Dear Bully (13 page)

It started off simple: sprint a few laps around the park, go buy us gum at the candy store, hang upside down from the monkey bars for five minutes, anything we could think of to amuse ourselves.

On all counts, Sam eagerly did what we told him to do.

And on all counts I was glad it wasn’t me.

“The last test is on the tennis courts,” I said.

“You sure every one of you had to do all these things?” Sam asked skeptically.

“Of course,” I lied. I unlatched the heavy gate and led Sam to the net.

My mind scrambled to think of something that would give the other kids a good laugh. “I’m going to blindfold you and you have to find your way out.”

I figured watching Sam bumble around on the green concrete would be pretty funny. Maybe he’d even trip over the net.

“That’s lame,” he said.

“I told you it was easy.”

Sam smiled. His crooked teeth spread his lips apart. His wavy hair stuck to his forehead in sweaty swirls. He was such an easy target, so odd-looking, so gullible. It was no wonder most of the fifth graders picked on the kid.

I felt a pang of guilt.

But it was only a pang.

The rest of me felt relieved it wasn’t me going through this fake initiation.

“What are you going to blindfold me with?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know.” I patted my pockets. “Do you have anything?”

“I could put my hoodie on backward,” he offered. “You know, so the hood covers my face.”

“Great idea.”

Sam pulled his arms out of the sleeves and turned his sweatshirt around. Then he flipped his hood up over his face. “I’m totally blind!” he joked as he flailed his arms around dramatically. I could hear the smile in his voice.

The other guys cheered from across the park.

Something fluttered in my chest. Was it fear? Excitement? Maybe it was something else. What I knew was that it was the first time I’d felt in control in a while. I had been struggling for friends ever since I moved here in third grade. Amusing the kids at the park, getting on their good side, seemed an excellent way to do it.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll just turn you around a few times . . .”

Sam held out his arms so I could spin him more easily.

I glanced at the other kids. Ricky gave me a thumbs-up.

When I figured Sam was dizzy enough, I let him go. He spun around a few extra times for good measure. By the time I slipped out of the tennis court, Sam was staggering about, groping for anything to help him regain his bearings. He stumbled to the edge of the court and leaned a shoulder against the fence. For a moment I was both afraid and amused that he might throw up inside his own hood.

Probably just playing it up to make us laugh,
I thought.

That’s when Mark pushed past me onto the court and held Sam against the fence. Ricky pulled the strings of Sam’s hoodie through the bars and yanked them tight so Sam’s head was snug against the metal. Then he tied a triple knot. Sam cried out but Mark and Ricky dashed away. I looked for Glen and Gary, but the twins were already gone, having hoisted Sam’s new ten-speed high into the branches of a nearby tree. Everyone else was running, too.

“Let’s go!” someone called to me.

I watched Sam struggle to loosen the drawstrings of his sweatshirt. His skinny legs kicked at the air. His fingers clawed at the back of his head.

“Someone untie me!” he shouted between sobs. “I can’t reach the knot through the fence!”

I hesitated. Even with my short nails, I knew I could get the knot loose.

I heard the laughter fade toward Ricky’s house.

“Come on, Luper!” someone else yelled. “Follow us!”

I followed.

The cracked sidewalk passed easily under my feet. I knew the way to Ricky’s. It was backed up to the train tracks on Hawthorne Avenue. I passed it every day on my way home from school, saw them eating ice pops on the front stoop out of the corner of my eye. I never dared to look up after the one time Mark chucked his blue raspberry Freezee at me.

Maybe we’ll have ice pops when we get there. Maybe those guys will let me hang out with them on the front stoop.

A heavy lump rose in my chest.

I slowed.

Maybe they won’t pick on me anymore . . .

I stopped.

I heard Sam’s muffled cries behind me.

I turned around . . .

. . . and headed back to the park.

Even with my short nails, I knew I could get the knot loose.

Thank You, Friends

The Alphabet
by Laura Kasischke

A.
I blamed the alphabet that the last name of the boy who hated me started with a letter so close to the letter that started mine. The ruthless fact of that. The depth and relentlessness of his random-seeming hatred. And he would be sitting right behind me in seventh-grade homeroom for the rest of my life. It made me want to die.

B.
“Because he’s jealous of you?” my mother offered (so kind, so wrong) when I asked what could possibly have made this boy hate me so, so much. “Maybe you have something he wishes he had?”

C.
Could my mother not see that I was no one a boy like this would be jealous of? My hair. My skin. My clothes. The house we lived in. The car my father drove.

D.
“Don’t raise your hand,” he whispered into my neck as I was just about to answer a question.

E.
“Everybody hates your goody-goody ‘I know the answer, I know the answer.’”

F.
Forgotten, over the years, until I remember it for you: The emptiness inside me every morning as I sat down at that desk. If he was already in his seat, I had to endure whatever he would say that day about my hair, my skin, my clothes, the house we lived in, the car my father drove. If he wasn’t there yet, I would keep my eyes on the book in front of me and wait. Some mornings, a mist of spit (he was so good at this, keeping anyone from seeing it) from above me. Some mornings, nothing, which meant—

G.
“Get ready.”

H.
The hallway. There, the teachers would see nothing.

I.
I hurried. To the next class. To my locker. To the bathroom. But when I stepped out, there he was. He liked to kick the books out of my arms. An explosion of them around me, and me on the floor. Me, trying to gather them back up as he kicked them out of reach.

