I was 14 years old, it was my first year (I was a freshman) at a private girls Catholic boarding school and my first time being away from home for such a long time. I lived in a very large dorm room with three other girls, to protect the innocent, I’ll call them Monica, Missy, and Layla. Missy and Monica were awesome, we got along very well, but Layla was a little off. It started when we realized she was lying a lot, about anything and everything, eventually her lies contradicted themselves and it was discovered that this was a pattern for her. She was kind of a human tire fire in that respect. Most of the other girls in our school didn’t like her because of her lying habit, the three of us kind of didn’t want to live with her because of it.
I used to do my laundry every weekend, you know, like one does, but I noticed a strange phenomenon. I would find pairs of my panties in my clean underwear drawer that were inhumanly filthy. I know that, first of all, I never let my panties get that disgusting, I changed into fresh panties every day and put the dirty ones in the hamper. These were unmistakably my panties, they had my initials on them (you had to mark all your stuff when living there, it was the rule) and they were mine, I bought them and had worn them in the past. But there they would be, dirty as if the whore mother of Jesus had worn them in the desert for a whole week, stained with discharge that was yellow/green, sometimes with blood on them. I brought this up to Monica and Missy, and they said the same thing was happening to them too! We were wondering if it was some sort of prank by the upperclassmen, they were always doing weird shit to the freshmen. We wondered who would do this, why they would do it, it seemed like a very unlikely prank to pull. And it was gross. So gross, that I threw out the underwear when I found it like that. I couldn’t imagine washing them and using them again, so I phoned home and asked my folks to please send me a care package with fresh new panties.
This had gone on for a month. One day I was in the gym locker room, changing my closes after class when I suddenly heard Monica loudly exclaim, “Layla! YER WEARIN’ MY UNDERWEAR!” (she was Southern, insert Southern accent here). I turned around, and lo and behold, there was Layla turning ten different shades of red and Monica staring at her in disbelief! The gig was up. Missy, Monica, and I all glanced at each other, we now knew who the underwear thief was. I couldn’t help myself, I began to taunt Layla. “You can wear a pair of mine this week, and Missy’s next week, and then Monica’s!” I remember saying, I probably said more, but all I can recall is that very suddenly Layla was pulling my hair, and totally freaking out on me! Of course I fought back, but it didn’t take long before we were pulled off of each other and sent to the head nun’s office. We didn’t really fight long enough to do any significant damage to each other, but I did lose a pretty good chunk of hair! She had some gnarly scratches on her face and a shiner from where I hit her.
Once in the principal’s office, I was made to have a conference call with my folks. I explained everything that happened, and my folks agreed that I did the right thing by defending myself, and that in no way was I wrong. Looking back on it now, as an adult, I can see that Layla probably had some serious mental issues and that her family probably put her in boarding school as a way to straighten her out. I think what she really needed was some serious help, and I hope that after she was expelled that she got it, but I’ll never actually know what her fate was.