Try as we might to be understanding and turn the other cheek, the fact is that almost everybody likes to witness a good old-fashioned downfall. This goes double when the person is popular and oh-so-perfect. Here, these Redditors tell stories about what made the popular person in their school lose their tiptop status in the blink of an eye.
1. What Happens In Vegas…
This one "popular" girl in high school got so sloshed at a party that she just started pooping herself everywhere. Some friends drove her home…and she did it again in the back seat. Not easily forgotten. But it was one of those things no one would say anything about, it's just that the entire school knew about it by Monday afternoon.
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2. Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
He was a new kid but due to his looks, parents’ wealth, and sports aptitude, he quickly became popular. Then he made a huge mistake. He started picking on this harmless kid who was on the spectrum and was basically the football team’s lucky charm. They treated him really well, especially because it turned out he was really good at tutoring and he kept a lot of them from being benched over bad grades.
Anyway, the lucky charm kid was also big on hugging. It was basically how he'd always greet his friends on the football team, and even the cheerleaders got in on it. One day, he tried to hug the new kid, who hadn't gotten the memo. Rather than calmly telling the lucky charm kid "no," he got mean about it, there were several swears.
The team did not take kindly to that, and he went from being the next big thing to being that kid no one wanted to talk to. He basically had to pay people to keep hanging out with him.
3. Now You See Me
This popular girl was driving drunk on the way to school and caused a pretty bad accident involving three other cars. She spilled her drink on herself and slammed on her brakes in a line of cars. Somehow, her car managed not to have a scratch. Well, she then swaps seats with her passenger in front of everyone, before officers arrive.
A few minutes later, we realize she has disappeared. She had slipped into another car that had stopped to see if everyone was okay. Several people ended up getting tickets, and her passenger ended up getting charged. She was unpopular until graduation.
4. Need For Speed
This guy was well known at our school. Then he punched some girl at my school in the face for no reason at a concert. Shortly after this, there was news that he rolled his brand new Camaro going 95 in a 45. This caused him and another guy at our school a lot of injuries, and his friend lost his entire ear in the accident. People kept their distance after that went down.
5. Pick On Somebody Your Own Size
This was in my freshman year of high school. There was a very popular guy who was an athletic phenomenon on a nationally ranked team. We were all leaving class one day, and he randomly decided it was a good idea to make fun of a very well-loved handicapped guy who was dying of his condition. Then he took his jeers to a disgusting new low.
He even decided to punch him, which knocked the poor kid to the ground. About 10 guys immediately jumped him, but the shop teacher let it continue for a minute before stopping things. Mr. Popular got quite messed up in that short window: Kicked off his team. Expelled. Moved schools in a move that I'm guessing was a way to start over at a new school.
I never heard from him again. He went from pep rally king to degenerate outcast in five minutes. I had a front row seat and was one of 50+ who testified to the school administrators. The victim passed later that school year from his condition. You almost never heard him speak, but when he did, he was always kind and thoughtful.
6. One Bad Year
I was the popular girl. Then I developed full-blown schizophrenia my sophomore year of high school and had a spiral that rivaled a Hollywood movie. By the time I graduated, everyone knew me as the weird, crazy witch girl who talked to herself and had no friends. Now I’m out of high school, stable, on my meds, with people in my life who love me, and I haven’t thought about popularity since. Life is wild.
7. Double Standards
I was somewhat part of the popular crowd and good lord, was there a lot of drama. One of the girls got shunned by practically our whole grade after it was revealed that she slept with the boyfriend of this other really well-liked girl; they were the “it” couple. She got lots of judgment about it, though somehow the guy got away with it without any drama.
I almost felt bad for her. But then I didn’t. Because the year before she made the Spanish teacher cry by being so rude, and later in the year she was caught cheating in bio and pressuring this really smart girl to give her the answers. She wasn’t exactly a good person.
8. The Writing’s On The Wall
He was in my grade. We were seniors and it was the last few days of school. He and some of his buddies, who were also popular but not nearly as much as him, decided to vandalize the school. At night, they spray-painted stuff all over the outside of the place. They also sprayed the words "could have done worse" on the big entryway doors in the front.
Well they got caught. Their punishment? None of them graduated. They all had to repeat the year. Everyone thought they were idiots after that. According to one of my friends who was a grade younger, many people would say "could have done better" to them in passing.
