Authors: Megan Kelley Hall
Dear Bully (19 page)
I picked up my daughter from school the other day and she reported with wide eyes that one of her friends confided in her that she was afraid to walk home because a bully would be waiting to beat her up. My daughter was understandably very concerned—and fortunately, the incident did not actually end up happening. Still, after telling her that she should let a teacher know if her friend ever told her something like that again (I have no problem being the narc), I started to think about the bullying my daughter will surely face in the upcoming years.
She’s already one of those “smart kids,” having skipped a grade. Strike one. She wears glasses just like I did (though, I admit, hers are much thinner and cuter than mine ever were). Strike two. And guess who makes the skirts she loves to wear to school? My mother; the same woman who made my clothes in any pattern and color I wanted when I was little. Strike three. There will be teasing, there will be torment, and I suspect there will be nights of her crying on my lap the same way I did with my mom.
I hope she gets through it. I see a boldness in her that I never had, and that gives me hope. But you know what I hope most of all? That I can teach her to never stoop to their level. To never become a bully herself—even as an adult. I want her to be aware of when she is hurting other people. Because simply teaching her not to punch her classmates isn’t enough. I want to teach her to care and be tolerant. Because if you don’t learn that as a kid, you have a whole lifetime for that bullying streak to come to the surface.
Because it doesn’t end with high school. But maybe it can end with us.
Strangers on a Street
by Diana Rodriguez Wallach
A couple of years ago, while I was planning my wedding, I came face-to-face with the girl who destroyed my life in sixth grade. She stopped me on the street, sweet as candy, and asked how I was doing. She cooed over my engagement ring, inquired about where I was working, and asked how my parents were doing. Everything was smiles and hugs; she was thrilled to have “run into me.”
I’d like to tell you that I was happy to see her, too, that I was delighted she was doing great at her job, and that I was genuinely sincere when I wished her well with her own wedding plans. I know that was what I was supposed to be feeling. (It was what I said, after all. You know, the “right” thing, the “polite” thing.) But I didn’t mean a word of it. A little piece of me still hopes her hair falls out one day.
You see, this girl wasn’t just a mean girl. She wasn’t a queen bee or a Lindsay Lohan stereotype.
She was my best friend. My first friend in the entire world.
Until she dumped me.
We’d been best friends since second grade, five years (which, in adolescent years, is like five hundred), and I never saw the end coming. There was no big fight, no betrayal, no boy we were competing for, or any academic or athletic rivalries on the line.
One day we were best friends, spending our half day from school roller-skating in my basement (yes, we did that back then). The next day she was calling me on the phone telling me that she didn’t want to be my best friend anymore. The conversation lasted only seconds, and she never gave a reason. (Though, when you’re being dumped, is there ever a rationale that you’ll accept?)
Our friendship simply ended. And if that were the extent of what happened, I probably would have been devastated at the loss of her friendship, but I wouldn’t be writing this essay.
Unfortunately, Amanda’s
*
decision to cut me from her life ultimately set a chain of events in motion that ended with our “friends,” all beautiful, popular cheerleaders (yes, I was part of
that
group), launching a full-scale attack.
It lasted a week. Five school days.
That might not seem like a long time, but when you’re being chased from class to class by a mob of powerful girls screaming “Bitch! Skank! Loser!” loud enough for your four hundred classmates to hear, you can feel like you’re in a time-lapse horror movie.
And the worst part was I suffered in silence, utter isolation. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell my sister. I obviously didn’t have any friends to talk to about the situation. I didn’t even write it in my diary. It was as if the situation was too embarrassing, too painful, even to admit to myself in writing, so instead a four-month gap exists in my journal from that year.
Somehow I even managed to be publicly stoned every forty-one minutes, between every class period, without a single teacher noticing.
Well, wait, that isn’t entirely true.
Around day five, after successfully ignoring these girls, never sputtering a word in defense or shedding a tear in their presence, I finally broke. I couldn’t breathe, my chest was cracking from the pressure of their insults, and I entered my math class in sobs.
My teacher pulled me into the hall, demanding to know the problem, and while I didn’t want to rat (is there anything worse a twelve-year-old can do?), I needed to talk. So I confessed what I was going through, tears streaking my cheeks, nose running, until the teacher cut me off, a finger pointed in my face. “Diana, pull yourself together!” she snapped, then marched me back into her classroom.
Eventually, I found new friends, a new lunch table to sit at, and new bonds that have lasted to this day. Three of the bridesmaids at my wedding were friends I’ve had since middle or high school.
But the scars of that week have remained, and I don’t say this lightly.
As an adult, I can tell you that my relationships with women have been affected by that sixth-grade experience. As recently as a couple of years ago, I realized that I still get nervous when a friend doesn’t call me back (maybe she’s mad at me?) or when we heatedly disagree on social/political/family issues (what if we stop being friends over this?). It took me a while to identify where these extreme worries were coming from, why that sick pit in my stomach always jumped to the worst conclusion to even the most minor negative occurrence between me and a female friend.
And it is because when I was twelve years old, that was exactly what happened.
I lost my best friend over nothing. I didn’t do anything to her, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it—other than being an entirely different person, because it wasn’t an action of mine she was rejecting, it was
me.
She moved on to a “cooler” best friend. We never spoke again.
Somehow, until the day we graduated, we managed to be on the same sports teams, walk through the same halls, go to the same dances, and attend some of the same classes, and never share a word, never let our eyes meet. We were strangers; those five years of our lives never happened, like deleted memories. I was easily forgettable.
