Being Bullied Was a God-Send

Have you ever sat at a 40-foot table alone?

Have you ever sat at a 40-foot table alone, when seconds before it had been crowded?

It had been shaping up to feel like the worst day of my 11 years on earth. Earlier that morning, I had run into my two best friends at school in the hallway outside 1st period.

“Hey guys!” I showed all of my slightly crooked and gapped British teeth, heavy teal backpack slapping my back as I jogged up to them, key-chains jangling.

They were not smiling. Their jaws were set, eyes determined on something I couldn’t see yet. “Listen, we know you think we’re your friends, but we’re not.”

My mind froze.

“We were just pretending to be your friends to be nice to you. We don’t actually like you. You’re annoying. You pretend to like stuff you don’t even know about.”

Even as my brain struggled to move again, hot liquid panic rose up in my chest and flushed my cheeks. “No, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do! All the time! The other day we were talking about Ghostbusters, and you said you loved that movie, and we asked you what it was about, and you got it wrong. You’ve never even seen it!”

My heart was making the same thumping reverberations as the industrial school trash cans when the janitors would turn them upside down and bang on the sides to empty them out.

“I have!” I hadn’t. Tears began to burn around the edges of my vision.

The truth was, I did pretend to love stuff I didn’t even know about. All the time. I was so desperate for friends that pretending to love Ghostbusters seemed like a small price to pay.

I also pretended to love Ruben Studdard.

A fierce rivalry had split the class that year between those rooting for Ruben Studdard to win American Idol, and those rooting for Clay Aiken. Looking back, race probably played a part.

Nearly the entire class were die-hard Clay fans, and white. One girl even made home-made earrings, Clay Aiken’s face beaming out from each earlobe behind protective plastic bubbles.

My two best friends at school were African American and Puerto Rican, and they would shake their head at these girls who honestly thought Clay was a better singer. I shook my head with them because I liked them and I wanted them to like me too. There was one other Latina girl who, when pressed to announce her loyalty, quietly admitted she thought Ruben was better.

Other things I pretended to love that year: Sean Paul, step dancing, Lip Smackers.

Pretending to love something you don’t seems like a small price to pay for friendship, but pretend to love enough things and it winds up costing you your whole self.

In my desperation for friendship I had become an entirely false person. My desperation had made me annoying.

You don’t become desperate overnight.

I had jumped schools every half-year to year since the time I was six. A small private Christian school where we wore plaid jumpers and shiny buckle shoes. A small private preparatory school where we learned to conjugate in Latin, amo, amas, amat. Homeschooling, where we ditched science and history and mostly just read classics out loud together.

I also jumped grade levels, hopping into classes with older and older students until I was 8 years old in an 8th grade level classroom.

You can imagine why I wasn’t very popular. I wasn’t just much younger than everyone else, I was also extremely undersized for my age. Not just short, tiny. Mouse-like. Ears that stuck out to the side, those British teeth, too-big eyes framed above by bushy eyebrows and below by two permanent swooping lines. I wanted to please the teacher more than I wanted to please the other students. They started to call me Hermione.

At this point, I was at an “Alternative School for Gifted Minds”, which in truth was just a ranch house out in the woods run by older people who had been in the hippie movement and wanted a space where they could practice hypnosis on children, smoke pot on their lunch breaks, and explore “more effective methods” of educating children. (Another story for another time.)

I was too small and too annoying to play with the bigger kids at lunch time. Instead, I found my niche with the preschoolers and the 12th graders. The preschoolers, because they were too young to judge. If you wiped their snot and lifted them onto the swings, you were wanted. The 12th graders because we shared a passionate love for the Beatles, and they’d let me sit in their sidewalk circle, our favourite albums playing from a communal boom box, lazily doodling chalk-art. I would later realize I was a part of a smoke circle.

It was here at this alternative school that I met my first, and longest, antagonist. She was a little older than me but in a lower grade. I don’t know why she chose me, except that I was an easy target.

One day at lunch she and her best friend set up a makeover station. They were painting nails and doing make-up for other girls— sparkly nail polish, lip gloss, and glitter eye-shadow, mostly. They offered to make me over. They hid the mirror. They were snickering while they worked, but when they were finished, they smiled and told me it looked amazing, that I was gorgeous. I was so excited to be beautiful, and so happy that someone was being friendly towards me.

