On the way to the station, I let Tayla nuzzle her head into my shoulder as I thought about all the times Mum had just been a ‘mum’. I thought about how she used to leave little presents on our beds for us to find after school. I thought about how she called us ‘sweet pea’ and ‘darling’ and would make us amazing cakes on our birthdays. I thought about the time she gave me a special book as a surprise and wrote ‘Darling Rosanna’ in the front, and how I still considered it the most precious thing I owned. I thought about how she used to stroke my hair when I was sick and the way she taught me to tie my shoes. I thought about how nothing felt as warm or as safe as a hug from her. I looked down at Tayla and thought about how, no matter what, Mum would always be the only person who felt like home to any of us, and how torturous it was to know that the feeling was never around for long. That for each special memory, for each special hug, there were just as many sad and lonely moments when she hadn’t come through. She was our only home, and we never knew if she was going to be there. And we were all just so tired.
As soon as Pam’s money ran out, Mum decided she was no longer a lesbian and wanted us back. But it was too late. After that night, none of us would ever live with Mum again. Rhiannon moved back in with her boyfriend in Lawson, and would go on to work her arse off as a single mother of two kids. Isabella had already disappeared with her dad, and wouldn’t come back into our lives until she was a teenager. Tayla and I stayed with our wealthy uncle for a few days, during which time he decided to keep me and not her. I was sent to a fancy boarding school, and Tayla was left to fend for herself in the foster system. She would languish there until, at sixteen, she was old enough to strike out on her own. I’ve never forgiven myself for not insisting that we stay together. She was so little, and so alone. But my mum’s brother was a successful doctor, and he wanted to spend a lot of money on my education. He thought I was special, and I found that intoxicating.
You will try to fit in at a very exclusive private boarding school (and fail spectacularly).
Penis fantasies. When I was at the College, I started having a lot of penis fantasies. I thought about penises all the freaking time. I was a teen possessed, but with only two penises in particular – the (no doubt tiny) dicks of my bullies, Wayne and Keith. In a strange place and with no way to stop these two boys from torturing me, I began to have elaborate fantasies about horrible accidents in which their dicks would be destroyed. If you’d caught me daydreaming in class during that time, with a faraway look in my eyes and a peaceful smile on my face, it was probably because I was imagining the sounds of Wayne’s screams after a blender fell on his peen and switched on. I often thought about Keith getting dick leprosy, and having crusty bits of his foreskin fall to the floor through his pants while onstage in front of the whole school. It may sound extreme (‘may’? Hahahaha), but I spent three years being verbally hunted by those boys, and picturing the demise of their (again, no doubt tiny) dicks was often the only thing that got me through the day. That was life at one of the ‘best schools in the country’. That was the College.
I should have known I was out of place the minute I was inundated with a sea of pastel polo shirts. Polo shirts, high ponytails and rugby jerseys. It was like stepping into a photo shoot for a yacht catalogue, except I was the waitress serving the models coffee and I kept accidentally getting in the shot. I had very little idea what going to a private school actually involved (besides rich kids and fancy blazers), and when I first arrived at the College, I was still convinced it was going to change my life. I had no idea that I’d leave so broken, that I’d try to kill myself within just a few months. That those damn polo shirts would defeat me in the end.
After escaping the clutches of the crazy lesbian (which I suppose could describe my mum or her girlfriend at that stage), I was sent to live with my uncle Ben, who enrolled me in boarding school within a few weeks. I get that most people would consider that to be some kind of punishment, but I was over the damn moon. I had always been the ‘smart one’, the one ‘going places’, the one ‘who spent time transcribing sitcoms instead of going to parties’, and I felt like I was finally being recognised for it. I may not have ever been as cool as my sister (or ninety-five percent of kids my age) but at least now I was getting a fancy school for my fancy brain. And, given I was about to enter Year 10, I also couldn’t believe that for the first time in my life, I was going to spend the next three years living in one place. I wouldn’t have to move house depending on Mum’s boyfriends, or stay in sperm-coated caravans or throw all my stuff into boxes in under an hour – I was staying put for three whole years. And at a very snooty school on Sydney’s affluent North Shore, no less. The freckle-faced dweeb from Smurf Village had made it, bitches.
