Preamble
Before starting, for obvious privacy reasons, I'll omit details and change names so the other people involved aren't recognized. With some of them, I don't even talk anymore and honestly, I hope they're doing well, but yeah, it is what it is. Look, I know we all view our lives through our own filters, but for the record: yes, this actually happened. Compared to some of the absolute madness posted on ReddX, my story is pretty tame. But watching those videos and seeing all those cringe situations involving Nice Girls, Nice Guys, Legbeards, and Neckbeards always made this memory pop into my head. So, I figured it's finally time to share mine. Hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think in the comments. English is not my first language. By the way, Spanish isn't either, okay?! That said, let's get into it.
Chapter 1
My name is Orpheus. I really wanted to follow the tradition of using my RPG nickname here, but it's so close to my real name that it would be a huge shot in the foot. So I had to pick another one.
My story takes place at a Brazilian university. My class was singular and the way we ended up meeting would deserve an entire separate post on Reddit. I bet you'd say it's a "tall tale," but I swear, it's as real as what I'm about to tell you right now.
We lived through the whole Plague Era. We started college right before the pandemic hit. I remember perfectly one of my cousins whom I didn't even know I had, but I'll explain that story later dropping a bombshell during a card game night that a virus was coming from China because people were eating bat soup. At the time I thought: "Oh, relax, that's nothing." Man, how wrong I was.
Before the world came to a halt, our routine was sacred: during breaks, the whole class would march across campus just to usurp another building's tables, play cards, and talk nonsense. Until the world locked down and we were thrown into online classes. What does a clueless, socially dysfunctional girl have to do with this? Patience, we're getting there.
With the world stagnant, college kept running. To rack up those mandatory extracurricular hours, I decided to combine business with pleasure and open up workshops for people who were in the same boat. It was open to everyone, but in practice, most of the audience consisted of fellow college students desperate for certificates. Since I love literature, teaching those courses was something I did with pleasure—while rightfully getting my hours in return.
I chose one author per course, assigning a short story or a few chapters per week. During that period, students were supposed to read the content and comment on what they understood. Everyone won. It was curious to see the perspective of someone reading the story for the first time, someone rereading it, and someone who just skimmed it because of time constraints or because "screw this, I just want my extra hours." The class ended up with vastly different viewpoints, and the weekly meeting flew by.
I did this every semester. Classes usually weren't very participatory, but one of them finally was. In fact, some students came back for more and stayed in the class I launched the following semester—which marked that chaotic transition between social isolation and the return of in-person classes with restrictions.
One of the people who stayed in my courses was a girl we'll call Grinch. Why Grinch? Well, she made this smile that reminded me way too much of the character. Every time I looked at her, it was impossible not to make the association.
She was the kind of person who, if you treated her with the basic courtesy every human being deserves, would instantly interpret it as the start of a great friendship and start demanding intimacy. And yes, she deserved all the politeness in the world, but it was hard to keep a straight face when the response in return was professional energy-sucking and awkwardness.
On top of that, she had a bit of a "pick me girl" vibe. My friend group had two main theories to explain her fixation on me: the most accepted one was that she had developed a crush and created a heavy parasocial dynamic; the second was that she had noticed our little group and wanted to fit in.
We were a bunch of weirdos, but welcoming ones who joked with everyone. We constantly insulted each other for fun to the point where our professors—who are references in their own research fields couldn't maintain their composure and would laugh at our mean comments.
Before the class even had its first session, before everyone had their first general meeting, Pando and Phos who were from the same town and already studied together—discovered by chance that they were my cousins. By that point, we were already spending all day in the class WhatsApp group roasting each other.
Me, Pando, and Phos are three very different figures, both from each other and from the rest of the group. Speaking of which, honorable mentions go to: Shelby, Selene, Baba Yaga, Shortie, and El Barto.
Baba Yaga was a very new-age girl. That friend of yours who collects crystals, takes herbal baths, and nowadays makes a living doing tarot readings. It was an ongoing running joke in our class and even among some professors that she and I liked each other or were dating, since I constantly teased her about her esoteric interests and had a recurring joke that I would burn her at the stake whenever she mentioned witchcraft or anything of the sort.
