Authors: Megan Kelley Hall
Words and thought forward
While Jayed stayed stuck in first grade.
We moved on to second and cursive writing,
Haikus, and Mrs. Snearson who wore fatigues.
I thought it was over.
This seventh-grade recess, Mr. Q ends all that.
He says, “If you don’t fix your ridiculous voice,
You will never make anything of yourself. You will be a loser
Forever, Carrie. No one wants to love a girl that sounds like you.
No one wants to hire a girl like you. Don’t you want
A life?” He perches on his desk and I stare at too-tight chinos
And a porn mustache and manage to say, “But . . .”
He cringes, lifts a finger, stops my words.
“You will never be anything with a voice like yours,” he says.
“Think about it.” I have thought about it for six years of speech
Therapy, one year of teasing, bullying, and I do not need to think
Anymore, but I do as he lets me go. I run down the linoleum hall
Thinking about it, wondering what happened to being safe, what happened
To being able to protect my sloppy tongue with friends. And I wonder
What if mean was frozen in a game of tag and nobody ever touched
Its fingers to let it go run free and it just had to stay there alone forever.
I write humor because I’m not comfortable with emotion. When this anthology was proposed, I was sure I wouldn’t have anything to contribute. But as my stomach proceeded to eat itself alive and my heart to break for those kids who were bullied to the point where they felt the only way out was death, I realized I was wrong. I did have a story to tell. Sadly, there’s nothing at all funny about it.
I was molested as a child. Wait for it, I promise there’s relevance or there’s no way I would put this out there to the world. The man was a neighbor and someone who worked with my father. I was about seven. I was/still am asthmatic. The first time it happened, I was out for a bike ride through the woods with friends and had to stop because my asthma had kicked up, and they left me behind. Prey.
For years I never told anyone. Molesters are master manipulators. They try to make their victims complicit in their silence, telling them their parents will be angry or won’t believe them or giving them terrible options of “I could do this or this” and making it seem like a choice. For years, I felt terrible guilt. For years, I prayed to God every night to forgive me, because I was sure it was all my fault in some way. He never answered.
It wasn’t until I was around twelve that my mother had “the talk” with my sister and me about dangers, how we could tell her everything. . . . I was so upset that I excused myself, went off to my room, and wrote her a note (I’ve always escaped through writing). I’d transferred my anger. I still hadn’t forgiven myself, but now I was angry at her, at my father, at everyone for not telling me sooner how to protect myself and that
I could have told
, which is something I want
everyone
to know. So I’m saying it in case your parents don’t.
To say that she was upset would be an understatement. How she handled it . . . I can’t say that I blame her or that she did anything wrong, but it made things very difficult for me. My mother called all the mothers on the block and told them so that they could watch out for the man. Unfortunately, she also told them what had happened to me, and they told their kids. I don’t blame them, either—they were trying to protect their children—but the result was that everyone in the neighborhood knew. They knew what had happened; they knew the button to push to get a rise out of me. (In case you’re wondering, my father, with whom I’d always had a tumultuous relationship, called the man and threatened that if he ever came near me again, my father would make sure he lost everything. That was the day I started loving him.)
Now, I’d always been a geek, a brain, asthmatic, rail thin, always snuffling from allergies and out of school for my health issues as much as I was in. In short, there was no dearth of material to tease me about, but I’d always escaped into books, sometimes three a day. I wasn’t terribly concerned about playing outside anymore (wonder why) or what people thought of me there. But
now
the kids had a surefire taunt, something I couldn’t ignore, couldn’t
not
react to.
And that led to the scariest moment of my life—the day I swung an aluminum bat at some boy’s head for twisting the knife about my abuse. That day, I could have done irreparable harm to another human being. I could have killed. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t decide to swing the bat. It was already in my hand, and then it was in motion. I’d never before experienced the “vision gone red with rage” thing I read about in books, but that was exactly what happened. If my vision hadn’t cleared and I hadn’t seen his face at that very last second, stricken with absolute terror, there’s no telling what would have happened. I managed to pull the blow, and he lived to tell about the experience . . . and get me into all the trouble I deserved. But I was a hair’s breadth away from murder. I’m not pulling the punch now, here. Sometimes it’s better to tell.
