Quite Contrary. 
Friday, July 11th, 2008
When I was growing up, in the short statured era of my life, I had an archenemy. And yes, I actually called her that at the time. (I’ve always had a decent vocabulary.)
Her name was Merry*, and I hated her. I hated her with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. I despised her. I abhorred her. She made me sick.
She was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, tiny and wiry, with simian features and constantly sticky fingers. Even at the tender age of five, she had things figured out. She knew adults were the way to power in this world, and she could twist them around those grubby paws with a twitch of her red mouth. Us other kids were merely pawns in her game of life.
She was an only child, and please accept my humble evidences that she was spoiled.
She had a pony. A fat shiny mean-tempered brute of an animal she would kick when nobody important was looking. He had a lovely white fenced paddock and a perfect tiny barn, and probably an unenviable life.
She had a treehouse. A real, honest-to-God, treehouse with faux rickety steps that wound up a tree to a tiny house that boasted real miniature furniture and curtains and plates and cups and everything.
Her bedroom was decorated like a high turreted room in a medieval castle, the walls Trompe-l’œil as stone and fireplaces with a window that looked out into a courtyard. She had the curtain-hung bed and the overflowing toy box and a huge stuffed horse she could actually ride, because an outside pony just wasn’t enough.
She would trash talk her parents, demonstrating her power to us lower creatures. And nothing happened to her. We knew we would never have emerged alive if we had essayed to try that. She was merely giggled at.
One of my first memories of her was my inner pride at a self-tied dress sash, and her happy smile at ripping it apart. I had her pegged at that moment, and never did I see her without my fingers tingling to slap her smug face. I can even remember sitting the back seat of my parents capacious car, pep-talking myself into ignoring her, into behaving myself, and then having all that stripped away as soon as I saw her, at her very first baiting of me.
I have no moral to this story, I didn’t stop hating her and discover that she actually had a heart of gold under that brass exterior, I didn’t find she was deeply unhappy and simply wanted to be loved, and we certainly never became friends. There was no after school special ending. Her family broke up and she was shunted around for the rest of her childhood, and it has been years and years since I last heard anything of her.
The only thing I can say is that it was an interesting time, to have a true, sworn enemy, and sometimes I miss the energizing blood lust, and the stimulation of matching wits with a fellow five year old.
But not all that much.
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent. By which I mean me.