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All through my school years, I was victimized by bullies. That’s probably not a surprise, right? I was small and timid, and therefore pretty much defenseless. You have to have some kind of gimmick to deflect attention from your weakness. Either that or a friend who’s taller (and I did latch onto a few of those over the years).
On the first day of junior high, I was held down by a pack of eighth grade thugs who smeared shoe polish on my face. In ninth grade, I was on crutches for several weeks because of torn ligaments suffered when a bigger kid decided it would be funny to lift me up by the leg and flip me over backwards. Even in college I wasn’t safe. I lived in the same dorm as members of the football team, and on Saturday nights they’d get drunk and pound on my door, while I sat cowering behind the bed.
I think I’ve lived long enough to come to terms with what happened to me when I was a kid, but I’ve been reliving those horrors lately. After dark on recent evenings, some rowdy teenagers from the neighborhood have been launching rocks at my roof from the landlord’s mostly vacant lot next door. I guess they get a thrill out of seeing rocks slide down the slope, but it’s not such a thrill from inside, where the noise echoes like a bomb attack.
I can’t identify anyone, because it’s dark out when they start, but even so, I peek through the blinds to see what I can see. It takes me right back to those days when I hid from bullies in school, and that doesn’t feel good at all. All I can see is the occasional wave of a flashlight. I’ve thought about calling the sheriff’s office, but these kids are also tenants of my landlord, and they live closer to him than I do.
Finally today, after lasting through an hour or more of last night’s bombardment, I took the next step. I called my landlord and asked if he could come by. When he did, I told him what was happening and suggested that we could probably guess who was responsible. “I know who’s doing it,” he told me. “I’ll take care of it.”
He said that he had found rocks on the roof of his barn, and now he knows where they came from. I hope this is the end of it. I moved this far out in the country so that I didn’t have to deal with things like this. All I really want is to be left alone, and I think my landlord knows that, because he leaves me completely alone (sometimes even when I need something from him). I’ll take him at his word until it happens again, and then I will call the sheriff. | 