I was sure I was going to become best friends with some blueblood girl called Bitsy Carrington Hastings III, who was related to the Kennedys and spent her summers sailing and her winters skiing. Her family would consider me a Dickensian novelty, and eventually I would become their ward, marry Bitsy’s brother and wear boat shoes and polo shirts forever and ever. I basically thought boarding school was going to be like living in a movie version of a Kennedy family photo.
And parts of it were not far off. I was floored when I first saw the campus. I may have been to about seventeen schools by this point, but they had all been of the public or ‘public-with-Jesus’ variety, so I had no clue that private schools like the College actually existed outside of TV.
There’s no delicate way to put this: the College was fucking insane. The campus was so big it was filled with streets that had actual street names. There was an aquatic centre. A TV studio. Two theatres. An amphitheatre. An art centre and art gallery, with fully equipped photographic studio. About ten different sporting ovals that I didn’t really understand the difference between. A music centre. A massive gym. Computer labs with Macs as far as the eye could see. A library with fancy electric doors and elevators because it had three freaking levels. At my previous high school, there was one computer in the library connected to dial-up internet, and if you were lucky enough to book it for a twenty-minute slot, that was never enough time to download even three-quarters of that picture of the Backstreet Boys you wanted. You would just sit there, watching the image come in, bar by torturous bar, and just as it was about to reveal Nick Carter’s glorious face, a scary kid from Penrith would tell you to get the fuck up because it was her turn.
When my uncle took me shopping for my uniform (at a special store on campus that sold only the uniform, because that’s a thing at rich schools, apparently), everything I needed just to get dressed every day cost $2000. I nearly fell over. I was fairly certain that $2000 was more than my mum had paid for my entire education up until that point.
I had literally come from a school where some classrooms didn’t have enough chairs, to a school that had an aquatic centre and TV studio. I was in an alternate universe, the fabric of which was money and blazers.
The College had boarders and day students, so the boarding houses were tucked away in their own area. Girls were accepted to the school only from Year 10 onwards, so we had one boarding house, while the boys, in years 7–12, had about three or four. There was a huge dining hall where we all had meals together, and I remember thinking on the first night that it kind of reminded me of being in rehab, but that I should probably keep that little tidbit to myself. There were common areas where we could watch TV and hang out, not to mention the ridiculous grounds that were pretty much ours to roam.
I loved it. I was in actual heaven. I’d never experienced so much consistency in my entire life. I thrived on the routine and loved that I always knew dinner was going to be at 5.30 and bedtime at 10pm. I loved that someone came and knocked on my door and woke me up at 7.15 every day. I loved that I had classes to go to and places to be and everything was organised and nothing ever felt uncertain.
For about two weeks, I was so, so happy. I even started begging my uncle to buy me a polo shirt.
Then the bullyi
ng started.
As it turns out, the College was filled with a lot of very nice facilities, but it wasn’t filled with a lot of very nice kids. In fact, of all the schools I had attended in my life, the College – although supposedly the best of the best – was the only one filled with kids who were outright cruel to me, just for the sake of it. I had never really worried about starting over somewhere new before – I had been forced to be a chameleon my entire life, adapting to different situations and people and friends as they came my way. But nothing could have prepared me for that preppy hell on the North Shore.
It was just so different from anything I had ever experienced, and I couldn’t work out how to adapt. My hair was wrong. My clothes were tacky. I used a $3 Lip Smacker while the other girls were smothering their lips in $40 Lancôme Juicy Tubes. I used Impulse while they sprayed their bodies with Chanel. I had never been the cool girl, but I had always been able to at least find a place to slot into, a little corner where nobody would bother me. But at the College, it was like everywhere and everyone were out of my league. I couldn’t even find a blueblood girl called Bitsy to be my friend.
