 Josh was one of those kids who was just born to be a bully. He was built more like a gorilla than a human teenager, and he had the disposition of a rot wilder someone had just tried to neuter with a pair of rusty scissors. There are a lot of different ways to bully someone, and Josh was an expert in all of them. He stole lunch money, shoved heads in toilets, beat kids up and even pinched girls asses in the hallways. But the thing that really made Josh born to be a bully was his dad. The man looked like an even bigger, uglier version of Josh, and he basically owned the small town we all lived in, and he seemed to think that he owned the people, too. If somebody pointed out that Josh shouldn't slap girls asses in the hallway, you can bet a few phone calls later that that person would be out of a job thanks to Josh's daddy dearest. To this day, I sometimes wonder if the horrible events that would forever besmirch our town's history could have been avoided if someone had just held him accountable. But nobody ever did, and I guess that I'll never know. The thing that started it was something simple. Josh took a special interest in making one particular kid's life miserable. Cruel Billy Williamson was just too easy of a target. He was skinny, pale, and kids called him the Scarecrow because of the patches in his clothes. Of course, it wasn't Billy's fault that his mom was poor and couldn't afford new clothes, but you know how cruel kids can be when someone's different. Myself, I always just called him Billy. Every day, Josh would call out to Billy in the halls, Hey Scarecrow, come over here so I can beat the stuffing out of you. He thought his joke was so clever that he repeated it every single day. And if Billy didn't laugh, then he'd end up with his head stuck in a toilet. Things went on like that for a while. Nobody seemed to bother with sticking up for Billy, and his over-large clothes hid the scars that had begun to grow like tree roots down his arms. I never understood why the people this world spits on always end up punishing themselves more, but I guess that's just how it goes. Billy eventually shut down entirely. He wouldn't talk to anyone, wouldn't look you in the eye. The kid was scared of his own shadow. We all thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, but I guess fate didn't really care too much for our ideas, because that week, Billy's mom died, and within a few days the whole town knew that she'd been found with a needle in her arm. If that was a cause for a reprieve, then Josh didn't see it. Rather he thought the opposite. His prey was wounded, and now was the time to move in for the kill. I heard about how your mom died. He'd hiss under his breath when there were no teachers around. Wish I had found her. Even for a smack at your mom was a nice piece of ass. You're living with your grandma now, aren't you? Maybe I'll pay her a visit tonight. I don't think she'd put up much of a fight. Nobody seemed to notice as the gashes on Billy's arm spread to his chest and his legs, or how his face would twitch whenever Josh's insults echoed behind his eyes. Nobody noticed that he'd started writing in his diary about how much he'd like to steal his dead grandpa's gun and put an end to things his way. Sometimes you'll see a story about a kid like Billy on the news and wonder how nobody stepped in, how nobody saw what was going on in their head. The answer to that is simple. It's just easier to look away. The uglier the truth is, the less people want to face it, because then they'll have to ask themselves why they did nothing for so long. The last day before it happened, Josh had cornered Billy after school and beat him to within an inch of his life. When he got home that day, his face looked like a pound of raw ground beef and as he stared at himself in the mirror, he decided tomorrow was the day he'd ended. He snuck into his grandpa's gun safe that night and grabbed the old 357 revolver from the inside. He didn't know where to find more ammo, but he knew it was kept loaded in case of a break-in. The next morning, he took the revolver in his waistband and slid a long shirt over it. He didn't check to see if it was loaded. He didn't even want to look at it. And yet he clenched his jaw with determination and caught the bus. When he got to school, he noticed there was a crowd outside by the football field. Thankful for the delay, he slid his way in between the shoulders and elbows to the front, and that's when he saw Josh. His former bully was naked, gutted from head to toe and strapped to the field goal post, straw poking out from holes where he'd been sewn back up. His eyes were hollow pits, pecked out by birds before anyone had found him. And on top of his head, someone had placed an old scarecrow's hat. Billy left right then and came home. He barely glanced at me as he passed, sitting there in my rocking chair and knitting. Rather, he headed straight to his room and collapsed on the bed. It was the first time he slept easy and a long while. It was only a few days before the news had spread around the town that the boy had been murdered and that when the police went to notify his dad, well, they found him dead too. To this day, they still don't know who did it. The police suspected Billy at first, and they must have asked me a dozen times if I'd seen my grandson leave the house that night, but I told them the same thing each time. I'd been awake all night watching TV in the den, and I would have seen him if he had left. I could tell they all thought I was senile, but none of them dared say it to my face. Well, I'm older now, and I don't think I have much time left, so now I suppose is the time for truth. I don't know what Billy was up to that night because I wasn't there. I was at Josh's house, and I was making damn sure that no one called my grandson Scarecrow ever again, and no one ever did.