Moving to a new city is a big step, let alone a new country. You might not know anyone there, maybe you look different or even speak a different language, and acclimating can feel like an enormous task. That’s even the case if you’re an adult when you move, but if you’re a child and your parents have decided to relocate to foreign shores? What a massive thing to have to deal with at such a young age.

Of course, the move can also bring massive opportunities and a new, improved way of life. You get to see and learn new things, and hopefully make some new friends that will help you to settle in. That was the situation faced by the person in this story, who relocated to Australia at just nine years old. It was a dream move, but the reality turned out – on a personal level – to be more of a nightmare.

Finally, after a couple of years of being shunned, they made a new friend. And this friend took them under her wing, helped them make even more friends, and suddenly their new Australian home felt more like the paradise they’d been promised. Until, a few years later, information that they revealed to their new friend caused her to turn on them in a truly horrifying way. But the way this person got their own back? Absolutely unprecedented.

Read on to find out what happened.

My former best friend turned nemesis finally got her comeuppance

When I moved to Australia, about nine years ago, I was nine (now eighteen) and had no friends. This was understandable, but the sad part was that no-one WANTED to be my friend.

I did everything wrong: I sat with the wrong posture, I said the wrong thing, I acted like a five-year-old when something serious was going on, I acted like a twenty year old when some game was happening; every little thing just went wrong for me.

Then, this amazing person became my friend – I’ll call her Sophie. Anyway, Sophie was my first real friend here, and I met her after easily three years with literally not a single friend in the hemisphere.

We did pretty much everything together, and later she introduced me to her own friends, and we very quickly bonded.

Let’s see how this turned out for them.

Now, this was fine for about two years: I had a great best friend, who was warm and friendly to me, and I had a great group of new friends who were interested in science fiction and classic literature and all the other nerdy things I liked.

And then I got my diagnosis of autism. This wasn’t something I bandied about or anything, I kept this information close to my chest, telling only the people I thought I could trust most in the world.

Apparently this did not extend to my best friend. She went screaming about how I was a freak, a liar, a ****** and a pervert (where did she get that one from? And yes, all of these and more were her actual words).

It got so bad I tried to kill myself on three separate occasions. It turned out she had a serious problem with anyone she perceived as mentally ill, and held virtually neo-Nazi views about what should be done with mentally disabled people.

Yikes! Read on to find out how they dealt with Sophie’s abhorrent behaviour.

I vowed absolute, total revenge on this ***** who had ruined my carefully-constructed life. We ended up sparring a little, mostly verbally, until after about six months of this we just sort of lapsed into furious silence.

She should have remembered that I was the winner of the prize for science in my school for three years running.

After about two more months, I got really sick of her. I still had my old friends from before, but my former best friend was now my absolute nemesis.

I trusted her with everything, and now she was using that against me, telling people I was bigender (“Hey, did you know the nutjob is a ****** too?”), that I had Tourette’s (“Yeah, like that ****** on YouTube”) and that I liked Star Trek and old sci-fi movies and things (“What a ******* nerdy *****”).

So on they went with their plan to get their revenge on Sophie.

I found my way onto eBay, and bought eight ounces of 99% pure iodine crystals. I then went to the local shops, and got some disposable pitchers and a few bottles of ammonium. If you mix these up in a certain ratio, you get a highly volatile chemical called nitrogen triiodide.

This is also known as explosive paint.

Later that night, I went to her house, and painted this stuff around her door handle. Her door is one of the ones where if you turn the handle on one side, the other turns too. I also painted it under the wheels of her car, and under her welcome mat.

Since nitrogen triiodide will explode with a small amount of force and a terrifyingly loud bang when touched or moved, leaving an indelible yellow stain, this might be quite interesting.

Oh no. Let’s see how this plan panned out.

Fast forward a little, and I come back four days later. There’s a deep yellow stain on the door handle, and on her driveway. Two of her tyres have the same mark, two others look new (I later found out from a co-worker of hers that they burst “for some reason”).

Turning over her mat, there are deep yellow and black scorch-marks in it.

I did this again, only this time on her bike wheels and under her window (which I heard from her boyfriend had been replaced, very expensively, since she thought she broke it because of the cracking sound), a week later.

She’ll never know it was me specifically, but I have a fair idea. She’s stopped calling me names in the street, which is something, and I may even have the restraining order (200 metres) lifted if she keeps up this enforced good behaviour.

Wow this is… a lot. It’s absolutely abhorrent that Sophie has treated her friend in this manner, and for the bullying and the abusive comments she deserves reporting in any way possible.

And sure, this was a very smart plan.

But resorting to criminal damage isn’t always the best idea – especially if it somehow gets back to Sophie who did it.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who was totally humiliated when he learned the real reason his friends had ditched him.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person was impressed by the plan.

While others thought that this might not sit well with the restraining order.

Meanwhile, others were concerned it was going to get back to Sophie.

There are clear ways to deal with bullying of the kind that Sophie was tormenting their ex-friend with. And let’s be clear: the slurs, the abuse, the nastiness that almost drove this person to suicide is absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable. No one, no matter their circumstances, should ever be subjected to anything like that. And to face it from someone they thought was their friend must hurt even more.

But also, while this chemistry experiment is very impressive and is likely causing Sophie a whole lot of torment and inconvenience of her own, it’s really not the smart thing to do. Especially when this person already has a restraining order against the girl in question. If the restraining order is being broken, that is something the courts should be dealing with – otherwise, the pair just need to maintain space between one another and move on.

It sucks, it really does, especially when you trusted and loved the person you thought was a friend. But sometimes you have to take the high road and not get yourself in trouble. And plotting this revenge, then posting on the internet about it? That might put you in all kinds of hot water.