I wish it went without saying that bullying is horrible and dangerous, for the perpetrator as well as the victim. The target can just as easily turn his or her rage outward as inward. If bullies won’t stop for the sheer humanity of it, I hope they’ll stop for the simple drive for self-preservation. To this day, I’m horrified by what I almost did. If I hadn’t pulled my swing, I’d have had to live with what I did forever. The bully would have had to live . . . or die . . . with the consequences.
I didn’t grow up in a family comfortable with emotion. I’ll never forget getting into trouble when I cried or having my father send me to my room once with a book called, I believe,
The Erroneous Zones,
which postulated that emotions were societal constructs and that the reason we felt sorrow, for example, when our grandmothers died was that that was what was expected. I think that day with the bat, I started to accept, not that emotions didn’t exist, but that they were dangerous things. That was the day I started to shut down.
It hampered my relationships and my writing for many years. Maybe still. It’s hard to emotionally invest your reader when you refuse to open yourself to emotion to begin with. But maybe, just maybe, I’m getting better. Maybe opening the floodgates with this might even help me on the road to recovery.
The Boy Who Won’t Leave Me Alone
by A. S. King
It’s him again. This time he’s grabbed me right between my legs from behind and I feel his fingernail pinch against my pelvic bone as I snap my legs shut. My whole face is hot and I can’t hear anything but white noise. I’m frozen—like always. My brain is kicking the shit out of him right there on the linoleum math-wing floor, but my body is completely still, like the way things must feel after a bomb explodes.
It’s gone on for six months now—ever since he told his whole team I was a lesbian. Six months since they all started sniggering and grinning at me all the time. Threatening smiles. Sickening laughter. All because I wouldn’t kiss him. “What are you—some sort of dyke?” he’d asked, and then he’d listed my dyke traits: no makeup, short hair, Chuck Taylors, men’s Levi’s. Plays sports. I thought we were friends. I thought he understood I just didn’t want to kiss him.
The first time it happened, I was at my locker. He came up behind me, grabbed my breast, and whispered, “I can turn you back.” It was fast—maybe three seconds—and he was gone. Later I swear I could still feel his hand there, like a ghost of what happened. It haunted me for days.
The second time we were in gym playing volleyball and he smacked my ass as if to say “good play,” but he did it three times, and he wasn’t smacking anyone else’s ass. Two gym teachers were there. Neither of them said anything. When I told him to stop, he just said, “Whoa. Didn’t know you were the sensitive type.”
The boy likes to breathe into my ear, and sometimes he licks it if I don’t flinch fast enough. Last week he pinned me against the hallway wall and stared me down until I pushed him away. A teacher poked her head out from her classroom and he put his hands up, smiled, and said, “Hey! Only kidding. We’re friends, right?” On his way down the hall past me, he whispered, “One night with me would cure you.”
I’m not a lesbian, you know. I mean, I don’t think I am. I’ve never been into a girl and I did have a boyfriend—before all this started. But right now I can’t see the attraction to guys at all. Though it’s probably not a great time to ask.
Sometimes I daydream that the next time he touches me, I’ll dribble him down the court and dunk his ugly head into the hoop. But I never do anything. Truth be told, I’m still surprised every time. I think that’s why I’ve let it go on so long. I guess I hope one day he’ll just get bored and stop, because I don’t want to have to tell anyone. It’s embarrassing. It’s stupid. It would just cause more rumors. And seriously, I know what they’d say. I’ve heard it all before.
Boys being boys.
Small towns and small minds.
Maybe if you weren’t so confident, boys wouldn’t want to cut you down a peg.
