I was a figure skater as a kid and, while I loved the sport, I absolutely detested most of the girls I skated with. I was a weird, ugly kid and when I first joined the club I got some shit from a pack of five of them, though they stopped when I wouldn't rise to the taunts. Most of them weren't too smart, but there was one girl, Jen, who was downright crafty. She knew just how to dole out attention and insult in just the right proportion to win supporters but keep her victims somehow desperate for attention from her. I hated her passionately, because I couldn't just dismiss her like I could the others. There was something more respectable, in a terrible way, about her. She was my archenemy.

At one competition some of us were sitting in the stands, along with this girl named Bridget. Bridget was a year or two younger than us, plump, and a bit slow, but as sweet as anything. She wanted so intensely to win Jen's approval, so when Jen told her to go get us all some bags of popcorn, she did in an instant.

Bridget came back with the snacks for everyone. In a beat, Jen said, "Oh Bridgie, why did you get so much popcorn for yourself? Don't you need to lose some weight?" Laughing, she swiped the bag right out of the girl's hands and lifted it far above her head. "Jump and get it!"

Bridget's face crumpled. "Could you give it back?" she asked.

"You'll have to catch it first!" Jen lobbed the bag right over Bridget's head to one of her friends, who threw it right back to her. Bridget's eyes were streaming even as she tried to laugh off the mean game.

Jen looked straight at me, with a smirk, and said, "Hey, ____, catch!" Seeing Jen's cool, cruel smile, I was seized with anger I hadn't felt before then or since. Before I knew it, I had jumped up the bleacher stairs towards Jen and slapped her square in the face. It made a sound like a shot. We stared at each other in mutual disbelief, her hand cradling her cheek. "You hit me," she mouthed. "You hit me!" Then she started to cry and ran off up the stands.

For a long time after that I felt like a fucking hero. The incident symbolized a lot of things I wanted to be true about myself-- that I had strength, that I was formidable, that I would stand up against injustice. It let me feel simultaneously like an underdog and a victor. However, by the summer after my senior year of high school, I'd practically forgotten about Jen. I'd moved away from my hometown, had graduated, all that jazz. If I thought about the incident, it was rarely and always with a little glimmer of satisfaction that I'd "defeated" my childhood archnemesis. Yet one day, the anchorman on the national news mentioned my hometown's name and I looked up to see her face along with four others on the screen. She had died in a terrible car crash just days after graduation while driving with her friends to her lake house to celebrate.

I had gone to elementary school with and liked the other four girls, but somehow it was Jen whose death bothered me the most. When I saw the whole town in mourning, the eulogies about her fidelity and kindness, the tears on her parents' faces I saw a person, not the cardboard cut-out movie villain I'd made star in my own personal epic. When the news made her a poster child for not texting while driving, it made me sick how I'd similarly used her as an emblem for my own supposed goodness. This girl was only eighteen years old when she died. It seemed suddenly deeply sad to use her as some cornerstone of my self definition, to be an anti-Jen when she had evidently been so much more than what I had known. It still bothers me a lot. I wonder if anyone has any similar stories...

TL;DR Slapped a bitch. She died in a car crash.

What about your own enemies? Did they ever get a deserved comeuppance? Did they reform? Do you even want to know what happened to them if you don't?