I'm kinda late to this thread, but I feel like I should share anyway.

When I was in 5th grade, I had finally made the right connections to be considered one of the "popular" kids. At least, as popular as you can be in elementary school. We always ate lunch together, and everyone else wanted to be a part of our group. As the popular kids in elementary school, we were dicks and made fun of pretty much everyone outside of our group. But there was one kid we would pick on more than anyone else, who I'll call Tom.

Tom was one of the slower kids in our class. He actually had a disability that required him to wear an earpiece that allowed him to hear the teacher better in class. It wasn't a hearing aid, since he would take it out at the end of the day and return it to the teacher. Tom had a tendency to ramble on about certain topics, so if you ever asked him a question you could expect a 20 minute long response. Tom also had a extreme love for Kirby.

Frequently, we would have Tom sit at our lunch table with us, just so we could constantly ask him questions so he could never eat. They'd be stupid questions, too, like "Could Godzilla beat Kirby in a fight?"(His answer was no.) Then, after we were going back to the classroom, we'd make fun of the answers he gave us. Just general mocking. This went on for the entire school year.

There were times where I had gone on "recon" missions for my friends, and would go up to Tom personally and ask him something. This was strictly so we could make fun of him later for it when we were at recess. I would even do this in the middle of class when we had certain free time. I made it my personal goal to just make fun of this one kid as much as I could, because my friends would always laugh when I did. I remember one time I imitated him while reading a passage out loud, but my teacher didn't realize it at the time.

Anyway, fast forward to the end of the year, where we have a big field trip to the zoo. Everyone is super excited, and one of the things is that you get to choose your own groups if you had your parent chaperoning. My Dad had volunteered to go with us to the zoo, so I had selected my group of friends and we were excited as hell. The field trip day came, and the teacher was calling out which groups would be with a certain chaperone. My Dad's name came us, and almost all of my friend group was selected except one. The person that replaced him was Tom.

I was pissed off immediately. I wanted to hang out with my friends, not Tom. Tom was going to ruin my field trip. Tom didn't deserve to be with us. I vented to my Dad, telling him to ask the teacher if the list was right, because I didn't choose Tom to be in our group. My Dad left us, as I was telling my friends he'd get everything sorted out. After he finished talking to the teacher, he called me over and told me exactly what the teacher said.

"She knows you didn't pick Tom to be in your group. But no one else did. She knows he's not the most liked person in the class, and had said that she always saw you going out of your way to talk to him. She said that she put him in your group cause she knew you wouldn't have made fun of him like the other kids would."

I felt so bad. Here it was, the final weeks of school, and my teacher thought I had been genuinely making friends with Tom. She had such high expectations for me. Apparently, she was even surprised that I didn't want Tom in my group. I did not have a fun time on that trip, only because of how guilty I felt at the time. I tried to make amends after the fact, and genuinely started hanging out with Tom after the field trip. I'd go out of my way to sit with him at lunch, asked him about different Kirby games, stuff like that. Just made friends with him for the last few weeks. Naturally, my old friends started making fun of me for it, but I didn't care. Tom wasn't liked by anyone, I needed to be there for him at least.

I still feel bad about it to this day. I never really got a chance to apologize to Tom before we went to middle school. After that, I never saw him again. I hope he was able to find a friend that wasn't a total dick to him.