Scapegoat.

Thanks to the magic that is Facebook, I'm able to stalk keep in touch with old friends from high school without actually having to talk to them. I've been feeling especially reminiscent lately, and was thinking about the dynamic of the "old gang." Looking back, I think I feel most sorry for Mary*.

Mary was what you would call the group DUFF. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, that would be the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Every group of high school girls has one. If you don't think your group does or did, guess what, you were the DUFF. Sorry. I was the smart one. Jennifer was the funny one. Kylie was the bitch. Mary was the DUFF.

Remember Piggy from Lord of the Flies? That was Mary. She was large, she was anxious, and she was always paranoid we'd get in trouble. Mainly because we usually did, often with the law, and her mom was the 911 dispatcher in our tiny town, so any trouble we incurred (and then dumped on her), she would be punished way worse than the rest of us. So, being 16, 17 years old, we usually used Mary as the group scapegoat, usually because she was slower than the rest of us and unable to run from the cops and jump fences and not cry when being questioned.

Sometimes you just have to sacrifice the slowest member of the pack, and in our case, it was Mary. And we left her to the wolves pretty frequently.

The most blatant and obvious case of this was one night during a sleepover when we decided it would be funny to go toilet-paper (or TP, if you will) the house of an especially cute guy in our class, we'll call him John. Kylie had a huge crush on John, so when you're 16 and you like a guy, naturally the best way to address this is to throw toilet paper all over every tree in his yard, shaving cream his and his parents' cars, and take a shit on his front doorstep. Well, I didn't particularly like him, also he was my second or third cousin, so I shit on his front doorstep. Whatever, he wasn't my crush.

We couldn't drive yet, so we had Mary's older brother Nick serve as our chauffeur in exchange for beer money and a joint. We piled into Nick's Ford Escort and drove to John's house, where Nick sat in the car while we TP'd the trees, giggling and shushing each other and running around like the idiot 15-year-olds we were.

Then the living room light turned on. We saw a silhouette pass through the living room and knew our shenanigans were being thwarted. So we screamed, because that's what idiot 15-year-olds do, and ran to the car. Mary was the furthest from the car at the time so already had a longer way to run. This proved to be her downfall. That, and the fact that she was morbidly obsese.

It was John's dad. The front door swung open and out he came, in nothing but tighty-whities and tube socks, and came charging out after us into the yard like a madman. (John's dad was also sort of known for being a little imbalanced.) We threw ourselves into the car, screaming in terror because there's a 40-something-year-old man in his underwear chasing us and screaming at us. We screamed at Nick to drive off as Mary was leaping headfirst into the backseat of the car.

Mary only got the top half of her body into the car, and I still remember her grabbing onto me as the car sped off... and John's dad ripped her out of the car. It was sort of like those horror movies, where you see the girl getting pulled under the bed by whatever beast awaits and you just see her fingers desperately grabbing in futility?


Yeah. It was like that.

And we yelled at Nick -- MARY'S BROTHER -- to keep driving as we slammed the door shut.

To this day, I remember watching out the back window as John's dad SHOOK HER, screaming (we later found out), "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" and as she was being violently shaken, Mary managed to stammer out, "WHAT...ARE...YOU...DOING?!?!"

John's dad called the police, and then Mary had to wait at John's house for her mom to come pick her up. We left her there to die, more or less -- especially once her mother got ahold of her. In the meantime, Nick took us to the late-night gas station and we got ice cream.

Mary didn't talk to us for a solid week. Mostly because she was on parental-imposed house arrest. "Grounding" never really did justice for the degree of punishment her parents would put her under.

We were assholes back then, sure. But then the year after we graduated, John's dad died of colon cancer, so really, karma won out after all.


* - Names changed to protect... well, basically just for my own amusement, really.