If Collab:If you were asked to identify your most life-altering moment, what would it be? Why did that pivotal event or experience cause you to change your direction?

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if we’d gotten away with it, or if we’d succeeded, if we hadn’t been caught and turned in to the school’s administration, or if the victim had been a less forgiving person.

It was more than one moment. It was a period of a month that led up to a single moment in the high school principle’s office where I suddenly realized how cruel I was capable of being, how capable I am of hurting other people, and how hard it is for someone to forgive a person like that, and how hard it can be to rebuild a friendship when someone has been like that.

I want to be able to blame other people: the woman who came up with the plan to ruin Fred’s (not his real name, of course) psyche, the other people who went along with it, or even Fred himself for being horrifically naive and a social outcast. Honestly, though, the only person I can blame is myself. I was the one who said, "It sounds like fun, let’s do it."

There were four of us who decided that Fred had become pompous and arrogant enough to deserve this kind of treatment. We decided that it would be right for us to play a big joke on him and create for him an alternate sort of social reality that he would believe for a month or two and that we would demolish and destroy at the end of that time. Apparently it had been done to someone else at the same high school. There was even a name for this process in the student body: "Spurgeoning", after the first victim. For that first unfortunate, it all ended with him crying, panicked, in the men’s room of the high school, trying desperately to escape from the white slave traders that he was convinced were after him.

So the plan was this: C–, the woman who came up with the plan, would pretend to be in love with him; so would B–, a guy we all knew who was bisexual. Woman intimidated Fred, and homosexuality intimidated him even more. Then L– and M– would pretend to be in love with each other. My role was to pretend to be a convert to the cult of the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, who was all over the news at the time. Fred, as I recall, was in love with L–, and M– was as close to a mortal enemy as Fred could get. And Fred was a staunch Catholic and we all knew that for him to believe that I was involved in this cult would really upset him.

And it all worked. For a month, we had Fred convinced that all of these things were true. It worked so well, in fact, that we decided that we would bring more people into our cabal. So C– approached N–, another woman in the senior class. N– was appalled, and approached the school administration and told them what we were doing to Fred.

C–, of course, was outraged. How dare N– betray her like this? L– and M– weren’t so outraged; but, then, their hearts were never really into it in the first place. B– immediately claimed that he’d never been into it at all, that he really was sincerely attracted to Fred; but, then, the attraction quickly faded when the whole thing came to light.

Shortly after N– went to the administration, we were all called in to the dean’s office, Fred included, to talk about it. C– sat in her chair, arms folded across her chest, fuming. The dean was open and concerned. L–, M–, and B– were downcast. I felt downright ashamed of myself. It was Fred, though, whom I respected. He was the one who forgave, who said, "It’s okay. I mean, a joke’s a joke, right?" The dean pressed him for a bit, but Fred was adamant. He wanted to forgive, forget and move on. The dean confessed that he’d planned on punishing us, but decided that he wouldn’t because Fred had forgiven.

That moment taught me a lot. I looked at Fred, and I saw the hurt and the feeling of betrayal there, but I heard the forgiveness and I knew it was sincere. I looked at C– and saw the indignation. In that moment, I suddenly knew two things: first, that people can rise above their hurts and their sadness and forgive those who hurt them; and second, that some people, even when confronted with what they had done wrong, will still admit that they were in the right, and will be indignant and outraged when it is implied that they were in the wrong. I learned a lot about fragility, and about courage, and about humility. I learned that I am capable of hurting people in terrible ways.

And mostly, I learned from Fred at that moment something about independence: about how we can be independent from the hurts we’ve suffered and go on to try to rebuild when the natural tendency is to resent and accuse. I feel fortunate that it was Fred we chose to do this to; I doubt anyone else would have been so ready to overcome the hurt and anger.

Fred and I still had a year together in school after that; we were both juniors when this whole thing came down. Somehow, we managed to rebuild our friendship, although it was never as strong as it had been before. When our senior class went to Los Angeles for our senior trip, Fred and I shared a hotel room but we didn’t talk that night.

C– graduated from high school, and I never heard from her again. L– and M– continued on with Fred and me, and I heard from both of them from time to time; B– I ran into at the Renaissance Faire, and he was pretty much the same as he’d ever been.

No lesson is ever perfectly learned, of course. In the sixteen years that have passed since then, I’ve still doled out my share of hurt and pain, some of it even deliberately. I like to think, though, that I learned enough about the human heart and about friendships in the one moment to be sensitive enough when I have hurt someone to try to make amends quickly and appropriately.