went the year before and didn’t really want to go through the trouble dealing with the money and effort it takes to find a dress, which seemed like an acceptable answer to a sixteen-year-old who didn’t know any better. Afterall, what did I know of the hardships involved in picking out a dress? There could be more to it than simply finding one that looks good and buying it. Maybe dresses had to be woven by hand around the girl while she stood perfectly still for days on end. It could have been a month long, life-draining process for all I knew.
I ended up not going to the dance and instead opted to spend the evening alone watching cartoons and counting discarded change left around the house, an activity I often resorted to when the relentless disappointments of suburban teenage life got me down. After all, the sting of unrequited love was nothing that $7.84 cents in rolled pennies couldn’t numb.
Later in the evening as my fingers began to brown from fumbling through pennies that had once undoubtedly been inserted into someone’s anus, I received a call from a friend.
“Kris!” he managed to shout above what sounded like “The Electric Slide.” “You will not believe who is here...”
That bitch. She lied to me. That rat faced, two timing, angel-haired witch had lied to me. She was there with Dennis Slattery—the head of the debate team. Not only did she reject me in favor of the quintessential Asian geek, she also wore a brand new blue dress. She could not get away with this. Who was she to toss my heart aside as if it were the browned core of an apple? She would not get away with this. I felt something inside me break. I wanted blood.
***
Now when you’re sixteen, revenge can be a tricky subject. My first instinct was to take all of the change I collected that evening, fill them into a sock, and savagely bash her perfectly shaped head in—but frankly I’m not that violent of a person, and I think homicide isn’t exactly something that gets you into a state school. I considered slashing her tires, but since she drove her mother’s handed down Volvo 244, I figured that would only get her parents angry; and since revenge by the hands of parents tends to involve lawsuits and community service I ruled that out as well. Obscene phone calls were also out of the question because, really, obscene phone calls aren’t so much revenge as they are a part of the masturbatory repertoire of men with thin moustaches named Walter.
This operation required something with more finesse, something with more charm, and, most importantly, something completely untraceable. Realizing that I couldn’t do this alone, I called together three of my closest friends: Patrick, Richie, and Michael. My friends and I shared an equally jilted and disenfranchised view on teenage life, and as such our collective angst was deadly and vast enough to fill a shark tank.
My blatant jilting at the homecoming dance was more than any of us could handle, so we put our collectively bitter and angst ridden minds together in order to finally strike back at those who made our teenage lives so superficially miserable.
However, it would seem that a childhood reared by video games and action movies didn’t exactly work wonders for our imaginations. The best idea any of us could muster was murder. Sure, we hated the girl—but the idea of shoving her corpse into a wood chipper or sharing a jail cell with someone who refers to you as Loraine didn’t exactly sit well with any of us. Some other ideas that we considered but ultimately scrapped for legal issues were as follows:
1. Set her car on fire.
2. Burn a hateful message into her yard.
3. Burn a caricature of a kitten into her yard (The kitten, somehow, made it seem less “hate crimey”).
4. Stab a cryptic message onto her front door.
5. Set her front door on fire. (Something about fire appealed to me at the time, I’m not sure why).
After several hours of debate, our ideas were running as dry. Since we were completely incapable of coming up with a revenge plot that wasn’t either implausible or a felony, we decided to call it a night and go to the grocery store to restock the house’s dwindling soft drink and junk food supply.
After gathering enough Cheez-its and orange soda to drown away our disappointment we headed towards the registers, but just as we had come to terms with our defeat something stopped us. Perhaps it was chance that brought us by the discount meat counter, or perhaps it was the will of God Himself; whatever it was, we came face to face with the objects that would make our rein of terror complete: pig’s feet. Rows of them, glistening in the halogen light of the 24-hour grocery store. They laid there untouched for weeks, and bore discount stickers as if they medals of valor.
After that, everything became clear.
