Becoming a legend
Let's see. I devloped a mental illness around age 11, and it wasn't diagnosed until I was about 30, because everyone knows the real cure is to "Smarten yourself up." Or in severe cases, "Pull your head out of your arse!"
So you could consider my high school self to have been a bit of a soft target. The rest of the school certainly did.

One lunchtime though, I managed to tip things into Lord of the Flies territory.

It started with the usual, getting bits of lunch flicked at me as I was walking around the school. (Sitting in one place made me too easy to get hold of.) I dodged one guy, who decided that I needed to be put in my place, and started chasing me, with his friends following for a laugh.
Now I was always good at running, from necessity. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong direction, and picked up another group, who decided to join in. And another. Then, dodging through one of the locker bays, another. Once I was outside the school quadrangle, I looked back, and had over a hundred screaming, jeering boys, all following me, the ones in the lead yelling about what they would do to me.
At this point, I did what anyone would do. Damn near pissed myself and ran like hell. There was one small corner of my brain still functioning, and I realised I had to get back into the quadrangle, because otherwise it would be just me and them. I had to cut across, which let them gain on me, but I'd managed to get just enough of a lead that I got into the doorway by the canteen about a foot in front of the leaders, and the bottleneck slowed them down.
Of course, by now they were picking up followers who had no idea what was up front. So imagine the scene when I ran past the staff room windows, with about 200 boys in hot pursuit. *All* of the teachers poured out of the door, some of them still holding their coffee mugs, and a couple of the male teachers who often played footy with the year 9/10 boys slammed into a couple of the leaders. At that, the entire crowd just evaporated, suddenly looking at terribly interesting things that just happened to be in the other direction.

I ended up in detention for a week. Really, it was protective custody until the teachers were sure it wasn't going to happen again. One of the maths teachers estimated there were 200 boys when I passed the window, and said that he'd never seen anything like it in 40 years of teaching.

And the legend part? Years later, at uni, I was chatting to someone who's younger brother happened to have started at that school. They were worried about him, because he'd been bullied a bit, and there was this story about how once there was a kid who ended up with the whole school of 1000 kids chasing him, who'd been beaten so badly he was never seen at the school again.


(Excuse me for catharting in public, at least this time I didn't follow through.)
(ShowPony, Tue 19 May 2009, 14:08, 3 replies)

Good grief
Mob mentality is a scary thing. At least you had teachers that gave a flying fuck and stopped it.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Tue 19 May 2009, 14:55, closed)

Have a click
This happened to someone in my hometown. it started of as a rumor that someone was going to get an after school beating, and Chinese whispers made this guy into the devil incarnate. Until virtually the entire population of two secondary schools were after this poor bugger. Most of the people were just there for the spectacle. But one against one thousand? He ended up running across the surrounding countryside just to get away.

To hear the same story from the point of view of the man on the receiving end of a witch hunt is sobering.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Tue 19 May 2009, 15:46, closed)

This is fantastic.
You've taken a terrifying experience and written it in a fantasticly wonderful way. The images in my head, I'm sorry to say, made me laugh quite a great deal, just imagining what the staff saw.

"aaAAAAaaa...."
~rumblerumblerumble~
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
( vix0r was not Matthew on, Tue 19 May 2009, 23:23, closed)