9. Be Nice, Or Else
She had the compulsive habit of backstabbing all of her “close friends,” then clinging to the less popular girls she had tormented because there was nobody else left. She’d literally backstab her way down the social food chain. I watched in middle school as she went from the most popular girl to the least popular, and then she ended up leaving at around 6th grade.
When we found our way into the same high school (lucky me), I watched from afar as she made enemies of every popular girl in school. By the end of it, she started to cling to me. I was so annoyed that when I found out she got expelled, I laughed in her face as she cried with her mom right there. To date, it’s the only time I’ve ever done that.
When she announced, “I’m expelled!” with tears down her face in the hallway, it was like a movie scene. At least 20 high school freshmen high fiving one another in the hallway. Suddenly popularity status didn’t matter; we were all just happy to get rid of her.
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10. Not Funny At All
In high school, this girl in the grade above me, I think she was 15 or 16 years old, lost her life. She was walking home from her friend’s house and this impaired driver in a van crashed into her. Her body went flying into a nearby bush. There were multiple assemblies for her, people came in to the school to speak about impaired driving, and the girl’s mother set up a campaign in her name.
She was a really sweet girl and had a lot of friends. A couple days after the accident, this popular kid in my year was going around telling this horrible joke, “elephant vs. truck,” which is what he said whenever someone spoke about her. The girl who passed was a little big, I wouldn’t have called her fat but he obviously thought she was.
Apart from maybe a couple of his closest friends, no one found it funny at all. He lost most of his friends, got in a lot of trouble, and got kicked out of school.
11. Read The Room
I will contend that this is the dumbest thing a popular person has ever done. During high school, we all had to read a book about the Holocaust. I don’t remember the exact book, but it was an incredible story, obviously in a horrible, yet eye-opening way. After every English class finished reading it, we had a school-wide assembly where an Auschwitz survivor came and spoke about their experiences.
It was an incredibly heavy assembly and it was clearly respected. There wasn’t any goofing around like normal assemblies. Everyone, including the class clowns, settled down to give this person respect. After their presentation, they opened the floor to general questions. Most people asked pretty tame questions, but this particular popular person raised their hand and asked the most disrespectful question. He went, “Did you ever have a one-on-one encounter with Hitler”
The presenter was dumbfounded and the entire school went silent like a collective “What the heck did you just ask?”
12. The Untouchables
There was a new kid at our school, Alex. He was athletic, funny, good-looking, etc. He got in with the popular kids pretty quick, and got along with just about everybody; it was a small-town school. Meanwhile, there was a special needs kid in our grade named Josh. Everybody loved Josh like a little brother, and we were all very protective of him.
One day about a week after Alex got to the school, he was teasing Josh out in the courtyard and Josh was getting really upset. A few kids told him to cut it out, and Alex got angry, so he pushed Josh. He instantly was attacked by several of the nearby guys, and was getting the snot beaten out of him until the teachers got there.
Alex was suspended for two weeks, and the guys attacking him were suspended for one week. When he got back, he was basically shunned, nobody would talk to him unless it was school-related, and during gym class, people would do whatever they could to exclude him. He switched schools after a few weeks of this. Looking back at it, this treatment was really harsh but he still deserved it in my eyes.
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13. Behind By A Century
The guy I knew was declared “athlete of the century” at our school. He was amazing at football, track, rugby, and wrestling. He didn’t play hockey though, which was big where I am. Still, everyone loved this guy because he almost single-handedly won us championships. And then it all came crashing down in just one instant.
He suffered a gruesome leg injury that ended his career. When he stopped playing sports, people sort of forgot about him. This was 12 years ago and I actually saw him a few months back, he’s doing well. I’m two years younger and he was always nice to me. To make it even sadder, last year his brother, another great athlete, took his own life.
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14. Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover
This girl was a real tool. Pretty as a picture but dim as a dark room. Once people saw how she really was as a person, i.e. using her looks to get what she wanted and throwing a hissy fit once she didn't get it, it caused people to lose interest real quick. I actually met her about a decade after we graduated and she was a completely different person.
Really humble and gentle. Actually a lot more clever than she appeared. No idea what caused that change.
15. A Brief Moment Of Glory
In 5th grade, we moved and I changed schools. I went from a school in the city where everyone got along and was friends to a school in the suburbs where I was introduced to the concepts of “popular” and “unpopular” for the first time. As a fat, quiet kid I was quickly deemed “unpopular” and took my fair share of mistreatment.
