Scar #2: You Call This a Scavenger Hunt?!?!

(Please note: I can't make this short...I just can't.  There is no coarse language but it is long, apologies in advance for this.)
The other night I tried to talk briefly about the day my high school was smoke bombed.  Three years later, it was nearly replaced as the worst of my scars, as it is it's a very close second.
Before I start, take a moment to imagine what a scavenger hunt would mean for you.  For me, it might involve snapping a few photos, or buying something small, or something around those lines.  This was nothing like that.
The so-called "prank week" practice at the hands of the senior class carried all the way the years I spent in high school.  A few weeks before I was to graduate from said high school, it was taken to another level...and not in a good way.
There were plans for a scavenger hunt one night...and not of the type that I thought of above.  I heard some rumors of what it was going to entail, which today makes me guilty because I still wish I had told an authority figure about them.  But two things stopped me: A feeling that it wouldn't matter because apparently nothing had been done about the previous two dozen or so incidents that I either saw or heard about, and the numbness I felt generally from these incidents as a whole.
Most of the actual rumors escape me now, but one really stands out: There was a rumor that one of the "targets" on the list was to find a particular student  -- unnamed at that time, apparently, hogtie him or her, and then take a photo of the hogtied student.  Because I'd had nothing to do with any of the previous stunts that had been perpetrated, there were rumors that I was the hogtie target.
I can't put into words what was running through my mind when I heard about this.  The best I can relate to you would go something like this, "I'm one of the targets?!?  I'm one of the targets?!?!? How in heck am I going to hide from this?", because I was sure a few people knew where I lived.
On the night of the hunt I was paranoid.  I made sure the lights in the house were kept to a minimum to make people think I had skipped town for the night, and I ordered the porch doors double-locked.  Even then I didn't feel safe until the morning after, and just hearing of the rumor drove a still-indelible image into my brain that the world was out to get me...if there was any hope of me trusting other people face-to-face before this, it was zapped forever by the fear on this night that I could potentially be seriously hurt.
As it turned out, someone else was the hogtie target.  But it was still a black-eye night for my hometown of Melrose, MA: Lots of street and stop signs were torn down, the sign outside the public library -- which was pretty big -- was uprooted, and there were a large number of arrests later that night in the parking lot of a Chili's on Route 1.  The damage estimate I saw was $20K to the city, but that was conservative, there was reason to think it was at least double that, but the exact figure may never be known.
I was never so happy to be rid of a group of classmates in my life.  Years later, after the first time through college, when a HS alumni tried to call my house for purposes of informing me of a reunion, a sibling beat me to the phone, and realizing what they had done to me, he hung up on them.  I couldn't and still haven't forgiven them for effectively making me paranoid around other people.
I apologize for making this so long, but as I admitted at the top, this is a story I couldn't make short...ugh, I can't put into words how bad it hurts talking about these things now, knowing how long I've let them fester, knowing that I don't know how to put these things into their proper focus. :(