and that's the rest of the story.

I'd like to tell the rest of the story about Chad.

Like I said, Chad had one good idea, and that was the paper. But I'm probably the only kid who remembers Chad's one good idea, and I was jealous of it. Every other person who went through the Caldwell County school system during those years, if they remember Chad at all, remembers him for that whole space alien thing.

Chad wasn't a bad kid, necessarily. He was smart, at least enough to test into the academically gifted classes. He wasn't hideously ugly or fat or short, though his personality did not have a beneficial effect to the way we regarded his appearance. Just as a friendly or fun person will create a pair of rose-colored glasses for those who view him, an obnoxious person will paint his own zits. And so Chad wasn't very popular, because he was annoying. He had a tendency to give ridiculous answers with too much confidence, and he had a case of dandruff for about six months, but which was remembered forever. But he was more of a mild annoyance, meaning he was still more popular than the fat kid.

The odd thing about Chad was that teachers seemed to really dislike him. I don't put much stock in grade school popularity, a view I developed when I didn't have any. Kids are unkind. While I was disappointed to find that adults retain most of the pettiness that they had as children, most adults have the sense to hide it better. I remember two separate teachers, both of them excellent mentors and otherwise fine adults, joining in with us kids as we all mocked Chad. And of course they passed it off as being friendly and teasing - ha ha, we're all friends! - but it strikes me as completely inappropriate now. I thought it was weird at the time, and had I stopped laughing at Chad long enough, I might have realized that these teachers really disliked Chad as much as the rest of us.

Puberty hit us all hard, but it seemed to really take a toll on Chad. He started hanging out with another unpopular-for-being-strange kid, which only made the teasing worse. One weird kid is bad enough, but put two together and you get gay jokes. He became known for telling stories of dubious veracity, though usually no one listened to him for very long.

Once he saw me reading an Agatha Christie book (I went through a brief but intense Christie phase in middle school), and he said that he had read the book as well. After conversing with him for a few minutes, I began to suspect that Chad had not read the book at all. And so I made up a character's name and asked him if that character died in the book. Chad replied that yes, that character did die. I icily responded that there was no such character in the book and the conversation pretty much halted there as he realized that once again, he was busted. Now I think about this little moment, and it makes me cringe. Sandra, you little bitch, I think, he was obviously a really messed up kid with some sort of terrible backstory, and all you had to do was be nice to him. But no, you failed. Good job.

Of course, this incident pales in comparison to the misery handed to Chad over the space alien incident. We had to write term papers twice a year in english class on a topic of our choice. Once these were done, we had to give a short presentation on the topic to the class. One year, Chad did his research on UFO sightings. That part wasn't so bad. It was not uncommon to be interested in that kind of thing, as long as you didn't let on that you believed in it. That was Chad's fatal error. For his presentation, he told us the story of his own personal experience with space aliens. We were agog; was he really saying these things? Being intelligent and cruel adolescents, we asked lots of questions during his presentation. We wanted him to tell us more, more, just to see how far he would go with this tale. He naturally took these questions as encouragement and mistook our interest for genuine, so desparate was his desire to be liked. At some point, the teacher finally stopped us. By the end of the day, every one in our grade knew about it, and Chad probably figured out that his peers had screwed him over again. Even the older kids knew him now, as the kid who saw aliens.

When Columbine happened, Chad was the kid that everyone started looking at differently. Would he fly off the handle and take his revenge upon us someday? And that wasn't even fair, either. I don't know that he ever entertained thoughts of taking everyone out, though I can't help but think he probably wished a little malice on at least a couple of kids. Maybe he wasn't that kind of guy at all. Maybe he still just wanted us to like him.

Me, I'm sitting here feeling like pond scum about poor Chad. And I feel bad about Chris (scrawny, nasal voice and smelled bad), Eric (fat, also smelled bad), Jessica (big nose), Charity (no good reason). I don't think that I was a bully, nor do I recall ever targetting someone for any reason. It was more that I was one more laughing face in the crowd. To a person kept on the outside, I was just another person on the inside, no matter how bad I feel about it now.

And that's the story about Chad. He had one good idea. He told us some stories about aliens. We made his life miserable and then forgot about him. I bet he remembers us.