Lights out.
I was fourteen. I was a freshman.
My brother found me before it was too late. He called my mother; my mother called the doctor—they didn’t feed me charcoal; they fed me mustard until I threw up. But we never, ever talked about why I ate those pills.
But I’m talking about it now. Twenty years after my attempt, I realize it’s still happening everywhere, and everywhere people keep wondering how this happens.
Here’s the answer: learning to fit in, learning to get along, ignoring it, and being the better person don’t work.
Asking victims to save themselves doesn’t work. People need to intervene. They need to give up on disbelief, on stupid, gossamer lies—oh, it’s not that bad, you’ll survive, high school is only four years.
They need to start listening. They need to hear us say: It’s that bad. Four years is too long. It has to stop. Putting faith in the idea that it will make a difference—we’re all sharing our bullying stories. This one is mine.
I hope it’ll be a light.
The Soundtrack to My Survival
by Stephanie Kuehnert
In the morning I sit on my front steps and tighten the laces of my Rollerblades. I do this carefully because in the afternoon I won’t have time to make adjustments. As soon as camp ends, I’ll have to slip into them and skate for my life.
The thought makes me queasy, so I pop a tape into my Walkman: Faith No More’s The Real Thing, side A.
I am freshly turned thirteen and in love with Mike Patton, the lead singer. He has long brown hair like mine and when he head bangs in his music videos, you can see that his skull is shaved underneath.
I nod my head in time with the driving guitar riff, slap the side of my peach and gray skates, and push off. It takes four songs to get to my junior high.
As my hair blows out behind me, snarling in the wind, I decide to shave the underside of my head, too. I’m sick of the way it knots up no matter how much I brush it, and it’s too hot to have long, thick hair clinging to your neck.
Especially when being chased by a pack of girls who have nicer Rollerblades and longer limbs.
“You want it all, but you can’t have it,” Mike Patton croons into my ears—to me it is crooning, others might view it as shouting. In the video for this song, he stomps around, swinging his hair and glaring intensely at the camera. I don’t just love Mike Patton because he’s one of the hottest guys on MTV. He knows how I feel.
I wanted a torment-free summer. Last year I was still trying to fit in with Liza/Brooke/Dani, the three-headed popular-girl beast from grade school, who accidentally-on-purpose burned my forehead with a curling iron. I’d flinched and that was it: my legs tangled in the hoops they made me jump through once again. When we got to junior high, I gave up and they sprouted new heads—boy and girl heads.
The girl heads shouted, “Freak!” in the hallways because I wore Converse sneakers instead of Keds. In gym class, the boy heads told me that I looked like the guy from the Black Crowes—ugly, flat-chested, and greasy-haired. I hate that band. To get their songs and the beast voices out of my head, I blasted Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, side B, Courtney Love shrieking, “Is she pretty on the inside? Is she pretty from the back?”
Summer was supposed to be my time to shine at the theater camp open to students from both of my town’s junior highs. Since the Liza/Brooke/Dani beast wasn’t there, I actually tried out and got a role in Grease instead of hiding behind the scenes on stage crew.
I hadn’t known that the beast from Emerson, the other junior high, would be worse.
I arrive at camp with the angry “Surprise! You’re Dead!” blaring in my ears. The drums rat-tat-tat-tat like machine-gun fire and Mike Patton screams about torturing someone who wronged him. For a moment I feel strong enough to stand up to anyone, but then I meet the blue eyes of Rachel, the Barbie doll who leads the Emerson girl beast. I scurry inside and try to enjoy the day, rehearsing my beloved Grease songs and forcing smiles at the few cast mates who don’t hate me.
I eat lunch with my stage crew friends and go home with one of them after camp. Mia has Rollerblades, too. I warn her that last week Rachel and up to six other girls chased me home every day. Mia believes that since there are two of us, they’ll leave us alone, but I’m prepared.
My Rollerblades are already laced and I have a tape in my Walkman: the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, side A. I saw an old live video of them on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Johnny Rotten is not pretty like Mike Patton, but his snarl makes up for that. When I was in second grade and intimidated by the teacher of my gifted class, my mother told me to “keep a stiff upper lip.”
Stiff upper lip, I always thought while suffering at the hands of the Liza/Brooke/Dani beast. Now that I’ve discovered Johnny Rotten, I think, Snarled upper lip.
Rachel leads a pack of four cackling girls after Mia and me. They all have shampoo commercial hair and curves like high school cheerleaders. I look like a third grader by comparison, but at least I’m fast and so is the music that keeps me moving. Instead of worrying about what will happen if they yank me to a stop with their manicured claws, I picture the kids in the Sex Pistols video slam dancing in big, black boots and the safety pins shoved through Johnny Rotten’s ear. I can barely understand his lyrics because his rage is even thicker than his British accent, but regardless, I think Johnny might understand me even better than Mike Patton does.
“Wow, Steph,” Mia says breathlessly as we clomp through her front door on our skates. “Those girls really hate you. You should have just done stage crew.”
I’ve already explained that my intrusion into the pretty, popular girl territory of acting isn’t the only reason Rachel hates me. She thinks she’s sticking up for a friend of hers who I had a disagreement with last year. She has no interest in my side of the story. The petty argument is grounds for making my summer a living hell.
Rachel and her cohorts twirl in delicate circles on the sidewalk in front of Mia’s house. They catch sight of my pale, sweaty face in the window and laugh before skating off.
I carefully wind the cord of my headphones around my Walkman, still thinking about Johnny Rotten.
I’ve decided that I will get big, black boots and wear safety pins as earrings.
I will learn how to snarl.
If Mean Froze
by Carrie Jones
It is recess and all my friends rush out to play
Freeze tag. I am always brilliant at standing still
As Scott Quinn, Jackie Shriver rush past me—one,
Two, three—until a hand reaches out to tag me into motion
Again, but this day I have to talk to Mr. Q,
My English teacher. A too-good girl, I never get
In trouble, but Mr. Q doesn’t like me, never picks
My stories to read, never picks me to talk
If my hand is raised. He cringes when I speak. Every time
My mouth opens, he cringes. Everyone whispers
About it. Whatever he wants, I know it can’t be good.
Not me alone with him and his porn star mustache and talk radio voice.
My dad has just died. My step-uncle has just touched me.
I am not prepared for even the smallest of blows, but there
He is—an earthquake of a man, always rumbling, always ready
To tremor my life into something that’s just rubble.
“You are here because of your s’s,” he says.
My s’s . . . My s’s . . . My . . . I pick at a hangnail, shift
My weight, look out the window at Jackie running
From Paul Freitzel, laughing . . . laughing . . . happy . . .
Back in first grade, I refused to talk because everyone laughed at my voice, at those s’s that slurred around in my mouth and refused to be still, those hopeless, moving things. Jayed Jamison imitated me to giggles, calling me Carrie Barnyard, St. Bernard, pulling my hair, chasing me at recess, knocking me down so my tongue tast
ed dirt and pine needles invaded my mouth and then he’d start it all over again, hissing s words in my ear, sss-sausage, sssss-snake, shshshs-shiver, all those sloshy s’s. Everybody just watched. Everybody took tag turns mocking my voice so
I stopped talking. I stopped
Moving my tongue. I gave
Away my lunch, my snacks
Until people loved me too much
To be mean. And slowly
—what an s word—
I started moving again, whispering
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.
Abuse
by Lucienne Diver
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. Late
r 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.”
Dear Bully Page 6