It was early in the morning, just before the start of elementary school. My homeroom teacher had stepped out of the classroom for a brief moment. One of my classmates entered the room. Noticing that the teacher was absent, he saw this as an opportunity. He went up to a girl sitting at her desk in the front row.
He kicked her in the shins and laughed.
Poor thing, she was painfully shy. She wore horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses and hid much of her face with her hair. She seemed terrified by life, a defenseless target.
What motivated him to do this I’ll never know. But he was older and way bigger than everyone, and so he got away with it.
I detested him for years afterward.
He never again did anything as cruel—that I witnessed. But, to my thinking, he matured into a smart-ass, quick with the unkind, sarcastic remark.
His family moved away before we reached high school.
I didn’t come across him again for almost a decade. It was a random, unlikely meeting at a bookstore. I recognized him immediately, despite the passage of time, and even though he cut an unexpected figure. With a tweed jacket and elbow patches, he had adopted the look of a scholar. And, to my surprise, he was browsing in a section devoted to religion.
We exchanged glances, and after a long moment of puzzlement, he gave me a friendly grin of recognition.
We took a few minutes to catch up on our current lives. All the while, in the back of my mind, I could see him kicking the girl. I kept looking for signs that this now apparently considerate and decent man was still the cruel bully of elementary school. But it turned out he was completing a major in religious studies and a minor in creative writing. He had a novel in the works. I found myself enjoying the conversation, though I don’t recall his asking many questions about me.
I felt disoriented. It was hard to comprehend a world in which someone who had been so cruel could now seem so apparently wholesome. And I was disappointed too. A part of me wanted him to remain the bully. Was it fair for him to change and then benefit from such a change?
Furthermore, can people ever really change if their prior self is defined by an extreme behavior seemingly so very diagnostic of a flawed essence?
I never saw him again. I’ve never had the opportunity to further examine the authenticity of his transformation.
But, for me, the question of whether people can make dramatic changes has surfaced time and time again.
Of course, anyone’s behavior is explained by a blend of personal factors and environment. Who knows, for example, whether he was an abused child and responded by acting cruelly outside the home? But, over time, helped by plasticity of development and more healthy experiences, he was able to reshape these early proclivities. A latent capacity for empathy flourished. Perhaps the fusion of temperament and experience in fact built in him a moral character now manifest in adulthood.
But the folk psychologist in me gives me pause. If I were to write a story based on this life, how would I have it to end? A changed man or still the bully?
God help me, I found myself pitying the woman who may have married him.
Do I need to change?
