You can forgive me, but I'm going to hell anyway

Everybody was laughing around the coffee table. Someone had just told a great joke about a person we all knew. We were at my place. I’d been drinking with my old time college friends for some time so I think that’s why one of them shot: “We used to hate you in first semester! You used to be obnoxious and annoying. Some of the people couldn’t even hear your name, so disgusted they were.” My expression changed slowly from drunken laughter to slight shock. I felt suddenly offended, frustrated, diminished, demolished.
“When you came back from that trip in Europe you were such a different person! No one even recognized you!”
They all went “yeah!” and I couldn’t yet feel the ground below me.
They were all laughing and smiling like it was a great war story they were telling me. But I felt like when someone tells you you had been getting cheated on by your wife who died some time ago and whose passing you’ve already gone through, but then you have to stir the pot all over again to re-evaluate the whole thing and then you don’t know how to feel. I didn’t know how to feel because they’re smiling over me all the time and their smiles are true and it’s supposed to be a good thing. Everyone’s drinking happily and heavily and they shoot something like that on your face like it’s so easy to take it.
“I didn’t change a fucking thing!” I said.
“Yes, you did, Mister Clever Aleck! You used to bring people down all the time. You used to think everybody was stupid” said one of the girls. Her name was Cameron, but I don’t think that’s her real name.
“Yeah. You used to laugh at people right to their faces!” said Julie.
“I did not!” I tried in vain to defend myself, but I couldn’t deny that they were speaking very earnestly and they seemed to have talked that over before. Their ideas matched too well. They were smiling and laughing, though. It was quite bizarre for me.
“Yes, you did! And you would say something like ‘Oh, my god, how stupid!’ and everybody around would shut up or something like that.”
“Or they would either look at each other like ‘why’s he so mean?’ and change the subject or leave.”
And then I remembered some scenes. People became silent and left.
“I mean, like, we LOVE you now!”
“Yeah, we’re, like, BEST FRIENDS!”
“YEAH! We are the closest group of friends from our old classroom and I know it. I miss it when we studied together” said a guy whose name was funny. Lovegod. He didn’t seem to be in the group of people who hated me back when.
And then I remembered.
We were studying language in college and some people just didn’t know how to write. Some people wrote almost absurdly well. Others just couldn’t. They would make mistakes which were seen with utmost despise by some. They knew little about the basics, so they learned barely nothing from what took more gray matter.
There was this girl. She was sitting on the coffee table now. She was one of the drunks who said she loved me after I came back from the trip. Her being there means she wasn’t one of the illiterate girls in the classroom.
I mean, not that literacy has anything in the world to do with how I judge people more interesting than others, but I was lucky to have befriended only people who could take care of themselves without having to ask god for help. There were a lot of religious people, mainly girls because there were only five guys in that group of 42. They would all sport their holy bibles in class and make compliments to each others’ long skirts, long hair. It was very interesting.
So, this girl, she had written pages of notes in this pink notebook with pink lines and using different colored pens and one of the colors was pink. It was Julie’s.
There was another guy who wasn’t sitting at that night table because he had quit drinking and smoking pot and whatever the hell “took him out of his center”. His name was Andy. We called him Necro. It had something to do with his last name. He borrowed Julie’s notebook during the class. We needed some of her notes for some test that was going to happen soon.
Necro was one of the guys who shared the same despise for grammatical mistakes.
“Check this out” he whispered, poking the notebook at my stomach “it’s BEAUTIFUL.”
There was some class going on and we always sat in the back of the room.
“Jesus, look at all this…” I was fascinated. I was having fun. I had found an oasis. We pointed out innumerable misspellings, punctuation problems, all kinds of shit. “Let’s give her her marks!”
We circled and crossed all the crap we saw on her notebook. There were about a hundred mistakes. We laughed in silence in the back of the room. Julie was sitting on the row in front of us. We had to be careful not to insult her with our laughter.
We gave her a C-. Below average. We wrote her marks on the top of the first page. We closed her notebook and returned it to her. We had forgotten all about the notes we needed.
She didn’t speak to me for weeks. I thought it was normal. No one spoke to me very often then.
Much later, I learned that Necro went and apologized to her. Maybe just a few hours after class. He went without me and didn’t tell me he’d done it. I think that was the worst part. Whether he apologized on my behalf or not, I didn’t go any time. She’d cried to our other friends. She liked us and it had made her consider quitting. She told him it was just notes and she wasn’t trying to be Shakespeare so she was really mad.
I did pretty well in the test. I passed with remarkable grades. My father took me to Europe. But what does it matter? Passport stamps won’t take away the awful taste of the beer that had been warming up on my lap while this movie played on my gray matter screen. The people smiled and so did I.