"Live your life to the fullest," I used to say. Words of wisdom, I used to think they were, but the truth could not have been more different. I was too foolish to understand the gravity of my words.

I was young. At least, the excuse helps me deal with the guilt that came with my actions.

Watching a girl I knew from high school who was sitting across the room with a cup of coffee sitting beside her expensive phone, I knew then how fortunate and careful she was and how much 'fuller' her life must be. She sat in front of her laptop screen, a designer scarf wrapped protectively around her neck and her clean and careful hands typed away as she worked on some important stuff I would never understand since I never listened during English class back then to understand it now.

Annoyed at the sight of her, I looked down at the oily keys of the keyboard at a cash register in McDonald's. It's unbelievable how we used to sit and eat at the same restaurant (it seems like it was just yesterday), yet here we are today, myself the mundane everyday example of a waitress at a fast food joint and her at the table drinking a cup of coffee I had had to serve her. Unbelievable.

I remember bullying her back in high school. I can't say I regret it, but I'm not exactly proud of it...

"What's the problem, nerd? Scared I'll rip this little paper to pieces?" I hissed, dangling the three-page essay carelessly over her head. There were tatters fluttering to the ground from the fourth page which I had torn off.

She cried, "Give it back! Please!"

Her dark hair was neatly plaited into two self-righteous pigtails, so I decided to fix the problem by tugging at one and pulling it free. Better.

She sobbed and tried to struggle free from the locked hold of my partner in crime, but a weakling like her couldn't even budge.

You see, the big issue here was that she always did better at everything. She beat me in everything. I mean, I didn't try to change that, but she should have some respect for those superior to her, and I wanted to teach her that. It was simply a lesson.

We shredded her assignment to pieces, page by page while she watched the intricate rows of hard work break apart and float hopelessly to the floor, forming a pile of what I would call a shredded ego.

Then, we knew from her streaming tears and shaking hands, that we needed to stop her disrespect for good, so she'd never forget it.

We grabbed her by the remnants of those irritating pigtails and tugged her down the hall towards the staircase.

"Remember this day, nerd," I growled with my tone as menacing as my grip on her tousled hair. "As the day you finally earned your place.

"In my shadow." And then I flung her over the staircase. Her body rolled and knocked on edges of the steps, the thumps echoed in the hallway, her sobs wracked her already trembling figure...

But it was I that had been falling into her shadow.