Just a Thought from Middle School

As a public school educator, I was required to watch a PowerPoint on bullying to avoid getting bullied by my principal. Since I like to see this woman as infrequently as possible, I'll do anything to prevent a conversation, a nod my direction, or an email. I went to the library to login with the special password and watched the PowerPoint. I actually learned some things, statistic-wise. But it also got my brain churning with unresolved mental issues and some events that became the push out of the plane I received to start a terrifying freefall through adolescence; one I was lucky to survive.

But I don't need to rehash the whole story. All I really need to tell about this time is one of the stand-out moments from being a middle school girl. This crumb of emotional cafeteria food is a constant reminder of what came after.

I was part of a group of girls, like most girls are. I know we had some that came and went on the fringes, but it started out as a core group of us: Me, Saundra, Debra, and Cammie. I'd known Saundra for quite some time, but we met the other two girls at the beginning of 6th grade. We were also in Girl Scouts together. Saundra was the fat girl, Cammie was the jock girl, Debra was the delicate and sick one and, without trying to sound conceited, I was the pretty one. Mind you, I was totally unaware of this at the time. I was still innocent enough to be blind to the stereotypes. No, that came a year later. Until that time, I was friendly to everyone, seemed to be the kind that could float between all different kinds of groups and work with anyone in class. I was an honor roll student who participated in Student Council, yearbook, newspaper, intramural volleyball, and band. I was well-liked (or at least not hated) by just about everyone in school. In fact, I knew the name of every student in my middle school, regardless of grade. I guess you could say I was popular. But I was humble.

The first thing that tipped me off that maybe I wasn't with a group of real friends was the subtle exclusion. The other girls would do things together - sleepovers, shopping, movies, bowling - and I wasn't invited. At first, they did a pretty good job of hiding it. Eventually I would hear things: Laughter in the restroom over something that had happened at the mall. Gasps of surprise as the small audience that had gathered in the locker room listened intently to a story about how they prank-called Thomas at a sleepover and they all got to hear his voice. A sleight of hand movement to scoop up a dropped Polaroid of Debra flat on her back, in the middle of a lane at the bowling alley.

After a couple of months, it became much more obvious. Debra's family owned a bowling alley in the neighborhood. Their shirts were really neat. Debi said she'd bring us shirts - even asked what color we wanted - and promised to bring them. The very next day, there was a pink shirt, an aqua shirt, and a white shirt. No purple. She gave out a sing-song "I'm sorry," and gave the others a look while promising to bring mine. Of course, that day never came, and any time I asked about it, she'd say the same thing in that same voice, and the others would giggle. I still hadn't caught on yet. It didn't make sense. I didn't believe they were deliberately being mean to me because I hadn't done a thing to deserve it.


Debra got very sick with mono. She was sickly to start with, so it affected her very badly. She lost probably 1/5 of her body weight. When she was healthy again, she was thrilled to be back at school. Everyone was glad to see her and we all rallied around to help her catch up on the stuff she didn't understand from the classwork brought to her. To celebrate her recovery, she held a party at the bowling alley. Guess who wasn't invited. Guess who didn't even know about it until people talked about it the next week at school.

Cammie stole a school project of mine and passed it off as her own. We had the same teacher, but different periods, so I had no idea. As "best friends," we all had each other's locker combinations. Her English was early in the day, mine a bit later. I didn't even realize it was gone until I needed it. When I noticed it was gone, I had about 3 minutes to get to class. I tried to ask my "friends" if they'd seen it, but they were always mysteriously 10 feet ahead of me and couldn't hear me calling them. Being a perfect student who never missed an assignment, I was speechless when my teacher berated me in front of the whole class. It was only later in the week, after I had redone a much-less-impressive project for a late grade, that I actually told my teacher what had happened. That's when she told me Cammie had submitted mine as her own.

At that point, a counselor intervened to separate fact from fiction. The truth came out somehow - I think it was a call to Cammie's mother, who admitted she'd never seen the assignment - but nothing came of it. My substandard project was graded as if it were on time, and I received a B- on it, rather than the A I would have gotten with my original one. I also got my locker combination changed. At that point, I thought I was just losing Cammie, but I realized it was a package deal. For a reason I didn't understand then, the girls sided with her and I lost the other two as friends as well.