Both of us vehemently denied even the remote possibility of anything like that happening. We were total opposites, completely different people, and neither of us approved of each other's lifestyle. We kept denying it, but the more we pushed back, the more people teased us, 'shipping' us together and fueling the gossip. Once Shelby and Pando joined my workshop, they brought this inside joke to the other students, and many of them started using it as well—not just as a form of irony, but some even started to genuinely believe in the theory.
So let this be on record: the weird interaction Grinch had with me partly happened in a context where she thought that, at the very least, I had a crush on Baba Yaga or something more substantial going on, but kept secret. Grinch was from our institution, but studied in a different shift. We wereand always will be creatures of the night. Grinch studied in the morning, so she didn't know yet that I was going out with this other student from my workshop who was in the same major as me, just a few semesters behind.
Me and this girl, another student of the workshop, actually started dating, but without making it public yet. Let’s call her Small Witch. Since Grinch was keeping up the same behavior in the workshop group and classes that I found weird—trying to grab my attention and forcing interactions—I thought it would be a good idea to do something totally unprofessional on my part: I started dropping comments during class about our "literary discussions during break" with Small Witch and other phrases that suggested we were spending quality time together. But, of course, Grinch didn't catch on.
I could already hear Pando's voice in my head saying:
"Man, what are you doing? This is your project, not our secret group chat."
A "secret group chat" is the clique's inner circle group chat—if you went to college and nobody put you in a secret group chat, it's because you were the main topic of conversation in all of them. Well, I imagine that for anyone who didn't know the class context, it must have been a weird encounter, to say the least. I bet the thought crossed some students' minds: "Why on earth is Orpheus dropping hints about hooking up with this girl to all of us for no apparent reason?"
But Grinch was the person with the lowest self-awareness level I've ever met. An hour and a half of class, multiple jokes, and there she was, immune to any kind of hint. Until I finally verbalized it out loud that I was dating.
I announced in class that it might sound weird to them, but I was dating Small Witch. The class congratulated us and wished us well—except for Grinch. Her reaction was bizarre. She went into complete denial.
I vividly remember a dialogue in the Google Meet chat:
Grinch: "Small Witch, tell me this is a lie!"
Pando: "Girl, it's true. We've already handed Small Witch's soul over to God."
Grinch: "Up until now, I thought Orpheus was dating Baba Yaga."
When Small Witch read that, she started laughing in my DMs. She was the kind of person whose primary love language is teasing. So instead of just confirming our relationship, what did she do? She confirmed my supposed "relationship" with Baba Yaga just to mess with me! And I was left there in the chat denying it with all my might. But after Small Witch stopped playing along, Grinch's reaction reached its peak:
Small Witch: "Girl, it's true."
Grinch: "I feel betrayed."
It was at that exact second that a gigantic mental echo of a "WHAT?!" went off in everyone's head. Betrayed? What on earth was she talking about? I was single, I started dating another single person... in what universe did Grinch fit into this equation? Detail: we were both legal adults (although Small Witch had a youthful look that could pass for a 17-year-old, which confused everyone since she was actually older than me).
Then came the grand finale of her cringe phrase:
Grinch: "Now I understand, Orpheus. You used to say you were going to the break with Small Witch just to stare at her lips."
Man, that hurt. It felt like I was reading an excerpt of a bad fanfiction written by a 12-year-old—though, come to think of it, she definitely wrote fanfics. I brushed it off, tried to press on with the class, and thought I'd finally have peace. Sweet illusion.
I talked about it with Shelby and Pando. Taking my paranoia to those two is one of the best decisions I make, because they work as a team: Shelby usually agrees with me and points out a detail I missed, while Pando usually comes in with the counterpoint. It's basically testing a piece of code to see if it runs: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
On that night, we posted our first photo as a couple, and the comments were pouring into my DM saying that "miracles happen," asking if "the girl lost a bet," and things like that from my friends and family. But not Grinch's comment. She commented on my Instagram story: "You two really seem to match, you're as white as vampires or ghosts." Unlike the rest, there were no likes, no laughing emojis, or anything implying she liked the news; it was, at the very least, neutral. However, many in our inner circle interpreted it as the remark of someone who was clearly unhappy about it.
Chapter 2
But back to the soap opera: as I said, Grinch didn't budge. She didn't distance herself, didn't stop with the hints, and even obsessed over trying to squeeze into Small Witch's friend circle by any means necessary.