I was just too different, and it paralysed me. I was so shy that I could barely talk to some people. And I really struggled with the boys – since growing older, I’d never been friends with any boys, never had any brothers, and now I was living across a very manicured lawn from about seventy-five guys. That, combined with the fact that everything I knew about fashion and hair and pop culture and just being a teenager was apparently wrong, meant that I had no freaking idea how to behave.
I was a petrified former Houso kid, and like a group of very well dressed sharks, the private-school kids could smell my fear from a mile away.
Once the taunts began, they escalated pretty quickly. Keith and Wayne took charge of the mission to break me, and they’re the reason I cried myself to sleep for three years, where I would then dream about them losing their penises in a myriad of sickening and disturbing ways.
They were both boarders, and both jocks. They played rugby and cricket, which at North Shore private schools are basically considered religions. The boys who are good at them are treated like gods, and Keith and Wayne had decided I would be their sacrifice.
It was Keith who kicked things off, and to be honest, I was a little confused when it happened. I had never really been bullied before, and it took me a minute to process what was going on. I was walking across a courtyard, when all of a sudden I heard a boy’s voice yell, ‘Yuck!’ from one of the surrounding windows. I looked around, confused, thinking that surely that ridiculously intelligent barb wasn’t aimed at me. But there was no one else around, and the yeller can’t have been expressing his distaste at the courtyard, since it was filled with the kind of gorgeous gardens that can only come from charging fifty grand a year per kid. I kept walking, slightly perplexed and just wanting to get the hell out of there. Then, just in case I hadn’t got the message, the vocal assassin took aim again: ‘Hey Rosie! Yuck. Scabface.’ Ah. Scabface. That one was definitely aimed at me. I had started getting acne not long before I started at the College (a cruel gift from the universe, since my freckles had finally faded and I was actually growing into my looks). A group of boys erupted into laughter, and I looked up to see Keith staring down at me with the satisfied smile of someone who had just hit the bull’s eye of a target.
I was hunted from that point on. No matter where I went, there was always a vocal assassin waiting in the wings. And their ammunition never really changed. It was always ‘yuck’ or ‘Scabface’ or the particularly well thought out ‘Rosie’s gross’.
When Keith, who had proudly taken the lead in shaping my misery up until that point, left the boarding house to become a day boy, he passed the baton to Wayne. I always wondered whether there was an official change-over ceremony. Was I bequeathed to Wayne like a gift? Did Keith, sad to think that he was leaving his opportunity to torture behind, decide that he couldn’t let it go to waste? I’d say it probably had more to do with the fact that Keith was a sporting hero and Wayne wanted to follow his lead by impressing him. I had a kitten once who used to kill mice and then line them up proudly next to my bed, desperate for my approval, and I think in my bullying situation, Wayne was the kitten and Keith his owner. Oh, and they both had deformed ball sacks.
The problem with Wayne was he had an actual, sadistic mean streak. Keith was just a sports bogan who had hunted me as a hobby, for laughs. With Wayne, it seemed to go deeper than that. He came after me with a vengeance, and seemed to take real pleasure in hurting me. And all the boys followed his lead, either by participating or being too scared to talk to me, lest they also become a target. The vocal assassinations continued. I’d be laughed at as I walked by. I’d be taunted in the dining hall, on the way to class, in the library. I’d be playing sport, and he would come and watch on the sidelines just so he could yell things at me. I started to become incredibly socially anxious. I was scared to walk to class. I was scared to walk to the shops. I was always convinced Wayne or one of his minions would be just around the next corner. I was being hunted, and it was making me a shell of a person. It was exhausting.