I started hanging out with some of the outcast girls. They were oddball freaks I befriended on an in-class basis, except for one - Janine - who I met in the library and we began eating lunch together. We really hit it off, although I was pretty sure she was one of the most socially awkward person I knew. I also started reconnecting with older friends I had grown apart from. Most of them had started down a wrong path but, the truth was, it was better to be with bad friends than it was to be alone. I knew they were bad for me, but they accepted me with open arms and I was no longer alone in hallways and had someone to talk to in class.

I thought it was all over then, but I was grossly mistaken.

Not too long after I just gave them what they wanted and left them alone, the really bad shit started.

Everything was stolen out of my gym locker, which I shared with a girl I hardly knew. They got to her, bullied her or bribed her into opening the locker for them. If I had to guess, I would have said it was Saundra, although Cammie appeared to be the one with sticky fingers.

They openly teased me, laughed at my clothes, my hair, my shoes. They would throw things at me. They convinced a boy to give them a chunk of his surf wax, balled up little chunks, and threw it in my hair whenever they were close to me.

At this point, I gave up even trying to eat lunch in the cafeteria. If it hadn't been for the mercy of my language arts and math teachers, who allowed Janine and me to eat in their classrooms, I may have literally died from embarrassment, humiliation, and degradation.

That's when the death threats started.

Every day, new promises of what they would do to me if they got me alone would fall out of my locker at some point. They were smart enough not to sign them, but you've all seen the handwriting of a teenage girl; it was distinctive. To say this took a toll on my mental health would be a severe understatement.

The counselor, although nice, really didn't do anything. She was the sweetest woman but there was no real action taken, regardless of the fact that she knew damned well who was writing those letters, as did the parents.

I was sexually assaulted on my school bus by an older student. The kids who were left after the majority of stops just sat there and either watched silently, or stared stiffly ahead as if they didn't know what was going on. The bus driver never once looked up in that long, horizontal mirror that was strategically placed to alert her to that very type of misbehavior.

I never told my parents. I tried calling my mother while she was at work, to beg her to come home and 'fix' it. Choked up, I had a hard time getting anything out at first. She became irritated, which flustered me even more, and all I could whisper was "I have to talk to you." She told me she was too busy at work and that she didn't have time for me. I knew that if my father found out, he would either try to handle it legally and nothing would actually happen, or he would try to handle it his way and he'd end up in prison. The fact that my attacker was black would have made it even worse. I was too broken to do anything about it and, besides, the damage was already done. I knew enough to know the future of that asshole was dead-end, anyway. He was trash, with no chance of ever becoming better than that.

I eventually found out that the girls had planned it all. Together, they saved up enough money to bribe Saundra's older brother into giving them his Air Jordans. The girls had them "signed." That's all it took for a boy to become a sex offender: a pair of inauthentically-autographed basketball shoes.

Oddly enough, that was one incident that never got around school. I guess all the kids were too shocked, scared, disgusted, pitiful, or embarrassed to say anything. Everyone tried to forget about it, but every time I saw them, I could still see their wide eyes, staring, frozen, as I was being assaulted.

The school year after that, I started doing a lot of things I shouldn't have been doing, but I didn't care. All of that, however, is a different story. There is no reason for me to get into that here.

You know, I've always felt like this was just the life I've led. I wasn't totally sure this was an unusual thing for a kid to go through - it's not like I talked about it with people - but now I'm realizing my story is sort of like something you'd see in a Lifetime movie. Now that I'm older, I CAN talk about it with people and I realize it's a little fucked up.

Anyway, that took me quite some time to actually write. I had to take a few breaks. Heavy memories, they are. Funny how something can flash through your head so quickly in just a matter of moments - snapshots of faces, snippets of sound, clips of anguish - but it takes so long to wade through the river of mud to relate it to a blog.

Needless to say, I'm kinda worn out for today. I'll try to come back a little more often from here on out. Sorry about that.