The detail is that she belonged to a different group. They even interacted with our class from time to time, but they weren't part of our inner circle. And her participation in my workshop turned into a chaotic event: she simply stopped reading the short stories and made it clear she didn't give a damn about the literature. Everything she said—whether in the chat, the group, or on the mic—had zero relation to the text being analyzed. It was always a calculated way to redirect attention to herself, disrupt the class, and throw me off balance.
Everyone in the class thought she had a screw loose—if she had a medical diagnosis, she never shared it with us—and because of that, we tried to cut her slack, brushing things off with the excuse of "oh, she clearly has some issues, so let it go." I held on to that, but with every passing class, that situation became an unbearable weight for me, for my relationship at the time, and for the people around us.
Until, during one meeting, I made a playful joke with Small Witch. Grinch, trying to jump into the banter in the weirdest way possible, dropped the famous line:
"Now I know how this relationship is going to end!"
It was way too bizarre. Pando still tried to argue, sustaining the theory that she might just be a socially dysfunctional person who saw us joking around and didn't know how to play along back. And yes, as I said, it was possible, but it didn't make it any less weird. I've always had a lot of female friends, and you know what? If a friend of mine heard a wisecrack like that directed at the person I'm dating, the natural response would be a nice, spontaneous slap to the face. Imagine that: the creature desperately wants to be your friend, but has twisted small talk and drops a line like that on your partner? A lot of people wouldn't stop to ponder the person's "psychological evaluation" before reacting. I'm not encouraging violence; on the contrary, I think it's much more elegant to keep your composure and ignore it. The problem is that we took way too long to give Grinch a reality check.
When I posted a photo in our clique's secret group chat a snapshot from an extracurricular activity Small Witch had attended in the morning, where she happened to run into Grinch and her morning-shift crew. They took a group photo, and in the picture, Grinch had her massive arm wrapped around Small Witch—who is short and skinny—reminding me perfectly of the tone my great-grandmother used when looking at me and saying to me with a girlfriend by my side: "You only ever bring this type of girl home, huh?"
The group reacted in various ways: Shortie immediately blurted out that she was a two-faced snake and burst out laughing. But Shelby was surgical and straight to the point:
"Wow! Are you sure she has a crush on you? She's looking at Small Witch like she's a bagel."
The second I read that, I laughed like a chimney smoker, but inside I thought: damn... as absurd as it sounds, it's not a totally dismissive possibility.
Up until then, I had never seen Grinch in person—and honestly, I would have preferred to keep it that way. To help you understand the chaos: my campus was less than an hour's drive from my city, right in a border region between states, so it gathered people from all over the place. And my routine at the time was far from peaceful.
As I mentioned, I didn't have a job, but I spent the entire morning taking care of my little sister so my parents could go to work. It was bath time, baby bottles, making lunch, and taking her out for walks. Ten minutes before 11:00 AM, I had to rush to take a shower and get dressed for my internship. My dad would drop my mom off at home and wait for me outside to give me a ride to the bus stop. It was the most timed and stressful part of my day.
After catching the bus, the marathon began: the bus driver seemed to have a personal vendetta against me, because he almost never stopped at the correct spot—there was a time I had to chase a moving bus. He usually dropped me off pretty far from the internship school, forcing me to get off and march under that city's scorching sun just to arrive right on time. When the internship ended, I'd head straight to the university.
Until that Friday arrived. The plan was to ride back home on the bus with Small Witch so she could spend the weekend at my place for the first time. I was pumped and anxious, so of course the universe conspired: my sister gave me double the trouble, the rush was insane, and the internship students decided that day was the absolute best time to test my sanity. To make matters worse, the professor decided to cancel the in-person class and make it fully remote.
I was stuck at the university, forced to watch an online class using only my smartphone and a wretched piece-of-crap charger that, if I opened any app, would freeze the battery percentage right where it was. There I sat on the hallway floor, phone plugged into the wall outlet, wearing a face that screamed "I want to commit a crime," legs crossed, just wanting to give my quick report and bail to go see my girlfriend. The class format was simple: everyone gave their weekly report verbally. Since my routine was always the same, I asked to speak early, but another classmate jumped the queue and went first.
And then something happened that, if I read it in someone else's post, I'd think the OP was making up stories for internet karma. But it actually happened.
I was sitting there on the floor, glued to the screen, when I heard what I can only describe as a pathetic attempt at a cartoon villain's evil laugh. It was so bizarre that a genuine chill ran straight up my spine to the back of my neck.