And then I saw her on the street. I was actually writing a book about bullying at the time (a book I’m still working on), and the memories of that ordeal were so fresh it was as if I had drawn her to me with my writing. I saw her twice more after that in the span of six months. She bought a house seven blocks from mine. Her husband joined my gym.
And I’d like to say that the universe brought her to me to learn some big lesson, but if that’s true, I’m not sure I absorbed it. Each time I saw her, I didn’t want to speak to her, I didn’t miraculously forget everything that happened, and I wasn’t happy to reminisce about the good ol’ days. But still I smiled, I nodded, I acted interested. That could not have been the lesson: to be inauthentic? But I also doubt the lesson was that I should have confronted her on the street with something that happened twenty years ago, either.
Maybe the lesson was to confront the fact that there is a name for what I went through at that time, a name I never used until now. I was
bullied
. And I survived it.
You might hate it when adults tell you this, but with two decades separating me from this experience, I can honestly say that the best revenge really is living well. I’m thrilled to go to class reunions now, because I know I’m not the same mousy person I was back then. I’m proud of who I turned out to be, because of and in spite of everything that happened to me growing up. Plus, I wrote a book about the ordeal, so maybe authors really do need to suffer for their art, maybe that’s why I so vividly remember what it was like to be a teenager, and maybe that’s why I write for young adults now.
So, to the teens who are reading this and are currently being bullied, I say: you will get through it, you will
not
forget it, it
is
a big deal, but hey, maybe one day you can turn it into a great novel. That’ll show ’em.
*
Names have been changed. Obviously. But I’m sure if “Amanda” were ever to read this, she’d know this essay is about her . . .
Objects in Mirror Are More Complex Than They Appear
by Lauren Oliver
I have a confession to make: I was not bullied in high school. I was not harassed, insulted, humiliated, or ostracized.
At various times, I was, however, the victim of rumors: there was the time when I was a sophomore and I hooked up with a popular junior in front of forty or so of my classmates on a dare; afterward, people shot me dirty looks for weeks, and whispers, snake hisses, followed me down the halls.
Then there was the time as a senior that photos of an (ahem)
intimate
nature made it into the hands of some sophomore boys and managed to circulate throughout almost the entire class before I was able to retrieve them.
But these were blips, minor traumas—not the seismic, permanent, and isolating ruptures so many teens experience during their high school years. For the most part, things were easy for me. I went to parties. I threw parties. I had friends, had boyfriends (many of them older), and if anything, was probably feared more than fearful: I wasn’t always very nice, I am ashamed to say.
Then who was I in high school? To answer that question is also to explain why I wanted to contribute to this anthology. Because there were unquestionably two different me’s in high school: there was the me as it was created by others, the me who could be comprehended in, and thus reduced to, a sum of facts and stories (Lauren:
smart, slutty, mean
).
Then there was the me as I understood—or, more accurately,
didn’t
understand—myself. And that me was far blurrier, far less easy to categorize. Angry, self-conscious; brave and also desperately insecure; fiercely loyal to my friends; both a partier and a bookworm; promiscuous and deeply ambivalent about sex. I was a soccer player and a smoker, a theater nerd and a lifeguard, a wild child and an impeccable student.
But that description is blurry and full of contradiction, and people have a very limited tolerance for contradiction; and so I remained Lauren:
smart, slutty, mean.
Humans have a long and not-so-illustrious history of dehumanizing people in order to dominate, subjugate, or otherwise abuse them—from the infamous three-fifths of a person compromise in the US Constitution to our colonizing ancestors’ determination that the Native Americans were
savages
to the trials at Salem in the 1600s, in which weird (or promiscuous) women were burned at the stake for being witches.
This is what happens in high school, too: We call people witches. We decide that they are too weird, too different. They are not us.
And then we burn them at the stake. We spread nasty rumors; we call them names; we alienate and ostracize them.
But my point is that the impulses that facilitate this kind of abuse are the same that had me labeled “mean” or, at least briefly, “a slut”; these are the same impulses that also lead us to assign labels like “jock,” “theater nerd,” “video-game geek”: impulses to categorize, to box, to hold desperately to our fragile identities by saying clearly what we are
not
. After all, it has always been easier to understand what we like by virtue of what we don’t—anyone who has ever heard the phrase “I like all music except for country!” knows that.
In order to find some solution to the bullying problem, we’ll have to be more tolerant of ambiguity, subtlety, and strangeness not just in other people but in
ourselves
. It may be important to your identity that you are a soccer player, but it may be equally important that you can whistle the national anthem backward and make the world’s best spicy popcorn and do a wicked impression of Victoria Beckham. Schools, parents, and educational endeavors should encourage people not just to empathize but to discover and celebrate the weirdness in others and in ourselves. We need not just to think but to
live
outside the box. Weirdness is good. It keeps things interesting.
I’ll end this essay with a metaphor. Imagine a plate, compartmentalized. In one corner is a pile of plain cooked pasta, lumped together; in another is steamed asparagus; in yet another is a pile of chopped basil; lastly, there is a small pile of feta cheese. The plate is orderly, clean-looking. It is also boring and unappetizing.
But shake things up a little, mix all the ingredients together . . . and, my friends, the miraculous will occur.
I feel I am still very young in many ways, but in the past ten years, since graduating from high school, I have learned several very valuable lessons. I can say with confidence that being kind and generous will make you happier than being mean and withholding; that the only thing worth striving for is individuality; and that celebrating people’s differences is, paradoxically, the best way to bring people together.
Being on top is cool
especially after working our way up from the bottom
But being on top is nothing
if you’re gonna use it