PROJECT 2 “Varsity” from Varsity’s point of view.

Athletics and going to the locker room was the part of my school day I dreaded the most. The gold walls and the red stalls and benches were a constant every day reminder of the horrors I knew I would face once I stepped foot inside. I was only fourteen and I hated going to school and seeing my classmates, something a usual fourteen year old would love. But since my classmates thought they were funny, they chose me as the kid to mess with. I never got a chance to enjoy my time at school. Yeah, I may be a Special Education student, but that was not commonly known information nor information I spread around. I still wanted to try athletics, so I thought why not? First mistake. I always try my hardest to not let it affect my life, but it is clear that troubles can arise from anywhere.

Sure, I did not look like most of the other kids at school. I was shorter, fatter, paler, but who would have thought that would matter to my classmates. They would pick on me, hit me, encourage me as a joke, call me names, and anything else you can think of probably happened to me as well. There was this one incident where I was showering and my teammates thought it would be funny to hide my clothes. I remember stepping out of the shower and scavenging to find my clothes (which I later found out were at the bottom of the trashcan). After I realized what was going on, I just stood there staring into blank space, fed up with the way they were treating me. I said nothing, I did not want to give them the satisfaction. But this seemed to only make them laugh even harder. Why can they not just grow up and quit this bs?

I’ll never forget the incident that ended it all. Some of the boys decided to tell one of the other kids with anger issues and a lack of common sense that I was talking shit about his mom. First off, why would I feel the need to talk bad about someone’s mom when I don’t even know the kid? Seemed like another usual dumb prank they were pulling on me, but boy was I wrong. Everyone was finishing up in the showers and I was one of the last to be done. I stepped out, with only a towel on, and was met with a punch to the face from the kid whose mom I had “been talking bad about.” I could feel everyone’s eyes on me laughing and I felt so humiliated. I was so fed up, I decided that this was the time I was not going to let them get away with it. So I fought back. Yeah, I may have ended up bloody and bruised, but it made me feel good to know that I was able to stand up for myself against the people who had been messing with me for years.

But that night at home my parents bombarded with questions about what had happened to me. I did not want to tell them that I was constantly bullied at school because I did not want them to worry about me. I figured, I’ve handled it on my own all this time, why should that change now? But it eventually got to the point where I could not keep quiet anymore. I had to tell my parents about what was happening to me, but I did not give any names. I was a better person than that. My parents decided to pull me from the school and reported to the dean what had been happening to me. I wonder how those kids feel now. Do they regret the way they treated me? I was glad to be out of that toxic environment because after that, my life started to look up a lot more.

I chose to modify “Varsity” by Brock Kinglsey by writing it from Varsity’s, the bullied kid, point of view. The original piece had a lot of information regarding Varsity, so I felt like I could effectively write a story coming from his pov. The original story talks about all the different ways a group of kids at school would bully Varsity and how the other kids stood around and did nothing to stop it. But at the end, the kids are told that Varsity is a special education student, and it can be inferred that the boys began to feel some regret for the way they treated him. I tried to briefly include this part in my piece since I feel like it is a major part of the story.

I did not struggle much to write from a different point of view because the original piece gives enough information about the events that would occur in the locker room. I picked to use Varsity’s POV because he was the main subject to begin with. I realized that when you switch the POV used in a writing, it can completely change the story since everyone has a different view on things. In the original, you read through the eyes of one of the bullying students, while in mine you see it from the bullied POV. I wrote it in the way I believe Varsity saw things and how he handled them.