Dear Friends and Classmates of Degrassi,
Thank you for granting me your time in hearing what I have to say today. I am a bit on the shy side, but lest we forget that you have done me the service of making me into "somebody" when that is so hard to do in high school. Rick Murray, by the way. I am in Grade 10, savant of the arts, and an aspiring film director. I know what you are thinking: why not give the comedic arts a try since I have such a knack for it? You gave me the push I needed to see that when you doused me in glue and feathers on live television. How you all laughed! I should have used my one and only spotlight to finally step forth and ask the only words still coherent to me. How could you?
I competed in the academic bowl for you. Your approbation was the prize, but it was lost to me before I ever began. With nothing before me and everything behind me, my vacant present absorbed the role of being an entertainer. In the days of old, entertainers saved their best work for execution day when the whole kingdom gathered for the occasion. The honor to entertain is truly mine. I am lucky to have friends so great as to recognize something real in me that I could not see in myself. You noticed I wear my heart on my sleeve, but I would not have known it for sure until you amassed your bullying mice of men to rip it away from me.
But there is a piece of my heart I sequestered far deeper than your myopic capacity can detect. That piece is my love for our school. I am sorry I cannot castrate my humanity into a subservient prisoner of your justice system. I answer to a higher power. Very soon you will understand that when justice has been compromised by the flaws of the human condition, He provides a chosen few of us with the tools we need to cleanse the world of the fallen souls so that His divinity will live on.
I am sorry for the way I hurt Terri. I renounced my old ways and repented for my moral shortcoming until I was forgiven: not just by Jesus, but forgiven by my own self. It is the hardest thing you can do. When you come back from it, you come back as someone else. Inside out you are changed, and you kind of get drunk on it. You rush out into the world and get ready to meet everyone in your whole life again for the first time. You do what I did and bound back into your old ghosts because mind over matter vanquished the demons of who you were before. You forgive, you forget, and you love. Damn, how you love…Sadly, learning from my mistake was overruled as inappropriate because it meant I stole something valuable to you. I stole your chance to unleash violence and write it off as justice.
It was all for nothing if the sufferings of my repentance did not stem from you.
Justice was contaminated if it was achieved apart from you.
The good in me was pounded to death by your fists so that it could be retaught to me by you.
You you you you YOU.
As for Terri, this has long since ceased to be about her. I remember you, Terri. You know I am sorry, and you know that I love you. You know that everything I have done since that day has been the embodiment of your grace and your kindness. One last time and I will never ask again…Forgive me.
The memories I have made in these halls will live on forever; of that, I hold no doubt. Some of you will get the chance to make new memories here without me, but some of you will not. Memories will spring forth in the wake of a bang. Don't let what is about to happen change the way you feel about Degrassi. I have taken it upon myself to make this school a safe space again by cleansing it of its impurities. It is with lament I must admit that not all of you have been selected to move on to the next round. Those dear friends will be dead by the time my momento mori is found, but I know there is an afterlife, and as angels they will be healed and whole. Their eyes will be repaired so they may see hindsight in 20/20. Their ears will be replaced with ones that hear cries for help. Their disabled hands will be modified to extend helping hands instead of fists. They will forgive me and welcome me into the kingdom of heaven when I join them anon. I am exuberantly happy for all of us because the lord will take care of you now until eternity. I love you too much to let you resume living the way you have been. You are welcome.
Toby
Toby, you good sir, you are the greatest friend a guy (well, this guy) could have. I did not know you for long, but I think it not too presumptuous to call us brothers. High school sculpted our souls with the same unassuming diligence towards our careers of complacency, although you never attempted to fight it after a certain point as I did. There is no trauma to be seen in your eyes or in the way you carry yourself. You are kind, good, and insightful out of consistency. You have never had those virtues taken from you and then had to work your way from the ground up to reinstate them. You and I are the same embodiment of precocious heroism, except that I am gasping from the exertion of preserving it.