I became one of those weird kids who pretend to be sick all the time so they can go to the nurse. And of course, at the College, ‘going to the nurse’ meant going to a fully equipped six-bed clinic with television, a private bathroom and a cupboard filled with drugs. I quickly figured out where the vitamin C was, and used that as my excuse to visit, usually at recess or lunch when I was too scared to go outside. I invented all kinds of ailments that could only be cured with that little orange-flavoured tablet. Sister Jones, the nurse, took pity on me and often let me use the clinic as a sanctuary, but I hated that I needed a sanctuary in the place that was meant to be my sanctuary in the first place.
I started to complain about Wayne from pretty early on. The College was very proud of its ‘no-tolerance’ stance on bullying, and had very patronising ‘No Put-Downs’ signs hanging in every classroom. I figured if I said something, Wayne would be punished and the bullying would stop.
The first time I went to the boys’ boarding master and told him what was going on, he just laughed and said, ‘Oh mate, he probably just has a crush on you.’ I must have stared back at him with a look that sat somewhere between ‘Are you fucking serious?’ and ‘Please step back before I punch your face’, because he promised that he would ‘look into it’.
A few days later, someone had taken the ‘No Put-Downs’ sign in one of the boarders’ classrooms and written ‘Except Scabface’ underneath it. I went back to the boys’ boarding master, who said I couldn’t prove that it was about me, and if it was, again, ‘Wayne is a nice boy who probably just has a crush on you. Have you tried talking to him? Maybe he just doesn’t know you well enough because you haven’t talked to him very much.’
I was basically being told that Wayne was bullying me because 1) he had a crush on me or 2) I was shy and hadn’t talked to him enough. Either way, the onus was on me to change my behaviour to make him stop bullying me, rather than on him to just stop fucking bullying me.
I was furious, and it lit enough of a fire in my belly that I decided I would not put up with how I was being treated. I was determined not to let Wayne get away with what he was doing to me (I also continued to fantasise about horrible Wayne-related penis accidents). I started to complain every time Wayne or one of his hunting party did something to me, however small. If the College maintained they had a no-tolerance bullying policy, I wanted to put that to the test. But again and again, I was ignored. Told he was just a hormonal boy. Told I should just try to have fun with the joke. Told to accept that it was just his sense of humour. Told to try and open up around him a bit more. He just never seemed to get punished. At one point, when his parents were at the school for parent–teacher interviews, the boys’ boarding master told me he’d had ‘a chat’ to them about Wayne’s behaviour. ‘They were very cranky, Rosie,’ he said. ‘Things should be fine now.�
� I couldn’t believe he’d just used the words ‘very cranky’. If I had a son and his teacher told me the kinds of things Wayne had been doing, the words I’d use would be ‘fucking ashamed’. When I was told they were ‘very cranky’, I immediately knew that they had no idea how bad things were.
After that conversation, obviously, things got worse. Nothing fuels a bully more than getting dobbed on but not actually being held accountable. The more I reacted, the worse things got, and I refused to accept the notion that my trying to force the school to punish him was just making things worse. I was constantly told not to ‘provoke’ him by going to teachers about his behaviour, but I just couldn’t accept that I was provoking him into being an arsehole by trying to protect myself. He was an arsehole because he was an arsehole.
I successfully lobbied to keep the boys out of the common area in the girls’ boarding house, just so there could be one place on campus where I could be sure I wouldn’t have to face him. Given I was already of very fragile social standing, my changing the rules so that a bunch of hormonal teens couldn’t watch TV together was hardly a smart idea, but I just wanted to be able to walk into one room and not worry about being abused or laughed at on the other side of the door. But time and time again, I would walk into the common area to find him sitting there, often with the teacher in charge talking and laughing with him.
I felt like I was losing my mind. This boy was torturing me on a daily basis and I wasn’t quiet about it. I reported him, I talked to teachers, I stood my ground. And still, nothing was done. I was just treated like I was being a spoilsport, and Wayne continued to laugh in the face of the College’s ‘no tolerance’ bullying policy. It’s amazing what a boy who’s good with a football can get away with.
But then came a ray of hope.
The Anti-Cool Girl Page 11