Around March or April, my teacher moved our desks around, and set up “islands” of 4-5 desks around the room, except for two. The most popular boy in school who was a troublemaker in class, and me. She moved our desks right up next to the side of hers. I later found out she did this for two reasons. One, to keep an eye on him, and two, she felt I’d be a good influence on him. Then a funny thing happened.
Between then and the end of school, we became best friends, and I became the second most popular kid in school. I started getting invited to birthday parties, kids stopped being mean to me, I got invited to play football at lunch, and girls liked me. It was amazing. Then, summer happened, we were in different classes the next year, and he forgot about me.
Then he moved, and everyone went back to treating me badly. That’s my little story about losing popularity.
16. Liar, Liar
This person had been a compulsive liar, to the point where nobody believed a single thing she said. Let’s make a list real quick: After her boyfriend had told his friends that he slept with her, she spread the rumor that she was pregnant and started wearing really baggy clothes. She also said she drove to the Super Bowl, which at the time was in Texas, and made it back the next morning for school.
We live in Michigan. She also said she kissed Tom Brady at said Super Bowl. Eventually, people just had enough.
17. No Honor In Teens
A Member of the National Honor Society got caught cheating on a final exam in senior year. Their father had to talk to the principal and “donate” a car to be used for school activities, all so that his kid would still graduate. Oh, but the other kids got back at them. On graduation day, every other member of the honor society took off their rope before crossing the stage to accept their diploma.
18. Paint By Numbers
He was popular among the group of people he was associated with in the punk/grunge crowd. All his popularity went out the window when he went out the window of his car, after he crashed it into a building because he was huffing paint and speeding down the road with one of his group’s popular girls. Thankfully she survived, but from what I recall he wasn't remembered so fondly after that.
19. Don’t You Forget About Me
He made the Varsity team his Freshman year. From then on, he hung out with all the older kids and didn’t care at all anymore about his friends our own age. Two years later, all his new friends graduated, and everyone who had been left behind saw right through him trying to get back to being the popular kid with our grade.
However, by the time we were seniors, he chilled out. Stopped being so full of himself and was a great student and athlete. We ended up getting along in the end, not exactly close but that’s because we played opposite sports.
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20. Hidden Talents
She started a fight with another popular girl over something petty. The other popular girl, unbeknownst to us all, practiced martial arts and delivered the most beautiful, graceful punch that I have ever had the pleasure of seeing, whilst pulling out a chunk of hair out with the other hand. The fighting girl was suspended and skyrocketed higher than ever while the popular girl who started the fight became little more than a laughing stock with a temporary bald spot.
21. An About Face
A guy was bragging for like a solid week about how he slept with three girls at the school. Turns out, two of them got pregnant. That was really bad luck, but what made him unpopular was even worse. What made him unpopular was that one of the pregnant girls was known as the “innocent religious girl,” and genuinely wanted to wait until marriage.
Her friends started questioning why she changed her standards so suddenly. Turns out he assaulted her.
22. No Winners Here
She dated me! We were both in Speech and Debate, and both did Impromptu. We spent a ton of time giving each other practice topics, and it devolved to funny stuff we just wanted to see the other spitball a five-minute speech on. We dated for two and a half days until her "popular" friends found out. She dumped me on the spot, but the damage to her...credibility?...had been done.
Thing is though, she then lost all of her nerdy friends too because she dumped me. It was a lose-lose situation for her.
23. The Cheese Stands Alone
Way back when I was in school, a girl who was quite popular decided she could make fun of another kid’s sibling who had Down syndrome in front of her friends. Well, the popular kids in my school weren’t jerks, so they didn’t laugh and literally turned their backs on her. She was a loner for the rest of the year, went goth the next, and then moved.
She tried to apologize to her friends for some reason but not the kid or his brother. That’s when the other kids got in a car and left her alone standing there after telling her it wasn’t funny and she should apologize to the kid and his brother, not them. I think this was just one thing in a long line of problems they had with her and this just was the final one.
Also side note, when I say no one laughed I mean no one. It was more like you could hear crickets and the girl laughing until she realized it was only her. So cringey.
