Yahoo Lifestyle "We All Watched In Horror": Former Students Are Sharing How The "Cool Person" In School Made A Decision That Altered Their Life For The Worse
Note: The below story involves attempted murder,
Everyone remembers that one "popular" student in school — maybe they were the captain of their sports team, or maybe they were just generally well-liked. Unfortunately, popularity can disappear after one poorly made decision. Recently, redditor u/_ZoroX_ asked the r/AskReddit community to share how their "popular" classmates ended up losing their status for good. Here are the shocking stories they shared.
1."They poured some chemicals on the football field to spell out our graduation year as a senior prank. It killed the grass and ruined the soil under it. The grass and soil on a football field are specific and expensive. It cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair it on such short notice. The school wanted to be lenient. However, the insurance company required them to get the police involved to cover the claim, so they were arrested."
2."He got caught cheating on the SATs and lost his college scholarship. Now, he's working at his dad's car wash. Karma's wild."
3."They had sex with the German foreign exchange student on the principal's desk during a pep rally. Instant expulsion and the exchange student was sent back to Germany."
4."Two of them decided to take hunting rifles and shoot several rounds into the principal's house at night, thinking the police wouldn't catch them and they would just not follow through with a possible attempted murder."
5."The kid was kind of smart but an excellent multi-sport athlete. He had a full baseball scholarship lined up for a state school. The summer after senior year, at a party, he got drunk, picked a fight, and got his knees broken. I don't know what happened to him, but I know he didn't go to college."
6."He got suspended for something really dumb, so he and a couple of buddies tried to burn down our vice principal's house. They got the address wrong and almost burned a family alive."
7."He had a full ride for a football scholarship at any school you can name. One Friday night, he decided to rob a Walgreens with his buddies. He lost everything. A few years later, I saw him working at McDonald's."
8."He tried to hit me with his car, lost control, and put it in the ditch. The cops came, realized he was under the influence and underage, and he lost his scholarship."
9."He got drunk at a party. There was a freshman who crashed the senior party, and he went after him with a broken beer bottle. He was charged, as an adult, with attempted manslaughter. This party happened the week before his 18th birthday. He was never seen at school again and had his football scholarship to college revoked."
10."A flashy good-looking kid named John, who was honestly quite talented at taekwondo, kept pushing and poking and bullying the quiet new kid from Venezuela. The new kid had enough and pushed back, so John challenged him to a fight after school. The fight was over hilariously quickly. John tried a flashy kick you'd see in a Van Dame movie, and it looked good, but he missed. The other person easily dodged it, threw a right hook to the jaw, and then a left roundhouse kick to the face. John was out cold, standing up. Later, we found out that the other kid's dad was a former military police officer in Venezuela and a kickboxer of some repute, so he had taught his kid from an early age how to protect himself. Anyway, this happened in March, and we never saw John until graduation in the summer. He spent the rest of the school year being homeschooled."
11."He was a big football star, handsome, and a lady's man at my school who would have definitely gotten a sports scholarship. He took a shit on a teacher's car and got expelled. A year later, he was stabbed in a knife fight and ended up in jail shortly after."
12."He took pictures of himself having oral sex with the football coach's daughter and slipped a copy under the coach's office door as revenge for some slight against him. He was one of the top football players. He was dumb enough to think the coach's daughter wouldn't say who it was in the picture. Of course, she told, and of course, he knew, and of course, he was kicked off the team. A few months of disciplinary actions followed because he sort of spiraled and was sent to one of those schools for people with difficulty functioning in normal schools. I don't know if it ruined his life, but it ruined his trajectory, and he ended up dropping out of the local community college instead of going off to a Florida university as he had planned."
13."Many years ago, he got a full ride to a military academy. They even sent out a representative to our school to present to him at a ceremony in front of our class. Then, he got two or three women pregnant either before or during his first year. He had to drop out."
14."They vandalized the school with racist graffiti as a senior prank."
15."This kid wasn't necessarily popular, but he was on the verge. He wanted nothing more in the world than to be on our high school's cross-country team, but he just didn't have the chops for it. He'd practice and practice and try out repeatedly, but he could never quite make the cut. Everybody knew about his desire to be on the team, and I think most of us were pulling for him because he had the heart, just not the legs."
"One day in gym class, we had a 'fitness test' in which we ran laps around the outer perimeter of our school and completed as many laps as possible. Most of us dropped out after a lap or two and went to sit on the bleachers.
There were a bunch of cross-country kids, though, who had taken this as a challenge and were running seemingly endless laps. The not-quite-popular kid figured that if he could keep up with those guys, he'd show that he deserved to be on the team.
Lap after lap, he hung right at the back of their pack, never catching up but never falling completely away, either. The large group of us who had already given up and were sitting on the bleachers saw this, and we all started rooting for this kid and watching closely.
As the pack passed our bleachers on yet another lap, the kid following behind visibly shit his pants. Turds poured from the leg holes of his gym shorts and onto the pavement as we all watched in horror.
He just kept running.
On the next lap, our gym teacher, who fancied himself a drill sergeant, flagged the kid down, chewed his ass, and made him clean up the turds as we all sat there, wishing for an unexpected asteroid strike to put us out of our collective misery.
His popularity never recovered. He never ran a single meter for our cross-country team."
16."The most popular guy in our school got a full-ride scholarship for football and then posted a video of himself stealing from a convenience store 'for fun.' It went viral, and he got expelled, lost the scholarship, and ended up working at that same store."
17."Not necessarily the most popular but well-known, he and his twin brother were two of the smartest kids in our grade. One of them was made valedictorian; the other was made salutatorian — I forgot which was which. Anyway, the brother in question went to some fancy college. It's not Harvard or anything like that, but it's still prestigious. During his second semester, he was raided by the cops for running a grow operation out of his dorm room with his roommate. Evidently, it was pretty successful until that point."
18."She apparently developed extremely possessive and stalking behavior with her romantic partner, leading to her receiving a court order to not go near her ex or his pets at any point. She'd gotten in trouble for violating this order as well. She then made a LinkedIn profile, in which her sole listed experience and history was the high school we attended over 20 years ago, with no title or position, so I'm guessing she's never actually worked."
19."The best soccer player I faced in high school got a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League school. The summer before college, he got pulled over with three pounds of weed, a bunch of cash, and an unregistered shotgun. I think his family might have had money, so chances are he did fine in life but way to fuck up a free ride to Ivy League."
How did your school's "popular" student lose their status? Tell us in the comments or fill out this form to remain anonymous.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length/clarity.
