Seventh grade was that classic year when you had to go on the Philadelphia trip, you simply had to, but I didn’t want to on account of my fear that Gregory Jenkins would kick my privates so hard it could be a physics exhibit at the Franklin Institute. But I had to.

Jenkins accordingly gave me this certain look at the Liberty Bell. Then he came to the hotel room I was staying in with three other nerds very late at night. I still don’t know how he acquired the key. However, that didn’t really matter when Gregory Jenkins was suddenly standing over me with that certain look in its full intensity.

“I know what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“You told my girlfriend I was being mean to you and she broke up with me.”

He then proceeded to start punching me, and he didn’t cease the abuse until our chaperone came into the room and pulled him off. The chaperone proceeded to reprimand him, a process which didn’t stop until they received a call the next morning that his mother, the wealthiest and most well-respected woman in Newark, had turned up dead on some road with a wine bottle that wasn’t full of wine. He didn’t talk much after that, and despite the psychologist telling me to, I didn’t talk to him, and I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it until he grew up and became president of the Franklin Institute.