Gather around, and let me tell you the story of the classmate from Hell. I am on the autism spectrum. During my senior year in high school, I was part of the school’s news program, as well as a theater kid. In both the news program and theater classes, I had a classmate. We got along well for most of the year — until we didn’t.

For reasons I can’t remember, the classmate started to menace me in the news program’s class, talking s*** about me and kicking my backpack around. I tried to deal with it as best as I could and let it slide off my back so that I wouldn’t worry my mother, but the teachers in the school’s special education program saw what was going on and, while initially respecting my wish not to involve my mother, decided she needed to be made aware of the situation. It was a good decision, in hindsight.

The teachers told this classmate not to bother me anymore, and she retaliated by trying to spread rumors about me. She claimed I tried to have her thrown off of the theater team that would be going to a state competition — a bald-faced lie. Ironically, as a result of her continuing to menace me, she actually was thrown off the theater team before we went to state, where I wound up winning “Best In State Actor”.

She was certain not to bother me after that.

The last I remember anything about her, she had been hired at a call center where my mother worked. Mum made certain to introduce herself to her as “[My Name]’s mother” and make it awkward for her.

Back in grad school, I ended up being the senior grad student. (This was largely because my professor was an incompetent idiot and all the other senior grad students had quit.) I was basically the lab manager in addition to handling my own research.

Eventually, the professor hired a new grad student. [Student] was one of those people whose default expression was slackjawed, gormless imbecility. When you talked to him or gave advice or instruction, he’d just stare at you with this vacant expression and then just turn away, never acknowledging a thing you’d said.

[Student] was a rolling disaster from pretty much day one. He constantly destroyed equipment. For example, he destroyed several hundred dollars worth of non-magnetic steel tweezers for TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy) sample work by taking them all out of their custom carrying cases and just tossing them point-down into a glass beaker, destroying their tips. When he was called out on doing this, he just shrugged and wordlessly stared at me.

[Student] would also bring in his crappy evangelical Christian rock music and play it on the lab stereo until the other students and I just got rid of the stereo to not have to listen to the crap. It was crappy not just because it was evangelical Christian music. That’s not my thing at all, but I’ll grant that some of those bands can at least play well. This crap was just awful.

The final straw was one morning when I opened the lab up, walked in, and nearly ran right into an unsecured gas cylinder sitting in the middle of the lab aisleway.

For the uninitiated, gas cylinders must be secured when the heavy metal transport cap has been removed. The gas outlet at the top is fairly delicate, and if the cylinder falls over and that valve hits something, it will probably get torn off. This turns a heavy metal gas cylinder into an uncontrolled rocket capable of punching through six-inch concrete walls and turning people into red smears. It’s serious s***. You do not remove the heavy metal transport cap until the cylinder is firmly attached to a sturdy wall clamp or other safety device.

This gas cylinder was just sitting in the middle of a walkway with a gas regulator on it and a clear plastic tube trailing over to a bench — the perfect setup for a cylinder getting knocked over and causing a disaster. To add insult to this, the f****** thing was literally a foot away from a cylinder tiedown I had mounted to one of the lab benches.

After my heart started again, I carefully walked up to the cylinder, grabbed it in a bear hug, slowly walked it over to the clamp, and secured it. Once I’d made the cylinder safe, I examined it to try and figure out what was going on. That’s when I saw what gas was in it.

Hydrogen. The unsecured gas cylinder was full of hydrogen.

If it had fallen over and hit the regulator on any of the benches all around it, it would have turned into a rocket that would have started punching holes through walls, shooting through a busy building with over fifty scientists working in it, and leaving behind a trail of hundreds of cubic feet of explosive hydrogen gas. Any flame or spark would have then detonated the hydrogen gas like a fuel-air explosive bomb. This thing could easily have killed most of the people in the building.

At this point, I was on the warpath. I was seeing red. I stormed over to the neighboring building where some of the other grad students were and demanded to know who had done such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing. They were all pretty appalled and told me it wasn’t them. But one mentioned that good ol’ [Student] had been talking about needing hydrogen gas for some nanoparticle reduction experiments.

Keep in mind that this sort of experiment needs maybe a few cubic feet of hydrogen gas — a tiny fraction of the volume of the full-sized bomb cylinder that had been in the lab. He could have just ordered a tiny benchtop-sized lecture bottle that was far safer and had more than enough gas.

At that point, I wanted blood. I spent the next hour or so scouring the three buildings of my department, looking for [Student], ready to beat the living s*** out of him the minute I laid eyes on him. I’m pretty sure the other grad students warned him to make himself scarce.

After I couldn’t find him, I went to the professor and basically told him that it was either me or [Student]. [Student] “left” a week or so later, and I never saw him again.

Where I live, it takes twelve weeks of training to become a police officer and fourteen weeks of training to become a border officer. There is also an optional two-year college course for each to prepare you for the job, dive deeper into the criminal code, increase your fitness, and get your nonviolent crisis certificate. I am currently in the optional Border Services course, which shares a first year with the optional police course. I am required to wear a uniform (cargo pants and a button-up collared shirt with the program crest on the sleeves) three days a week.

The first day of classes was orientation, which meant we spent the day in one classroom and were introduced to the program and what it had to offer. I was fresh out of high school and was very nervous about my first day, so I packed everything I could imagine needing — a pencil case, a laptop, several notebooks, lined paper, and feminine hygiene products — and got ready for orientation. 