J.
Jar. It was for science. We’d had to catch moths and grasshoppers and whatever else we could, bring them to class in a glass jar with holes poked in the lid. I had that jar in my hands and was hurrying, almost there, and then he was also there, and the jar was smashing on the floor around me. The billion pieces of that, and the living creatures fluttering, hopping, crawling, some escaping, some dying.

K.
The first letter of my last name.

L.
The first letter of his last name.

M.
My mother pointed out an article in the newspaper about this boy’s sister. She had been paralyzed in a car accident the year before. A lawsuit. A photograph of this girl in a wheelchair. Her sad expression. Her twisted hands in her lap. This boy’s house behind her. It was a mansion, but all the curtains were pulled closed.

N.
No one noticed who it was who might have torn my homework in half that morning and thrown it on the floor when I’d gotten up to go to the office. They’d called me down to pick up my homework from the day before, which had disappeared and been found wadded up in a trash can.

O.
“Oh, maybe he likes you. Maybe he’s trying to get your attention.”

P.
“Piss,” he said. “Why do you always stink like piss? Is it because you live in that shitty little house?” At home, I smelled all my clothes, my underarms. I asked my mother to smell my hair. I bought soap and shampoo and feminine hygiene products. He never said it again, but I walked through the world smelling myself smelling like piss. I tried not to stand too close to the boy I liked. My best friend smelled me every day and insisted (such a good friend) that I smelled like violets.

Q.
“Quit paying so much attention, and he’ll quit picking on you,” said the one teacher I ever told. “Fuck her,” my best friend said when I relayed this information. “How do you not pay attention when someone kicks the books out of your hands?” We laughed long and hard about that. We acted out the scenario: Me, walking happily through the hallways with an armload of books, whistling a tune. Him, stomping toward me, the little two-step run-and-kick he had perfected, and the books in the air while I just stood there pretending nothing had happened. The books landed on my head, and I stood there, smiling, and said, “Hi, Tom! How are you this morning?”

R.
“Rat head,” he called me, and stuck a wad of gum in my hair.

S.
She was the first person I thought to call, to tell. Thirty-five years later, separated now by hundreds of miles, living in a world we could never have imagined. Husbands, children, pets, houses, neighbors who liked us, colleagues who listened to our opinions politely. Whole decades had passed in this world, the real one, in which people were either kind or, at worst, indifferent. When I sat down in a chair, I never considered who might be sitting behind me. For more than a quarter of a century I had not once cringed and looked behind me, and had I really even thought of him in all that time?

Maybe a little. Maybe I told the story to entertain my husband or one of the kids. A story of this awful boy who kicked a jar of grasshoppers out of my hands. Who stuck a wad of gum in my hair. I’d tell it, and it was funny. Even to me. These things had happened to another girl—one so afraid of a boy in her homeroom that she went home every day and smelled her clothes. Who assumed she always would. Who believed that seventh-grade homeroom would last forever. Who blamed the unchangeable alphabet—cold and distant and as out of her control as the cosmos.

Over. That other forever was over and had only been called up again that afternoon in front of the computer when his much-older face emerged from the void in which I’d left it—with an invitation. To be friends. (The internet: it hadn’t been invented yet, or what an added tool it would have been, back then, for him to torture me with!) I thought, briefly, I should be upset, but found myself laughing instead and dialing the number of my old friend.

“Who? Tell me.”

T.
“Tom L.”

U.
“Unbelievable. What did you do?” “Nothing.” “What will you do?” “I’m still thinking about that.” “Maybe he’s going to apologize. Or maybe he’s not done bullying you yet.” “Oh, yes he is,” I said.

V.
“Life is very strange,” she said. “Very, very strange. Who would ever have imagined?”

W.
“Why me?” I asked, as if there might be an answer to that question after all this time. We laughed.

X.
“Exactly,” she said.

Y.
“You can’t take it personally,” my mother said, wiping the tears off my cheeks, my chin, my neck with her soft hand. (But I wanted to die. But I wanted to die. I remember so little, but I remember clearly: Because of him, I wanted to die.) “If you weren’t there to bully, it would just be someone else. You’re going to be stronger and happier after you live through this, I promise you.”

Z.
How could she have been so wrong? (So wrong. So kind.) How could she have been so right? All the years and friends and family and the sorrows and the strength I would need and the laughter. On the other side of that forever was the future, and it was so much better, and all I needed to do was to keep on living to get to it.

They Made Me Do It and I’m Sorry
by Cecil Castellucci

ILLUSTRATED BY LISE BERNIER