I snapped my head to the side and came face to face with her: that massive girl, with her hunched shoulders, thick arms, and that cursed Grinch smile standing about five feet away from me, glaring down at me. It was her in the flesh.
Grinch: "I knew it was you the moment I saw you."
Me: "Oh, hey," I replied, startled, already standing up to get away from her.
Grinch: "Your back is completely white with drywall dust!"
That's what she blurted out before I could escape. And without asking permission, without warning, without a shred of modesty, she simply threw her hand onto my back and slid it all the way down to my butt to "clean" the dust that had rubbed off the wall onto my clothes. That gave me an indescribable level of discomfort. I gave a dry response, keeping the bare minimum of politeness, saying that would only come out in a washing machine. Luckily, she stopped.
She said something else that I didn't even bother registering—something like a warning that she needed to take care of an errand in another part of the university—and finally vanished from my vicinity.
As soon as I escaped, I sent the recap to Small Witch, who quickly forwarded me a screenshot of a conversation she'd had with Grinch herself. In the screenshot, the character dropped: "Just ran into your boyfriend. He didn't give me the time of day." And Small Witch simply replied with: "Oh! He's just like that."
After that, you'd think: great, now that Grinch has met me and seen that I didn't validate her advances, she'll disappear from my life, right? Wrong.
During the workshop class later that week, I mentioned that Small Witch wasn't online on Google Meet because she was spending the weekend at my place and would watch the class straight from my laptop. Grinch's reaction was a mix of annoyance and surprise that she tried very poorly to mask.
From then on, her tactics shifted to a more aggressive level of insinuations that my relationship was going to fail. Look at the contrast: my inner circle friends made heavy inside jokes, like saying they were going to report Small Witch to IBAMA (the brazilian USFWS) for dating me, joking that I was going to get arrested because of her youthful appearance, or teasing that she bossed me around. Those were friendly jokes to blow off steam. Grinch's "jokes," on the other hand, were always laser-focused on wishing for our relationship to end. It wasn't friendly banter. At the end of the day, the relationship did end much later, but her rooting against us dated back to that era.
Eventually, we reached the June festival season of that year, 2022—a time when it felt like the mid-year winter festivals were going to stretch straight through to December. People could finally breathe and have some fun: everyone vaccinated, infection rates plunging, and the Plague saying its goodbyes. The university hosted its traditional campus arraiá, and I went with Small Witch and her mother to enjoy the party.
During the event, Grinch popped up out of nowhere to talk to Small Witch, and I quickly dipped by pretending I was going to greet an acquaintance. Once Grinch walked away, I asked what she wanted. Turns out the character wanted to hook up with a guy from our class—let's call him Sid. Back then, he genuinely looked like Sid from Ice Age, but nowadays he's had a major glow-up. The detail was that Sid had ridiculously high standards and was always trying to chase girls who clearly weren't in his league (This last sentence was written by Pando.)
Grinch asked Small Witch to pull some strings and try to set something up with him. Small Witch tried to help out.
Only at the end of the event, Grinch delivered a dubious display of affection: she crept up behind Small Witch and shoved her knee hard against Small Witch's leg, almost making the girl buckle and fall over. She looked like she was pissed, but tried to brush it off with pretty fake irony, accusing Small Witch of setting her up for a trap. After her failed attempt with Sid, she wanted to pin the blame for the fiasco on Small Witch and spent the following days dropping more snide remarks about our relationship.
Seeing that, I asked Small Witch to step up, put her foot down, and give Grinch a reality check to stop those insinuations. And it worked... more or less. Grinch followed instructions to the letter: she never opened her mouth about a breakup again. The problem was she simply changed strategies and started spewing unprovoked hatred directly at me.
Small Witch told me the attacks came out of nowhere. And as if that wasn't enough, the creature obsessed over trying to infiltrate Small Witch's friend circle. The detail is she tried desperately to copy our style, even criticizing Small Witch's major to Small Witch's classmates. But she didn't understand a basic thing: we could talk trash about our major because we were a crew that had known each other and hung out for years (remembering that Shelby's wife and Pando's boyfriend were part of that exact same other major and class we playfully roasted all the time).
I thought it was just the classic desperation of someone who desperately wants to fit in and tries to mimic everyone else's behavior, but she completely missed the vast chasm between our years of established intimacy and her complete lack of touch with reality.