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24. Too Close For Comfort
They were brother and sister, let’s call them Eric and Meghan. Eric was in his senior year and a couple months from graduating. He was a jock, an idiot, and an absolute tool. Meghan was a sophomore. She was actually nice. They were both very popular and reasonably attractive. Their friends would make comments about how hot their sibling was etc.
Then the two of them, for some messed-up reason, did something utterly disturbing. They made some very “adult” footage together and showed it to their friends. Somehow, they were surprised when this led to them being socially exiled. Meghan ended up being sent to live with her grandparents about 1,000 miles away. This kind of stuff was not uncommon in the area I grew up, unfortunately.
25. Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
There was a girl who was super popular all throughout middle school. Then this completely fake rumor started that she had tempted her dog with peanut butter into doing…stuff. The rumor STUCK too, like all throughout school people would say her name and then say "Peanut butter.” Like, people would write it on the white boards and everything.
I saw her leave class in tears multiple times. It was horrible. The dog was a cocker spaniel too, which obviously did not help. The tea, however was our school junior and senior year offered this special program where half the school got exclusive invites to spend the day "making a difference." Literally it was called Re-Do day and it was apparently pretty intense.
It was designed to have people come together and accept differences and stuff, which was kind of stupid considering the absolute abysmal lack of diversity in my school, but I digress. I was never invited so this part is second-hand, but apparently during the open mic portion where people make admissions and "come clean," her TWIN BROTHER took the mic and fully ADMITTED it was him who started the rumor.
That was why the rumor had stuck so hard and RUINED this girl's whole high school life. It was wild.
26. Over The Line
A girl in my hometown was always picking on this guy in her class, making fun of his last name, picking on his mom and his little brother. I think people just thought it was a bit of ribbing, and nothing so bad that anyone felt the need to intervene. Then one day, his family was in a car accident, and he was the only one to survive.
When he came back to school, her response was bone chilling. She said something like, “You couldn’t even get dying right, could you?” It was so bad after that she switched schools, her reputation still followed her. She even tried rushing a sorority in college, but wouldn’t you know, the story followed her there too. Serves her right.
27. Fame Is Fleeting
I went to a private high school that had a middle school as well. The guys who were popular in middle school were typically the center of the "popular" crowd going into high school. It also helped that they basically got a free in to be on the sports teams in Freshman year. This one group of guys were pretty much the center of popularity for three of the four years.
They did it just by being bro douches and flaunting the fact that they went to parties and chewed dip. Slowly though, everyone sort of got tired of them and were less insecure about acting like themselves and not trying to fit in. So the douchey bros eventually faded away during senior year into their little clique of five dudes who stopped being invited to most of the parties that the rest of the class went to.
28. One Terrible Choice
She told her friends that she had slept with everyone’s favorite English teacher. One of her friends was concerned, so she reported it. Oh my god, the fallout of that decision. The teacher was fired and charged and his fiancée left him. Within a month, she was overheard bragging about lying about it, which was ignored until it was proven in court that she was lying. He was released, but not rehired.
29. Young And Dumb
He and another kid from our school got busted for picking up two middle school girls from the local mall and taking them to a motel. He used to be the class clown and on the announcements and everything, but the dude was an untouchable from then on. I don’t even remember if he graduated. No one could get over it, obviously.
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30. You Think You Know Someone
This was college, and everyone knew him and he was well liked. All around really friendly, the life of the party, and just a very open person. Except then he took money from A LOT of people, and it was all at once. So it was a film school, and we were on a project filming at a house. The bottom floor, which was just a room and the garage, is where people stored all their stuff, like book bags and equipment that was not currently being used.
This guy went through everyone’s stuff and took any cash he could find. I lost only five bucks—though when I got home that night and couldn't do laundry I was a bit peeved—but some kids lost hundreds. There were people always coming and going in that space and it was only the crew, so no one thought the stuff was unsafe down there.
I was down there at some point just taking a snack break with another person and saw him going through bags. He made up some story that he was looking for his friend’s bag and her car keys. At the time I believed him and didn't think anything more of it till it came out that people were missing money. He was of course found out because I was not the only one who saw him rifling through stuff. Then we learned the truth.
It turned out he was a serious addict, and they found his stash when going through his dorm room. He was dismissed from the school and that's the last I heard of him.
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31. Losing The Breakup
He was popular for doing dumb pranks. He had a devil-may-care attitude to everything, and was Really Attractive. That wasn't the reason he was popular, but it helped. Then he sprayed his displeasure over his recent breakup with his well-liked girlfriend, who was a kind soul, on her car with spray paint. Suddenly he lost his crew, because they felt he'd gone too far.
