Dear Bully (16 page)

But then the game turned ugly. A trip to the guidance counselor and a look at the tears that our seat saving had caused the blue-eyed girl in particular made my heart hurt. I don’t know if it was seeing the look of desperation on her face, the sadness that sat deep in her eyes, the crisis swirling around her, but at that moment I made a change. I no longer fought for the coveted seat at the group table. If the blue-eyed girl wasn’t included in the lunchroom, then I didn’t want to be included, either. If she wasn’t invited to the sleepovers, then I didn’t want to go. I would love to say it was smooth sailing after that, but it wasn’t. I lost friends. I was the subject of notes passed and whispered secrets in the hallway. But the friendship I had with the blue-eyed girl was all I needed.

Maybe life can be easier if you throw out everything that makes you different and unique, but then it’s no longer your life. It’s something created, imagined, something owned and dictated by a group. I’ve seen both sides. I’ve been inside and I’ve been out. I chose out. I stepped away from the lunch table. The blue-eyed girl and I found our own seats, apart from the crowd. I walked away from safety and made memories of my own choosing, just me and the blue-eyed girl. Our friendship grew and strengthened over the years. We became an inseparable duo. It took us through the hallways of high school, the campus visits of college, and the bars of our early twenties. When I would run into some of those girls from the “popular” lunch table, they told me that if I hadn’t been friends with the blue-eyed girl, they would have included me. I couldn’t have cared less. I stood up for the one left behind. I willingly jumped into the fire, and yes, my feet got burned, but I kept walking and have never looked back.

Frenemies Are Not Friends
by Michelle Zink

My daughter’s bullies came disguised as friends.

It started at the end of seventh grade, but to understand it all, you have to go back further than that.

Pretty much from birth, my daughter was an attention getter. It might have been the blond hair and green eyes, or it might have been her utter disregard for what other people thought—I’ve learned that confidence is appealing in pretty much everyone.

Who knows?

What I do know is that she didn’t strive for it. She just did things the way she wanted to, without a thought to what anyone would think. She wore clothing in strange combinations (something I attributed to artistic tendencies that were later proven), experimented with weird hairstyles starting in kindergarten, and sat down in the middle of the soccer field during games because “My legs are so tired, Mommy.” Even when her teammates yelled and screamed, angry that they might lose because of her lack of effort, no amount of cajoling could convince her to play when the truth was, she just didn’t want to.

Once, while rehearsing the day before a dance recital, she sat down on the stage as the other girls twirled around her, casting astonished glances her way amid shouts of “You’re ruining
everything
!” Afterward, I asked her why she would behave in such a way right before a recital.

“Tomorrow you’ll be onstage in front of lots and lots of people, honey. Don’t you care that you might not be ready?”

She thought about the question long enough for me to know she was actually considering it before replying, “No.”

I was stunned.
How can she not
care
?
I thought. What about the other girls, who were counting on her? What about her teacher, who would or would not recommend that she be moved into the advanced class next session?

But then I realized how incredible it would be
not to care.
To be so sure of who I was that I did what was right for me without a single thought to what other people would think. I started hoping she could hang on to that feeling, and I was happy when it remained a part of her year after year.

Getting glasses in the third grade seemed to solidify her place as one of the polite, semi-invisible kids in school. Her teacher told me that during free time, she liked to draw or read despite the fact that she did have a small group of good friends. She didn’t seem unhappy or shunned, the teacher said.

Just happy to be by herself.

I took it as a good sign. A sign that my daughter was happy within herself and didn’t need the validation of a million friends to be happy. She continued to develop selectively close friendships with girls like herself—girls who cared about how they did in school and weren’t growing up too fast.

Then, in seventh grade, she decided to get contacts. And it changed everything.

The girls who used to ignore her started saying hello and including her in conversations. The boys for whom she’d been invisible suddenly sat up and took notice. My daughter noticed, too, but in the way I hoped she would.

“Why didn’t they pay attention to me before when I had glasses?” she said. “What makes them think I want to be friends with them now when they didn’t like who I was before?”

And I would think,
Smart girl.

But as much as the change in people she didn’t know surprised her, the changes in the people she knew surprised her more. Suddenly, the girls with whom she’d been friends for years started whispering behind her back. There were parties to which she wasn’t invited, and any boy for whom she expressed interest—no matter how much he had been previously derided—was suddenly a target for her “friends.”

The situation quickly degenerated to an aggressive rumor campaign and, finally, to my daughter having her name written on the girls’ bathroom wall in conjunction with something truly humiliating by someone who had once been her very best friend.

This time she cared.

As someone who’d spent her entire childhood and adolescence within a circle of trusted friends, all of them playing it low-key, she was ill prepared for the viciousness that ensued. In her eyes nothing had changed. She was still the same girl she’d always been, but it became commonplace for her to come home in tears. Being targeted and ostracized by the girls she had once trusted was utterly devastating to her.

The girls who had once been her friends inexplicably didn’t want to be her friend anymore, and she wasn’t interested in joining the ranks of the big-headed, fast-moving kids in the so-called popular crowd who now seemed willing to welcome her. For the first time ever, she felt alone and isolated.

I was at a loss, too. We spent hours talking over the things that happened and all of our possible recourses before agreeing it would be best to try to let it go. To move on to something better.

And I think it took awhile, even for me, to recognize it as the bullying that it was. Perpetrated by the people my daughter had always known, it was insidious and vague. She wasn’t pushed or physically abused. She wasn’t forced to do things she didn’t want to do.

But school became a scary and confusing place. Those who knew her best used what they knew to hurt her. They made it their business to keep her down and do all they could to ensure that she was alienated and unhappy.

