Salient

If justice is a glass of milk, then revenge is a Singapore Sling—sweet, poisonous, and best served cold. Sure, justice is sweet, but revenge is sweeter.

I had my first taste of revenge at a very early age. Tiffany Marshall was a first class bitch; pure evil in the form of a little freckled five-year-old. So evil, in fact, that she broke the unsaid, though widely understood playground rule; that you never take advantage of a girl hanging from the monkey bars. There I was, my leggings (oh, the nineties) around my ankles, exposed to the taunting eyes of my classmates. To seek justice would have involved reliving my story to my teacher and parents, which I was not about to do. No, I had to act alone, and it had to hurt.

I waited a couple of weeks, my resentment towards her growing as fast as the list of my cruel, bottom-related nicknames. Blind-man’s Bluff is a game of trust, foolish girl. “Keep walking,” I cackled, as I saw her disappear over a ledge into a bush, meters below. I’ll bet she still has a bump on her head.

I watched in horror and admiration as a friend of mine served a long, cool glass of revenge to a party-crasher in her house this weekend. A stranger had stepped in front of poor Isobel as she passed into the kitchen, looking her up and down, his eyes lingering a little too long on her chest, before purring “that’s a fiiine piece of ass”. Who says that? Isobel let out an indignant grunt and pushed her way past, willing to let this one slide. Undeterred by Isobel’s coolness, or perhaps mistaking her grunt for one of sexual frustration, the said stranger decided that it was time to get a little more physical. He grabbed her bottom.

I do hate having my bottom grabbed. My reaction is usually to give the offending male a good old-fashioned kick in the shins, but Isobel had a better idea—she got pissy, literally. She stormed to the bathroom, peed in a glass, and left it on the windowsill to cool. “Would you like a drink?”

See, there are some situations in which justice does not suffice. This guy needed to learn his lesson, before his slimy little fingers pinched any other innocent Wellingtonian bottoms. I hope that every time he reaches out for a little feel, he tastes Isobel’s urine at the back of his throat.

Vengeful? Yes. Always.

My boyfriend’s first taste of revenge highlights the reason that same-sex schools should be disestablished, involving, as one would expect, a pie, a porno, and a tampon. A poor boy left a half-eaten pie on the table as he went off to take a phone call at his house, and Kim, always the opportunist, decided that it was time to take punitive action. He put a tomato sauce-stained tampon in the boy’s pie, and waited for the boy to take a bite. When to boy pulled the (seemingly blood-stained) tampon out of his mouth Kim, to add insult to injury, informed him that he had found it in his mother’s bedside rubbish bin. “In my defence,” he says, “my victim had once played a porn video (in which a man stuck his entire head into some poor girl’s vagina) to our fourth-form geography class when the relief teacher failed to turn up.” Boys.

When my flatmate Daniel got turned down by a girl who he had asked to the school dance, he took a rather unusual course of action, deciding to punish her rather than woo her. He climbed on the science block roof, armed with a video camera and a bag of frozen rats that he had stolen from the science department. As his friend filmed, he tied the rats up with string and lowered them onto his crush’s head. How could she have refused such a gentleman?

I’ve never been much good at maths, but my mother did at least make sure that I understand the most useful equations: Wrong + Wrong = Right, and Eye=Eye, Tooth=Tooth. She explained the concepts to me as she told me about being rejected whilst on a date with a man called Steven. Grabbing his arm, she wrestled the watch off his wrist and dunked it straight into his pint of beer.

“There’s an old proverb,” she said. “Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold.”

Correction: In my last article, I accidently wrote that “the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way before the Bible was written”. It should, of course, have read; “the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way after the Bible was written”. The Bible is, like, super old. I have apologised to the author (J.K. Rowling), and would apologise to God, except that I’m not so sure that He even exists.

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