Don't get me wrong; I am not jealous of you. That is not why you were chosen to accompany me in Heaven. I have to take you with me because once I am gone, Degrassi will need a living body to take the blunt of their suffering. (I will say that once more: their suffering.) The dead are immune to the cruelty of the living, and our beloved classmates will be more enraged than ever that I dared find a way out of it. A new generation of bullies will take the torch from the ones I shot and use it to hunt a new generation of monster. It will be you, Toby, and you have to understand that it is no longer in my control to stop myself. You already know you are my best friend. Hell, my mom still thinks you and I are ruling the school. That is classic: couldn't have sounded better if I had made it up myself. I would never perform a selfish act without thinking of everyone else first. I can't wait to see you soon. We are going to have so much to catch up on.
Jimmy
Well Jim, I originally thought you came a long way to stand by me. I have always known you have a good head on your shoulders, but the problem is: you are so popular that it would be a social tort to keep any part of you reserved for only yourself. You bring out the best in others by allowing them at your lunch table, on your team, and into your representation of cool that shows off what high school is all about. You have a duty as king to rule over your subjects, which comes with the converse that your people are ruling you. There comes that inevitable time when the subjects demand an execution of one of their own, and you have to acquiesce or risk a mutiny in your court. I allow a portion of compassion in my heart for you because I can see you are unenthusiastic over this expectation of you and that you are only carrying it out begrudgingly. At the first chance we got to talk one on one, you were relieved to drop the act and say to everyone, "Drop the bullying; it's boring."
You implicated "boring" as something immature that only children do, so everyone was suddenly horrified to run the risk of you viewing them as such. You reaped the core of your authority to rescue me even though it could have ended catastrophically for you. It was a major risk to put your reputation on the line just to set up the ultimate prank that ended up with the creation of this letter. I feel stricken by my own acute blindness to see the good in you that earns you such adoration. I was so, so desperate to believe good still existed, and that was my mistake. I should have known your derision to take me down would have been worth your crown had it come to that.
A prank in the name of bullying can't possibly be distinguished from anything that has already been done, right? That armor of logic makes you feel protected from the sin of lying to the neighbor you lie about loving. All the intent you infuse in using logic to pardon sin is what made me realize that your prank to drop glue and feathers on me at the academic bowl was borderline terrorism. Evil was presented in the war waged against me for the first time. What you did and how you justified it was only the beginning. Once evil takes shape, it cannot be reformed.
It can only be exterminated.
Spinner & Paige
I hate to be crass in the admittance of what we are all thinking, but we seem to like it when I play the bad guy… The sex must be pretty good to keep such a toxic union afloat. To be honest, I don't find declarations of such a personal nature to be professional, but maturity was never an applicable concept to you. I recall your interference with my relationship with Terri was what blew it apart. It is also the reason why I am including you in my campaign to purge Degrassi of any and all impurities. I think it is time we take a closer look at the constituents of Degrassi's top voted most perfect couple.
Paige, you have always been the chosen leader of every group. Your ideas only had to be as strong as your ability to manipulate the consequences. Case in point: your ideas never had to be of a higher sort than a mere accusation towards someone who might oppose you. You felt proud enough to keep expanding your territory until you were physically pulling Terri away and forbidding her from seeing me. I can't even begin to go into how many lines that crosses. Suddenly I had to change myself so that Terri would see that I conformed to the rules you assigned to our relationship. It was you, Paige, that I was angry at when I lost my temper towards Terri. It was you that was on my mind the entire time. When I hurt Terri, I was actually defending myself against you because you made me fight for my right to love her.
Spinner, it's no secret you are Paige's puppy indulged in the honor of wearing her leash. You play basketball on the court all day until Paige calls time out and demands you to make love to her assuage her divalicious ego. With your delicate little sex life on the line, you throw fists whenever she cries wolf. Maybe against Dean your rage could have been considered heroic (if she was actually assaulted or not, I find irrelevant) but you keep rerunning the same show until even Paige herself is switching the channel. She would have called it off for being boring if Jimmy had not got there first. You never give it up, the whole giving me hell thing, because there is no legitimate way for a class clown who flunked his own language three times to find the creativity to resort to anything else.
