Megan Hall - Dear Bully

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.