The B

We used to call him 'Big Backwards Buck'. This was due to his obesity, the fact his shirt was always backwards or inside-out and his oversized teeth. No one was entirely sure of his real name, he was 'The B' to us all. We had our suspicions; Bobby, Bill, but no one ever really asked. We made a game out of the different misshapen features of his face, scoring points for each time our miscellaneously selected objects would collide with them from across the class; erasers, balls of paper, shoes. It wasn't a particularly challenging games - he never reacted, never even scowled back, he'd just sit there taking it all - but it passed the time. I remember one day, in tenth grade, Liam Hiller managed to convince which ever grade-below girl he was dating at the time to go over to The B and lightly rub her abnormally developed breast against the arm he was resting in front of him. as he tried frantically to solve a basic maths equation. We immediately saw the blood rush to his face, but the tale dictates, the blood didn't stop there. The B stood up and shuffled out the room like a constipated penguin, waddling and tripping as he went.  One more 'B' to add to the coincidentally alphabetizable list. I suppose it should have come as no surprise to us how we found him that day. The lonely old oak standing mightily still, bearing the weight, not even creaking. Shiny black leather glinting like a smile as it danced in the sun before us, tightly wrapped around a stocky, pale neck. Ever backwards label of an ever backwards shirt to us, then from us, to, from, to, from - turning with the wind, a dissipated carousel in the breeze. Stagnent line of drool hanging from the corner of a gaping mouth, coagulating further as the seconds ebbed on.    
The note he left itself gave us no precise indication it was our fault. There was no finger-pointing, no arduous and detailed account of every incident of wrong doing, no names -not a lot of anything really. In fact I would have gone as far as to say he did not blame us in the slightest, from what we could deduce from the note itself. It was a snivelling collection of cliches about how he was sorry to his mother and why the world was not fit for him - all the things a hormonal premenstrual girl writes in her diary after a pathetic vexatious breakup. And yet I still take these meds; anxiety, depression, sleep. Whenever I close my eyes I still see his lolling tongue and his fixed, bulging eyes staring at me as they circulate, dangling from the stumpy branch. Swaying softly like dice from a rear-view mirror. And every time I try to escape these apparitions  to find solace in other corners of my subconscious mind- there he is - his eyes fly open and so do mine as I scream and scream, cold sweat covering my body. I struggle so furiously against the images burning into my dream, fiery visions from Satan's own picture house - but they fight back, body spinning at the speed of a hydraulic drill - threatening to fly from it's suspended eternal stance by that oak tree and crush me where I stand. I still have to check each corner of my room five times over for his ghost, I'm still afraid of my own shadow and those all around me. I rue the day I ever laughed at his obesity, his backwards shirts and his bucked teeth. All because of how he signed that apologetic, travesty of romanticized garbage, that trivial scribbling. An almost illegible afterword at the back of an envelope haunts me, freezes the very marrow in my bones if I ever dare to think about it; 'I'll get you. - The B'