Sure, it’s the eighties and girls can complain about these things. Doesn’t mean anyone will listen.
At lunch, I sit with my friends. Some of them are gay—who cares? Two girls approach us while we’re eating and one of them pulls out a Bible and reads.
“Leviticus chapter twenty, verse thirteen. If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
When they’re done, they stand there smirking at us. What are we supposed to say to that? L. looks up and claps. S. asks if they want to take a bow now so Jesus can see them. W. probably says something reasonable. I don’t say anything because I define
detestable
in a whole different way.
A few weeks later, it’s the first day of basketball practice. I’m excited because I live for basketball and I’ve been waiting for the season to start. In last period social studies, the classroom phone rings and the teacher answers it and tells me to go down to the office.
When I get there, the 1960s crew-cut principal opens his office door and invites me in with a look of stern disappointment. There is a teacher sitting in one of the two chairs in front of the desk, and she gives me a look like she hates me down to my spine.
“Look,” the principal says. “I’ve heard you’re a lesbian and I don’t have any feelings about that one way or the other. But Mrs. X. and I have a problem and I think you know what it is.”
My face goes red and the white noise starts in my ears. I shake my head to indicate that I have no idea what they’re talking about. So they tell me.
One of the Bible readers’ mothers has called and complained that not only does her daughter have to go to school with lesbians but she also heard that Mrs. X. is a lesbian who once dated my sister.
Crew cut says, “This is a serious problem for Mrs. X. and you need to tell us if you started this horrible rumor.”
I swear adults are the dumbest people alive. I get lied about, groped, and read to from the Bible and nobody blinks a stupid little eyelid. But somebody makes up a story about my long-graduated sister in a fit of hysterical homophobia and now it’s my problem. I have no idea what to say. They’re just sitting here looking at me and I am deaf from the pounding explosions in my head.
Too many things wrong with this to compute. Too many things. I wish I could disappear. Run away. Start over.
My emotion center goes completely cold so I don’t cry—and once I’m safe inside my bomb shelter, I finally speak.
I tell them yes, it’s common knowledge my sister is a lesbian. I tell them I’m not a lesbian, but even if I was, why would I spread a rumor about my own sister? I tell them the only people who pass rumors like this one are cowardly lying jerks. Like the boy. The boy who won’t leave me alone.
I don’t tell them about him, though.
Why would I?
break my heart
by Megan Kelley Hall
Middle school. Watching as the other girls picked on those they felt were different. The ones they thought didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to be me. I was quiet. I didn’t draw attention. I looked but didn’t speak.
I watched, safe and high up from the library windows, as they pushed, they taunted, they mocked one another at recess. Every day they’d pick someone new. It wasn’t going to be me. My heart beating so fast I could feel it trying to explode inside. “You have a big heart,” my mother said to me. “That’s why you feel so much when others are mean.”
High school. My heart found a new purpose. To love, to be open, to have crushes. I guarded mine. Boys were reckless with my friends’ hearts. Girls, the ones who are supposed to be your friends, your defenders against these evil boys—the ones we all secretly loved and wanted to love us back—could cut you down so fast that you didn’t even see it coming. Again, I watched as girls fought over these boys. Fought so that they could be loved back. Tricked one another, rolled their eyes, mocked, belittled, bullied their own friends. All because of their love for the boys—the ones who promised them the world for a night alone by the beach. The girls just wanted to be loved. The boys wanted something else. Jealous girls found a way to use this as ammunition in the high school battlefield. Rumors swirled.
She’s a slut
.
She’s desperate. She’s a lesbian.
She had an abortion. He’s using her. She was with two guys last night.
That wasn’t going to be me. I was quiet. I watched. I was silent. If I could have disappeared into the walls of the high school, I would have. Every day, someone’s heart would be ripped out and put on display, mocked, tormented, destroyed. I guarded mine. I learned that while boys could break hearts, girls could cut them open.