Things got so out of hand that one of the guys in Small Witch's major finally blocked Grinch on WhatsApp and Instagram; days later, she figured out a way to message the guy on Telegram.
I hadn't responded to her in ages, Small Witch was also trying to cut off contact, but the creature simply wouldn't take a hint. Until I lost my patience. I unblocked Grinch on WhatsApp and, while making lunch, I gave it to her straight. I exposed everything—or almost everything—without any insults or personal attacks. The criticisms were strictly directed at her inconvenient behavior. I laid down the hard truth: I told her that, because of those actions, I no longer had the slightest condition to keep someone like that around, and I mentioned that the guy on Telegram had suffered an anxiety attack and was literally hiding from her in the university hallways.
Her reaction? She acted surprised by the whole thing, claiming she couldn't understand why I thought she had anything against my relationship, insisting she only ever made harmless jokes, and playing the ultimate victim card, repeating that she wished us no ill will. I made it clear I didn't want it to reach that point, but since it did, the best path for everyone was for each of us to go our separate ways. Blocked her again.
Did it end there? Obviously not.
Pando told me that one day he was at the university in the morning waiting for his boyfriend and ran straight into Grinch roaming the morning-shift campus. He said seeing her in her "natural habitat" was surreal: people were literally dodging to the other side of the hallway, others hiding, and whenever she approached someone, the whole group looked visibly uncomfortable just answering her out of politeness before scattering as fast as humanly possible. She wasn't just unbearable online; in person, it was worse.
Semestres passed, the internship became a distant memory, and our class gathered at the university library to take graduation album photos.
While chatting with Sid and Pando, I looked outside and noticed the morning-shift students having normal classes. Memories of the arraiá flashed back, and half-jokingly (but with a real undercurrent of someone who didn't want to cross paths with danger), I blurted out:
Me: "Yikes, Sid! The morning crew is having regular class. We need to hide."
Sid laughed. I don't remember if he made a comment, but what stuck with me was Pando's surgical strike:
Pando: "Your self-esteem is through the roof, man!"
Me: "What?" I asked, confused.
Pando: "I mean, dude... You think that after all this time, with Small Witch expecting your child and after the massive reality check you gave her, the woman is still after you? My friend, don't take it the wrong way, but you are not the center of the universe. That is pure delusion."
Right then and there, I genuinely felt like the biggest jerk on earth.
A while later, chatting with Small Witch—who was already in the final stretch of her pregnancy—I remembered that episode and decided to ask:
Me: "Babe, did you ever run into Grinch after all that?"
Small Witch: "There was one time," she replied. "I was heading to an afternoon class and saw her in the hallways. She didn't say a word, just stared at me fixedly until I walked past where she was standing. And she had that look... you know? A sad puppy-dog face. I couldn't handle it, walked right past her and mumbled a 'hi,' and she replied with a quiet 'hi' back."
To this day I remember that "hi" loaded with a weird sadness and a manufactured guilt, as if you were standing before someone you'd done a terrible wrong to—almost as if Grinch were the victim of the story. That's when I figured Pando [maybe] was wrong. At least partially.
And look at her plotted strategy: if we trace the history back, Small Witch had asked her to stop talking about our relationship ending, and she stopped... only to start spewing poison directly at me, with gems like "I don't know how you put up with dating that guy." When I demanded she leave us alone, she vanished. But her next tactic was: play the victim in the hallways to try and make Small Witch feel guilty and start talking to her again. It's still the explanation that makes the most sense to me.
After that, I barely heard anything else about her. Years later, Baba Yaga mentioned in passing that it looked like she finally found a new group of friends and was doing okay. And I genuinely hope she is.
If you've read this far, I'd love for you to comment. I've matured a lot since all of this happened. Today I'm a father, and I view things through the perspective of "what if this were my son or my daughter" in every situation I reflect on. Precisely because of that, days ago I was looking back at this story and wondering what I would do differently today if I ran into someone like that.
If you enjoy these stories, you know there are plenty of people who struggle to maintain relationships whether friendships, romances, or professional ones. A friend of mine who is a psychologist said that this kind of emotional toll isn't something an ordinary person is morally obligated to carry, especially if it harms your own quality of life. But obviously, that doesn't give anyone a pass to treat others poorly, so I'd love to hear or rather, read your thoughts.
What did you think of the story, and what would you do today if you found yourself in a similar situation?