The wall carving

By Maridel De Los Reyes

I walked into my new after school classroom with high hopes. My friends and I were in the same class, so we’d have lots of fun playing Smash Bros, board games, and anything we so pleased. We picked out our seats and our teacher greeted us. I was looking forward to the time I’d be spending here, completely unaware that in a few months, I’d see the classroom as a living hell.

I first met Peter in the seventh grade. I had a large group of friends in the afterschool program and within the first couple of days, I noticed he hardly had anyone to sit with. I decided to reach out to him and found out we had a shared interest in video games. For a while, nothing was wrong; we would talk about what games we were playing and the latest news in the video game world. However, I noticed that despite my efforts, he only ever talked to me, and stayed silent around my friends.

My friends were always a bit wary of him. I thought nothing of it at first and that they were overreacting. AJ and Kevin were my best friends and AJ in particular was one of the first to sense something off about Peter.

AJ: “I thought it was really weird that he would follow you around and he’d talk to you about the randomest things just to talk to you more. There was an incident where you lost your water bottle, I honestly thought it was him who took it, it was a little weird he wasn’t talking when that was happening.”

I did begin to take AJ’s advice more seriously when I noticed that he was almost always nearby. Our afterschool program offered special classes for certain subjects. I joined a mock trial class which was off campus. We had to take a charter bus each week to reach a law firm that was 2 hours away. Peter joined the class as well. There was no assigned seating in the bus, so my friends and I sat together. Though where we sat often changed, Peter sat in front of me without fail.

Peter—which is not his real name, by the way, but what I will be using for this story—would write letters to me on the bus and drop them on the walkway so that I’d see them. How he claimed to love me and how he would do anything for me. I made sure not to react and pretend like I didn’t see them, and my friends would get people we knew to sit around me but he always sat as close as he could.

I made sure not to interact with him ever again but things only got worse. I became so paranoid and uncomfortable that I left the afterschool program in January. I couldn’t tell my mother the real reason because I didn’t want to make her worry, so I just told her I felt like the program took up too much of my time.

His activities were eventually no longer confined to just the afterschool program. He would write my name in hearts in all of the bathroom stalls he had access to. He even made multiple Instagram accounts hoping I’d let him follow me. Every time I blocked one of his accounts another one would pop up and try to send me messages or follow me. During lunch and brunch he’d always sit near where my friends and I hung out, making sure to keep me within his line of sight. He’d pretend to put his hood over his eyes so that it seemed like he couldn’t see but since the hood was a thin sportswear material he was able to see through it.

Peter was an eighth grader, so as the school year drew to a close, I began to feel relieved. I didn’t see him nearly as much, as he had to prepare for graduation ceremonies and left school earlier than us. He didn’t go out without a bang though: he wrote a letter to me on a bathroom wall written in thick black sharpie and explained how sad he was that he wouldn’t be able to see me anymore and how he’d wait a whole year just to see me again. While unsettling, the letter marked what I believed to be the end of an era.

For nearly a year, I heard nothing of Peter, but that peace did not last forever. In March of 2019 a friend of mine claimed to have seen Peter come to campus on his bike. I thought nothing of it at first. A few weeks later, while my friends and I were walking to the office to get papers for our leadership class, we stopped by the bathroom. While one of my friends was in the bathroom, another one of my friends noticed there was a carving on the window outside. It was by pure coincidence, but while he examined the carving on the wall, he noticed what was carved actually said my name: “Maridel De Los Reyes”.

He called AJ and I over to the window, and as we examined it more closely, we noticed that it was part of a larger carving. Next to my name was carved various “I wills”, ranging from kidnapping, to rape, to killing. I tried to stop my friends from telling our teacher because I didn’t want to escalate the situation; I thought that it would just cause more trouble. They refused to stay quiet and immediately reported it to our teacher.

An investigation began, and I was asked if there was anyone I suspected of making the wall carving. The only person who came to mind was Peter. My mother was called up to the office and when I went home that day, despite having been a terrible day, I felt a weight had been lifted. I never told my mother any of what was happening because I didn’t want her to worry but she took it much better than I had expected.

Maridel: Do you remember when you got called to the office, the only time you ever got called to the office?

Mom: “I’m shocked, maybe you did something wrong, because ever since nobody ever called me to go to the office.

Maridel: How did you feel when you found out what actually happened, with the carving in the window?

Mom: I’m scared, I’m scared because I didn’t know it was going to happen to you and I didn’t even have any idea about what happened, it was the first time I heard about what happened, that’s why I was really shocked. We got closer, now I think more about your safety and I call you more often.

The police got involved and confirmed that Peter was indeed the one who carved my name into the window. I was terrified of Peter but thankfully, I never saw him again. I decided to go to Yerba Buena instead of the high school Peter attends. I felt that going to the same school would just make me paranoid.

Reaching out and telling people about my problems was always really hard for me. I always thought I could deal with it on my own, or that if I hid it for long enough, the problem would subside. But bottling it up and trying to keep it hidden just made the situation worse for me mentally. Despite feeling uncomfortable, I never reached out for help; rather, it was those around me that reached out to me.

If I had spoken out right when I began to feel uncomfortable with the situation involving Peter, it would have never escalated to the point it did. You’re not causing trouble by speaking up. Sometimes the people you trust can see what’s better for you more clearly than yourself. If something truly is bothering you, you deserve an outlet, you can share it, do not hold back on it.