He also rendered himself undateable because he had proved he was unstable and jealous. He literally went from a God to "that creep."
32. It Happened One Night
He got super high one night and got in his car with his friends. They thought they were getting chased by the authorities, ended up losing control of their car, and drove it through someone's house. He lost one of his fingers in the accident, but fortunately no one else was seriously harmed. They were all removed from the sports teams that they were on.
33. Animal Instinct
The kid ate part of a cow's heart we were dissecting. I met him years later at the county courthouse when I had jury duty. He recognized me and struck up a conversation. Turns out, he wasn't there for jury duty like I was…Dude was on the docket. I wish I was surprised. He had issues. Honestly, I just hope he's doing better nowadays.
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34. Baring It All
Joe was not terribly popular, even though he was a jock, but he did well in any team sport he tried. Now, he was never the key player, but he was a good team player. One day while in gym class, everyone was rolling up sleeves and rolling up shorts so the gym teacher could do his BMI shtick. I was up and the teacher had to measure three times to arrive at the same answer of 0-2% body fat.
Yes, I was the proverbial skinny nerd. While the teacher was doing his third check of his figures, one of the guys on the wrestling team thought it would be funny to pants this guy Joe. I didn't see it. I heard stories about what was exposed during the half-second Joe's shorts were around his ankles, because he'd gone commando that day. Good choice, as it turned out.
Joe was suddenly the most popular guy in school, in terms of female attention. "Hung like a horse," as they say. Joe's love life was the least of his problems after that day.
35. Balance In The Universe
I've never seen a more brutal social downfall than this one, or one more deserved. When this girl was told that someone in our year had been crushed under a collapsed wall and was in critical condition, she laughed and said she hoped he passed. He was the class comedian and was well loved by all who knew him. He made a full recovery, and she got pregnant at 16 and dropped out.
36. In It For The Right Reasons
My mom was incredibly popular in college. She was beautiful, charismatic, very smart, and loved to party. She also didn't care what race, gender, or sexuality you were. This was in the 80s, and her closest friends were also the ones who liked to party pretty hard. Because of this, she became very aware of AIDs pretty early, and realized very quickly that while her gay friends were very at risk, the risk was also high for anyone who liked to party.
So, she spoke with her college health department and then the school board about setting up an information station to be run by the school and the local health centres on school grounds to help keep the students safe. They told her they could give her resources and she could do what she wanted, but they would not host it themselves.
Thinking that she could use her popularity to get people behind her, she set it up herself. She got information, pamphlets, condoms, everything she could get to help spread the word. Then she set up an info booth at the college to try to promote safe intimacy and substance use, and to spread awareness of AIDs. She was unpopular within one day.
At the time, the only people who talked about this were gay people. It was really hard for her at the time; she kept a few friends but most of them didn't want anything to do with her anymore She kept it up though, and when she graduated and left, it had picked up and still was going on yearly last time she checked. She never got credit for it, but she was very happy she did. She said that if she helped one or two people that's all that mattered.
37. Total Turnaround
In 6th grade I was enrolled in a new school mid-year and there was a girl and her friend who everyone hated. It turns out, she used to be wildly popular and had a large following, but then she started ordering the other girls to tie her shoes and do other menial tasks. A few girls revolted, and soon everyone ostracized her except for the one girl who stuck with her.
The formerly popular girl turned out to be really nice after being ostracized, while the ones who revolted became the designated mean girls all through grade school and Junior High.
38. New Girl In Town
Not my story, but my mom’s. She was the popular girl at her high school from about Freshman to Junior year. Cheerleader, national honour society, Homecoming Queen, all that jazz. Just before her senior year, her dad (my grandpa) gets a transfer at his job, forcing her to move. They go from small town Texas to another small town in North Dakota.
Here’s the thing: She’s introduced and it’s like everyone is nice to her at first, and suddenly they find out who her dad was. My grandfather worked in the armed forces and basically was the head of the local base. Essentially speaking, the other “base kids” were now afraid of her, because her dad was their parents’ boss.
So my mom’s senior year, she didn’t really have any friends. She did say, however, that the stoner kids would sit with her on the bus and at lunch because they were totally friendly with everyone and “she didn’t mind the smell.”