There were more changes over the summer between seventh and eighth grade. My daughter got taller and slimmer. She blossomed. Even adults she’d known her whole life didn’t recognize her until someone said her name.

Which was pretty much the nail in the coffin of all her old friendships.

But the good news is that she gained some other things, too. With a little encouragement, she hosted several summer get-togethers, making a point to invite people she didn’t know very well. Our methods for choosing invitees were . . . unconventional! We took a yearbook and went down the list of every single person in her grade. It went something like this:

Me: “Who’s this?”

Her: “Oh, that’s Heather.”

Me: “What’s her story?”

Her: “She’s weird.”

Me: “Weird, how?”

Her: “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk much. And I don’t really even see her at lunch or anything. But she’s a really good artist.”

Me: “Really? Well, you like art. Is she nice?”

Her: “Yeah.”

Me: “Is she a troublemaker or something?”

Her: “No . . .”

Me: “Maybe she just hasn’t found her place yet. Think we should invite her?”

Her: “Okay. I could try.”

And so it went.

It was an odd assortment at first! We ended up with people from every crowd who had only one thing in common—my daughter thought they were all nice, interesting people. Like her, many of them were adrift, and they found kinship in their shared search for friendships they could count on.

I was proud of her. It was a gutsy move. She was already a little shy, and it was scary to call people she didn’t know very well and invite them to a party. Plus, they didn’t all come.

But some of them did, and a funny thing grew out of those first awkward parties.

Friendship. The real kind. The kind where you have shared values and interests. The kind where you want one another to thrive and be happy.

My daughter is sixteen now and many of those friends are still a part of her life. Those days—the ones where she had to steel herself to go to school in the morning and try not to cry until she arrived home—seem far away. She looks back on them with a mixture of surprise and horror. I think time and distance have softened the memory, but I still see her shudder when someone mentions a particularly brutal episode.

Yet for all its brutality, she learned something valuable. She learned that even those dark and terrible moments that are embedded in our psyche change and fade. That the world is not as small as it can seem. That there are people in it who will hurt you to ease their own pain, insecurity, and fear.

But if you look a little closer, there are people in it who are like you, too. People who will love and accept and cherish you as you are. Often, you will find them in the most unexpected places.

And when you get right down to it, that’s really what life is: one long opportunity to find “your” people. The ones who make your world a better place and the ones for whom you can make the world a little brighter as well.

Every day is another chance. Another opportunity to find them.

You just have to do your part. You just have to keep looking.

Insight

The Other Side
by Nancy Holder

Recently, I received a letter brimming with pain and remorse. It was from a bully. “I’m the queen bee you’ve written about,” she wrote. “I’m the one people save a seat for and hope I’ll sit down next to them in return. I’m the one with the cool clothes and I throw the good parties. People want to hang out with me. They do all kinds of things just to be seen with me. But I’m mean, and my friends are mean, and I don’t know how to stop.”

I told her that I know how that feels.

When I was in middle school, I was the kind of girl who was “good” popular—president of the Associated Student Body, editor of the paper, friend to all . . . or so they thought. But I gleefully filled out the pages of a slam book with dozens of names in it, and not all my comments were nice. Some were far from nice. Some were very, very mean. With some years between then and now, I’m stunned that I could have said such things. But at the time, we scribbled in that book in classes, passing it around when the teachers weren’t looking. We worked on it during lunch.
Gross, zitty, BO
. Some of my disses were classics of snark, or so I imagined:
B-O-B = L-S-R
. As if every mean thing I wrote were some soaring haiku of wit.
SUL SUX.

At the end of the week that the slam book made its rounds, I got called to the principal’s office. I sat across from his gray metal desk in a sweat while he asked me if, in my position as the school president and the newspaper editor, I could put a stop to cruel, mean-spirited things like this. Maybe I could write an editorial. Or I could give a speech at the next pep rally. He was genuinely distressed and disappointed that “some people” could turn against their fellow students like wild animals and display such a lack of respect and regard for common decency. As he paged through the spiral-bound notebook, shaking his head, he talked about how some of these insults and digs might stick with the victims for the rest of their lives.

Since we had each created a symbol to represent our names, he didn’t know I had taken part. Was I ashamed that I wrote in the slam book? Yes, but that shame came much later. When I sat there in his office, I didn’t feel so much remorse as acute terror that I would be busted. I was more worried about getting in trouble than I was about inflicting lasting damage on anyone’s psyche.

The Dalai Lama said, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” And Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” But I know that when you’re scoring points for epic put-downs and clever repartee, it’s hard to remember to be kind. When you’re in the passenger seat and the driver, aka your best friend, rolls up the windows because
that
girl starts walking toward the car—that mousy chick with the bad skin, who’s maybe hoping just to say “Hi” to you because you’ve got everything and you’re so pretty, it’s so easy to forget. It’s much easier to remember that you have a reputation to preserve, and you sure don’t want to get stuck with this loser—be nice for two seconds, and she’ll be inviting you to the movies, just watch. Easiest of all to make a point of locking the windows and doors and shouting “Let’s get out of here!” instead of giving zit-chick a wave—a place in the sun, two seconds of your time.

My letter writer sounded just as sad and confused as anyone who’s ever been picked on. And just as powerless. The center of attention, the reigning queen of school, and she had a slam-book-style secret. She didn’t want the power to hurt.

The Dalai Lama also said, “If you want to be happy, practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.” I told that queen bee to start forgiving herself, first and foremost. Over time, the bully inside her will lose its favorite target. And then she’ll get her real power back.