“Mrs. Park? Your son’s lucky. My mom wouldn’t know a garden if it bit her.”
Over the following weeks, he engineered “accidental” encounters. Walking by our house after practice. “Losing” a ball in our yard. Each time, he’d speak to her—not as the snarling predator I knew, but as a wounded puppy. He told her his parents were divorcing. He said his grades were slipping. He called her “the only adult who actually listens.”
The first crack appeared on a Tuesday. Yuna invited him in for iced tea. I sat at the kitchen table, silent, as Derek spun his web. my bully tries to corrupt my mother yuna
A high school bully, unable to break his victim directly, shifts his cruelty to a more vulnerable target: the victim’s mother, Yuna—a gentle widow whose kindness becomes the very weapon used against her. Yuna hums while she gardens. It’s her sanctuary, a small patch of irises and lavender behind the modest house she once shared with her late husband. She doesn’t hear the chain-link rattle. She doesn’t see him lean against the fence, arms folded, smile like a razor.
Yuna, ever gracious, wiped her hands on her apron and smiled. “Oh? Well, anyone can learn. It just takes patience.” “Mrs
Then, she began questioning me. “Are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You’ve been so stressed lately.”
I felt the floor drop. He was rewriting history. My bruises, my terror, my sleepless nights—he was recasting them as my inability to forgive. And Yuna, my sweet, lonely mother, was drinking it in because he was offering her something she’d lost when Dad died: the feeling of being needed. My mom wouldn’t know a garden if it bit her
And I realized: corruption only wins when love forgets to look closely. My bully didn’t want Yuna. He wanted the version of her that existed without me. But mothers, the good ones, don’t exist without their children.