39. Karma Comes For Us All
My school was pretty chill, and also pretty small; there were about 150 kids in my class, so there weren’t a whole lot of issues. Personally, though, the one thing I found satisfying was right after our senior year ended, when the biggest jock in my class almost immediately got a girl pregnant and then got really overweight.
He was the type of kid who relied on his jock friends for everything. His dad was also a teacher, so he got away with a ton of stuff that he probably shouldn't have. I’m pretty sure he had some of the lowest grades in our class. He would also purposefully mispronounce my name as some sort of derogatory name-calling. Seeing him knocked down a peg proved that there is some sort of balance in the universe.
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40. Mean Girls, Real Life Edition
The Regina George of my high school lost her popularity when her “best friend” ratted out her biggest secret. She’d apparently tried some backdoor bedroom time with her boyfriend and ended up pooping on him. When the whole school found out, she was so embarrassed that she actually left and went to another county. Honestly, I still laugh when I think about it.
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41. Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse
When I was in middle school, a lot of the cool kids had been in a fight with some of the cool kids from a different local school, and this one guy fled when he saw they were coming. The other cool kids were roasting him about it for a few weeks, but he never lost popularity. Well, at least until he decided to try and end the roasting session in the worst way. That backfired on him BIG TIME.
He tried to start a fight with the least popular guy in our class: me. Little did he know, I have only one strength when it comes to fighting—I'm very difficult to knock down. I can't really throw a punch to save my life, but I don't go down easy. He was able to convince me and a large portion of my class over to this corner of the school field that wasn't really monitored by teachers and he just started hitting me.
I didn't hit back because I didn't want to get in trouble and I couldn't get away because the class had formed a kind of barricade. Instead, I just blocked or dodged as best I could until after 10 minutes or so of it, another unpopular boy in our class grabbed me round the shins to help trip me so the guy could hit me easier.
The aftermath had the formerly popular boy going to a different secondary school because he lost all credibility after not being able to beat up someone after 10 minutes of them not even fighting back. The tripper was also teased so hard for being a rat that he didn't even wait for secondary school; he was transferred from school within a few weeks.
Meanwhile, I actually rose up in the social rankings and spent secondary school in this wonderful middle-ground where the popular guys were nice to me without sacrificing the respect of the other nerdy guys.
42. Be Careful What You Wish For
These girls were brought down by a pregnancy pact in Junior/Senior year that involved multiple school districts. Unfortunately, that led to most of them being single mothers with multiple baby daddies. Oh, the influence of the shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom. Except it turned out nothing like they expected, and they never got their fairy-tales. Poor girls.
43. Born This Way
Back in my high school days in the early 2000s, there was this football player who was liked by everyone. One day after a summer break, it was revealed to the whole school that he was gay. There were a lot of rumors about how he was outed. Some believable ones like he came out to someone who he thought he could trust, to outlandish accusations of him trying to force himself onto one of his friends.
Regardless, once school started, his old group of friends ostracized him. There were some people who tried to befriend him afterwards, but he would brush them off. After about four months, he stopped coming to school. Never heard anything about him after that. I often think about how just 20 years can change people's viewpoints.
Had he been in high school today, I would imagine his coming out would have gone a bit better. But who knows.
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44. Pour One Out
She was a new girl who was loved by everyone when she first arrived at school. She was amazing and kind and sweet, and it didn't matter if you where popular or an outcast (like me), she would be your friend. She got in with the popular girls but that didn't change the way she acted towards anyone. Until one day someone from her old school spread around the reason she moved schools.
She had a history of bulimia and suicidal tendencies. As soon as the rumor hit the school, she became withdrawn and only spoke to a few people, me included. The last thing she ever said to me was, "If I win my race on Sunday, you won't see me Monday because I can die happy." To this day, I wish I had told a teacher what she said.
On Monday, we came to school and found out she had taken her own life hours after winning her race. Such a wonderful girl just gone from the world.
45. Use Your Noggin
You'd think it might be when she pooped in a Pringles can on the cheerleading bus, or maybe even that she was a known drunk driver who injured a family—but no, the popular crowd supported her through all of that. It was actually that she got a 29 on her ACT, the highest of her grade. Apparently, that made them all turn against her for being a "know-it-all.”
