The Girl Who Hated Me for No Reason

Lilienne was the girl everyone admired—pretty, popular, the type who could do no wrong in anyone’s eyes. But when it came to me, it was different. She didn’t just dislike me; she hated me. And she made sure everyone knew it.

Her hate wasn’t subtle. It was loud, sharp, and deliberate. She wanted people to see it, to hear it, to join in. And one day in junior high, during P.E. class, she made sure I felt it in a way I’d never forget.

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We were in the locker room, changing, when she suddenly called out, making sure she had an audience.

“Miss Dean,” she said, her voice carrying across the room, dripping with fake confusion. “Why is he in here? He’s not like us. He shouldn’t be changing with the girls.”

For a moment, everything went quiet. Then came the whispers, the stifled laughs, the sideways glances. Some of the girls smirked. Others just looked away, pretending not to hear.

Miss Dean barely reacted. She just told everyone to hurry up. But the damage had already been done. Lilienne had made sure of that.

I was going through puberty just like everyone else, but my body wasn’t quite like the other girls’. I was getting chubby, my features weren’t as soft, and I didn’t fit neatly into the mold of what people expected. And that was enough for Lilienne to single me out, to make me the target of her own twisted little power play.

Maybe she wasn’t even the source of all that hate. Maybe she learned it from her parents, from her church, from the world around her. People absorb prejudice like secondhand smoke, breathing it in until it feels like their own thoughts. But understanding that didn’t make it hurt any less.

She saw me as different, and in her eyes, different meant wrong. And for years, I wondered why? What had I done to her? Why did my existence offend her so much?

Years passed. Life moved on. And then one day, I ran into her again.

Same smirk. Same attitude. Like she was waiting for me to shrink.

“So, you really think you all that now?” she asked, as if time hadn’t passed, as if she still had any say in who I was.

I looked her straight in the eyes and said, “I never needed to think it, Lilienne. I just am.”

And for the first time, she hesitated. She realized, in that moment, that whatever power she once thought she had over me—it was never real.

I never saw her again after that. But the last I heard, she yet strung out, homeless. Something had happened to her.

And hey, I guess that was her karma.