I sat at a table with five other girls who also looked my age and was surprised that they had all only brought their purses while I had packed a full backpack. At first, I was a bit embarrassed that I had misunderstood what was needed for the day.

Then, the orientation started. 

Professor: “All right, we are going to start by getting to know each other a bit, so I want you all to write your names on the cards in front of you so I know who I am calling on.” 

Nobody at my table had a single writing instrument, and they all needed to borrow a pen or pencil from me. 

Professor: “Next, I want you all to pull out your laptops. You are expected to have these; it was in the list of program requirements when you applied. I want you to open [Website]. I can’t show you the student version because I have a teacher’s account.”

She quickly realised that out of seventy students, only about twenty-five of us had brought our laptops. 

Professor: “Today, you can look this up on your phones, but in the future, you need to bring your laptops. I don’t want you pulling out your phones in class. This is the first day of college; you all need to be better prepared than this.”

We were then given an hour off and asked to meet in a different room for uniform fitting. I ate lunch and then found the room, arriving ten minutes early with about twenty classmates.

Uniform fitting ended up going by very slowly because they could only take three people at a time, but the email we had gotten the week before told us that we had two and a half hours blocked off for this, so I wasn’t concerned. After ten minutes of waiting past the time we were supposed to meet, people at the back of the line started loudly complaining, and several started to call the professor profanities behind her back for making them wait sooooo long. 

Things like this continued all semester. Our Sociology teacher started bringing a box of pencils to the tests because most of the class didn’t bring anything to write with for the test, or at least not a pencil for the scantron. Several people stopped showing up for Fitness because they thought the professor was a b**** for making us go for runs.

One girl got kicked out of Psychology because she screamed at the professor and called her several names when she was asked to put her phone away. (She was in her late twenties and angry that the “high schoolers” were taking up the back row so she couldn’t hide her phone as easily.)

Over twenty people asked for extensions the night before a major presentation was due because they hadn’t read the instructions and hadn’t started the project, thinking that we would be working on it in class that day.

Someone dropped out because she was concerned about how the homework was interfering with her bar-hopping with her fake ID. 

Thankfully, many of these people will not be returning next semester, but it still confuses me how many of these people somehow wanted to go into law enforcement without even being able to respect authority.

I always carry extra pens in case one dies. How do you show up for a final exam without even one?

CONTENT WARNING: Antisemitism

In fourth grade (so I was about nine years old), our teacher decided to hold a little Christmas card exchange. We’d pick names out of a hat and do a little craft thing to make the card ourselves.

The teacher was a special sort of lady, and after gently asking around, she supplied students with ideas for Hanukkah- and Kwanzaa-celebrating students. She went over the cultural and spiritual importance of both holidays. She made it very inclusive and offered to help students make little artsy ideas if, say, a menorah was difficult to draw freehand.

I got a card with a minimalistic Christmas tree, marked heavily over with a big black X that said,

“Roses are red, 

Violets are blue, 

You’re a Jew, 

So no Christmas for you.”  

The student who sent me this card had deliberately been hateful, in accordance with what their parents had taught them. I burst into tears, and the teacher and students were all appalled. There was quite a hullabaloo about it.

The parents of the child didn’t see anything wrong with what their child had done. They simply claimed that the card had been factual and perfectly “creative” considering they had made the effort to make the “poem” for me.

That student’s popularity took quite a plummet for the rest of their attendance at that school.

When I was in high school, in the 1980s, we had a “homeroom” class once every two weeks. Homeroom was for announcements, for voting for class president, and generally for whatever.

The teacher let us vote on what to do. One girl in my homeroom proposed that we take the first fifteen minutes of every homeroom for prayer. The proposal passed by a narrow majority.

As an atheist, I didn’t care to pray, so I just quietly did my homework during this time. This lasted until someone complained that it gave me an “unfair advantage” to be doing homework instead of praying during prayer time.

So, I started putting on my Walkman and listening to a tape. I got called on this even more quickly. Mandatory prayer time was for prayer.

Me: “Well, I don’t pray. I’m an atheist.”

The girl who proposed prayer time argued with me.

Girl: “No. You’ve gotta pray. This is prayer time. The Jewish kids are praying.”

Me: “The sanctity of all religions is protected in the constitution.”

Girl: “Atheism isn’t a religion.”

Me: “Uh… yes, it is.”

Girl: “If atheism is a religion, then ‘off’ is a TV channel.”

Me: “Uh…”

Girl: “If atheism is a religion, ‘bald’ is a hair color.”

Me: “But—”

Girl: “If atheism is a religion, then ‘yes, please’ is a sex.”

Me: “I always put—” 

Girl: “If atheism is a religion, Black is a color.”

Me: “It is…”

Girl: “If atheism is a religion, then ‘empty’ is a flavor.”

Me: “Fine. Fine, I’ll pray.” 

I clasped my hands in front of myself.

Me: “Oh, holy Satan…”

That’s as far as I got. She hit me. Right in the face. It was the first time I’d ever been hit, and I did not enjoy the experience at all. I do not recommend being punched in the face to anybody. 

I do think the reason I remember the preceding exchange so clearly was from being hit in the face, however.

The teacher intervened at this point, dragging [Girl] off of me and sending both of us to the principal’s office. I was suspended for a day; she was suspended for three days.

When we got back, we learned that mandatory prayer time had been canceled, and there was no further mention of it from anyone.