46. Don’t Mess With Paul
A guy in my school named Otavio was very popular, and knew almost everyone in two different classes. He was also a bit of a bully, and made everyone he tormented be silent about it, with the promise that he would beat the ever-living daylights out of them if they said anything to their parents. One day, Otavio went on to pick on my friend Paul.
Now, Paul was and probably still is the coolest guy who has ever stepped into that building. He was able to insult you on such a level that he would make you cry—but only if you were trying to do the same to him. So Otavio tried to insult Paul, saying he was fat and ugly. Paul then decided to say this: "Well at least I don't have a broken nose."
"Broken nose?" asked Otavio, not knowing he was about to see the bright shining light of the after-life. Before Paul could fully answer though, I went to get some water, so I just hear Otavio screaming like a banshee. I go back to see what happened, and Otavio is just rolling on the floor, crying and screaming, with a small amount of blood coming from his nose.
Paul got in trouble of course, but his act made the kids Otavio tormented actually say what was happening to them. After that, Otavio was taken out of the school by his parents. According to the teachers, though, Otavio's parents claimed that Otavio was innocent and was actually the one getting bullied, the only proof being Paul's punch.
Paul became more popular than Otavio had ever been, since he gained both the respect of the teachers, Otavio's old friends, and the kids Otavio hurt. Honestly, I'm gonna regret all of my actions if I ever insult Paul.
47. CSI: High School
One of the popular girls when I was in high school got diagnosed with bacterial meningitis. When they traced all the people who she had intimate contact with, they found out and hospitalized around 20% of the football team. While no one knows for sure, she obviously had a bad rap and no one wanted to be associated with her again, at least until I graduated.
48. Look Before You Leap
He saw the movie Fight Club and tried acting tough at a party, then got his butt obliterated by an upper classman. Like, it wasn't even close, and he was done from that point forward.
49. Going Overboard
When I was in 6th grade, one of my classmates brought about $90 to school since they were going to go shopping after school. She was the most popular girl in class. At some point during the course of the day, the money went missing. Our teacher went right to the superintendent's office right across the hall from our class to figure it out.
This was a super small school where there were only like 200 kids total from kindergarten on up to 12th grade. Within minutes, they had pulled us all out of class and separated out the boys and the girls. The fifth-grade teacher took the girls into the bathroom three at a time and searched them, and the superintendent handled all of us boys.
I didn't take the money, but I got in a stall, locked it, and refused to come out. I had some serious skid-marks going on that day and no one on this earth needed to go rooting around in my underpants. He finally gave up and let me go. The authorities showed up a few hours later and interviewed all of us one by one. After all that, we found out the real story.
A few weeks later, it got out that she forgot to bring the money to school, and it was home in her bedroom the whole time. Despite us being in a rural area and the next nearest school being 30 miles away, the backlash was bad enough that her parents pulled her out of school and sent her to the next town over. In retrospect, people mess up, and our anger at her was misplaced compared to the mountain of lawsuits that should have come down on the superintendent.
50. I’m Nobody, Who Are You?
I knew a guy who graduated high school, then became a literal nobody. There was this kid named Matt who spent all of grades 1-12 riding his older brother's fame. His older brother was very charismatic and proactive, big into sports, the student council president, valedictorian, highest grades, you name it. Matt just walked in as the little brother and got all the attention and popularity from teachers and students because of who his brother was.
It hit him HARD when he went to the local university and realized that nobody knew him or paid him any attention. In June, he graduated high school as the valedictorian and had a massive amount of awards and scholarships. By the end of September, only three weeks into university, I saw him in a biology class. I was shocked at what I saw.
It was your typical first-year general bio class that every program seemed to need, and he was one of 500 students in a massive auditorium, sitting in the back. I noticed him because he was there with a friend, randomly shouting out comments and “funny” one-liners to try and mock the professor. The kind of stuff that might've had people giggle and comment "you're so cool! you're so funny!" in grade school. But well, that didn't fly here.
Instead of attention, all he got were nasty glares and being ignored by everyone. His entire world crumbled. He went through literal withdrawal from the lack of attention and popularity. Less than six weeks into university, he dropped out. My friends and I ran into him at a bowling alley a few years later. He was unrecognizable.
From being thin and athletic, he looked like he put on 50 pounds and had a massive gut, scruffy beard, and married with two kids, each with different mothers. He had the whole world in the palm of his hand and then reality smacked the life out of him.
Sources: Reddit,