***
One major draw-back to working with half rotten pork products as a medium of revenge, however, is that you have to work in direct contact with the stuff. A luke-warm pig’s foot isn’t exactly the most welcoming object to handle with your bare hands. The smell didn’t help matters either. After ripping open the cellophane the car immediately smelled like a retirement home—an odor reminiscent of soiled bed sheets and clammy skin. I still will never understand how exactly a person could bring themselves to cook one of these things much less actually consume one.
After becoming comfortable with our weapon of choice, the operation essentially planned itself. We would pull up to her house under the cover of night and strike in three-unit pincer attack: the first would hit the car, the second would strike the mailbox, and the third would take out the most vital target: the front porch. Nothing says “Fuck you” like rotting pig parts sitting on your front porch.
We pulled up to the house just after midnight, and the lack of light in the house assured us that nobody was stirring about. We burst out of the minivan like a squad of trained marines with a pig’s foot clenched in each fist. Michael took the driveway, and he threw the pig’s foot underhanded towards
By the time the Harrington family dog’s husky bark flooded the neighborhood I was already halfway across the yard. My get-away car had already begun driving away by the time that I reached the street, and my friends reached out of the open door towards me, telling me to jump in as if I were a tramp hopping onto a moving train. I threw my body in towards the open door and the van sped off with my feet still dragging against the pavement.
***
When I went to school the next day I expected it to be ablaze with rumor mongering.
“Did you hear about
“Her parents might get divorced because of it.”
“The CIA is at her house now—they think it might have been terrorists.”
But when I arrived I was thrown off by the lack of buzz reverberating through the hall. Still, I was giddy to see what was left of my victim’s shattered psych; or at least satisfying a gross out story about finding a fly-covered pig’s foot stinking up her front porch.
When I got to class the seat where
The sound of the bell snapped me out of my trance. Where was she? Where was my revenge? Jesus Christ, maybe something bad did happen. Maybe all of those rumors running around the high school in my imagination were true. Maybe her grandfather did have a stroke after finding out about the desecration of his favorite granddaughter’s house; maybe the pig’s foot did drive her insane and she ended up hanging herself; my God, maybe her dog found the pig’s foot ate it and died! Jesus, I just assassinated a girl’s dog! What the fuck is the matter with me? I was a dog murderer. I was on the same level as child molesters and men who eat used chewing gum. I was an abomination.
After an eternity of living out scenarios like a secret world government hunting for me, or being eaten alive by angry, footless pigs the door to the class opened bringing me back to my senses. It was her. My chest swelled with relief, she was alive. In fact, she looked amazing. Her hair and make-up were perfect and she was even wearing a new outfit. Wait, Goddamnit, after all of that effort and three dollar expense she has the gall to come waltzing into my classroom looking amazing? That bitch! Maybe I should have killed her fucking dog. I should have broken its stupid neck and left its bleeding carcass right in her God damned bed. My quest for revenge crumbled before my very eyes as she jaunted into her seat.
I spent the period staring furiously at the back of her head as if my eyes would burn a hole through her skull. What could have gone wrong? As far as I knew pig’s feet didn’t dissolve when exposed to open air, and I didn’t dream the entire evening. Did I?
***
Despite our apparent failure, this wasn’t the last time that my friends and I consulted the discount meat counter out of acts of revenge. In fact it almost became a bi-weekly tradition. Every time we would strike in the night like the undead we would hope that maybe this time someone might actually find what we’ve done. But in all the time of us sneaking around and calling ourselves the Pig’s Feet Bandits no one ever found anything. It wasn’t exactly as effective as other methods of high school revenge, but I’d like to think it was at least healthier than taking your grandfather’s World War II rifle and shooting your geometry teacher. I still haven’t figured out what could have happened to all of those pig’s feet, and I suppose in the end that never mattered. But if you’re reading this and you’ve always wondered from where that pig’s foot on your porch appeared, it was me. And if it also managed to kill your cat, well then I’m sorry—you shouldn’t have spilled milk on my history project.
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