I would never insult myself by suggesting that you took part in the dissolution of Terri and I's relationship; as I said before, your girlfriend ruined all that. All you did was carry out all her manipulation out of desperate fear that she would otherwise grow tired of your mulishness and lace her ankles around a new clown's neck. Jesus Christ, Spin, how did you refrain from beating her? I am not being facetious; I seriously want to know. With that queen bitch out of power, we would have been great friends. I would have found you a much better girl than Paige Michaelchuck. (And yes, the sex would have been just as good.) I am sorry you could not drop a toxic partner when it was good for you. Love isn't always on time.
But your love is on my time. I will take the best care of it.
Jay
I don't have many words left to reserve for tact, so I am just going to say it. Jason Hogart, you are a stone-cold son of a bitch. I know it was Jimmy that laced my fate with his prank, but nothing in the underbelly of Degrassi happens outside your cognizance. It is evident in the way you disregard the entire school system that you are afraid of being a has-been in its most embryonic stages. You are a clever fox, but you strain yourself over the possibility of someone finding out. They will tell you what an efficacious businessman you are. They will demonstrate how your people skills will get you a respectable income that will support a family in the most domestic of the suburbs. You will get angry at them and then terrified of that inclusive version of adulthood that has failed to represent a single one of your exceptional interests. You will need a distraction that allows you to keep being the fox long after it stopped making you clever. You will turn to bullying to close the doors to your own future. You didn't even know Terri, but you became her fiercest avenger. That was me back when things were still good, but your anger was so strong that it replaced me despite your obsolescence in all of it.
Suffice it to say, you are too rotten to fit in any category of victim, so let us not even make the attempt.
Emma
Em, I know that I messed up with you, but you never gave me a chance to understand how I wronged you. You crusaded to have me cast out of Degrassi, only to admit me into your friend circle after one circumstance of violence alarmed you. You shielded me from Jay with your own body. After Jay crushed my glasses and I had to autofill the blurry imagery, I saw an angel in your place. It is a rarity when a girl retrogresses into such a primal crime of passion that she proves equally capable as a man to fight tooth and nail. Unlike a man, you would have never fallen out of the commitment. Perhaps you would have died to protect me from society's failings. From that day on I realized our intentions were spoken for. From how I saw it, we were married on the spot, with my mission being to keep my patience in check until you realized it as well. You are smart, but not smart enough to grasp our tied knot without a little help from me.
I downplayed our consummation by breaking down into a contest with Toby to get you to kiss me. After that, well it was clear we would be doing it again. I had to prove that you made the right choice by picking me, although that meant I had to read your needs and act quickly. You were blonde, energetic, and graceful in a way that eclipsed me. It would not be long before you left me far behind in your tracks if I could not do you the honor of being your equal. When the glue and feathers came down upon me and everyone started laughing, I saw only you watching me in the audience. Your brown eyes the size of worlds reflected sadness upon realizing that when this mess blew over I would feel hopelessly sorry for you. You were going to end our courtship because you presumed I would blame you the same way I blamed everyone else for letting this happen. You had it so wrong I had to do something to change your mind!
It was I that had it all wrong. I kissed you in my life-flashing-before-my-eyes state of mind to prove I still loved you, but you pushed me away and told me…it was you that was sorry for me. I had made incongruent suppositions in my life, but to get the answer diametrically opposite to the only thing in which I kept my faith was catastrophic.
Ergo, there had to be a flaw in the code for me to get a 0% on my professed area of study, but I was certain that was impossible. I am not a sociopath despite what they all say; it is my outstanding mental competency that keeps them so intimidated. Where I can always draw patterns in human behavior to control the outcome, it was not the case with you, Emma, because you dramatically broke every pattern. You hated me over everyone in the whole school, then you stood up for me. You thought my abuse sent Terri to the hospital, then you kissed me. I should have removed the rose-colored glasses sooner to see how compromised you are inside. You can't regret what you have done because you will be acting on the next impulse before you can process the one precedent. A succubus is still a demon, albeit a female one, and it must be expelled from this world to make its peace. Thank you, Emma, for being reckless enough to reveal your secret to the one man capable of doing something about it. I very well intend to.