I ran into the bathroom before class to see if it was true, if they had made me beautiful. I looked in the mirror and burst into tears, desperately trying to wipe off the clown-like mask they had given me, huge red circles on my cheeks, garish red lipstick smeared across my mouth. I heard them laughing outside the bathroom. “She looks like a doll!”

As the year went by, my classmates became less and less tolerant of me.

I started getting “sick” for days, a week, eventually weeks at a time. I’d hold the thermometer to a light bulb until it was just high enough to warrant staying home, but not high enough to go to the hospital. I’d make myself wretch and dry-heave. Anything to avoid school.

One day, after two weeks of feigned illness, my mom decided I had to go back. “You can’t stay out forever, Katie!”

I cried. I shook my head. She picked me up thrashing from the couch and tried to carry me to the car. I latched onto the doorframe with both hands, digging in my fingernails until it hurt, screaming and pleading. She let me stay home one more day.

After a year and a half she pulled us out of that school, and home-schooled us again until the next year, when she placed us in the public school system. Only, the public school system decided hippie school credits don’t transfer. I wound up the youngest kid in 5th grade.

The kids didn’t like me here, either. I was strange, nerdy, annoying. The teachers started feeling the same way. Why was I reading outside books during their class? Why was I always zoned out? Why wasn’t I coming to school regularly? I attended about half the school days that year.

I began public middle school the next year. Turned out the girl who had given me the bad makeover was going there, too. We were in the same grade, and would be until we graduated high school.

The thing about girl bullying is that it rarely happens in one’s or two’s. When these two girls who I thought were my best friends said “we don’t actually like you”, it was the final tipping point in a social organizing that had been developing since the beginning of the year, spearheaded by Makeover Girl. A communal decision that “we don’t actually like you”.

The bell rang, and they went into class. I wanted to hide in the bathroom and cry, but I was too afraid of being late. I dragged my heavy feet into class and took my seat. I numbed myself, carefully turning off each nerve and synapse, letting my eyes lose focus a little. I heard nothing in class that day. I glanced over at them once, but not again after that, because it sent a jolt of pain through my chest.

At lunch time, I walked into the cafeteria, relieved that I could join the table I always sat, where I was tolerated, where I could blend in with bodies to my left and right, and eat my food in silence. They were laughing, jostling, loud.

Only, when I sat at this table, which happened to be roughly 40 feet long because of the way the school had arranged the tables end to end to stretch across the entire cafeteria, everyone left. They immediately scraped their chairs back, silently gathered their belongings, and crossed the room to take seats on the other side. I later found out Makeover Girl had planned it. The sound of that many chairs dragging across linoleum at once tracked permanent black marks across my memory of that year.

I rustled the plastic bag handles, tore grapes off their stems one by one and let them drop, folded and refolded the paper napkin. I pretended not to notice the line of girls shooting looks back at me. I pretended not to notice the vacant chairs surrounding me. My throat burned.

I floated through the rest of my day and onto the bus, down my street and through my back door, up the stairs and into my room. As soon as I locked the door, the pain came in rolling currents. My knees melted beneath me and I fell onto my bed, burying my face into the cheap mattress to muffle the moans and sobs so my parents wouldn’t hear. I cried until my eyes were swollen and dry, until the clouds outside my window went to purple and the light to grey, until the cicadas were loud and insistent.

I slowly eased my fist out from under my empty stomach. I held it out in front of my face, and I tried to count my friends. “Sofia.” My thumb unfolded, still wet with tears. “April.” My index finger uncurled. “Lauren.” I searched for any other names. None of these three went to my school. I needed a friend at school.

My eyes flitted back and forth, trying to find names of friends in the twisting pattern of my comforter. Anyone who tolerated me could count as a friend, I decided. Finally my eyes fell back on my shaking tear-streaked fist with three fingers stretched out. I stared at that fist and all that it meant, and, unable to find a fourth name, I collapsed in on myself. “I don’t want to do this,” I begged into my mattress. “I can’t do this. I don’t want to go back.”

I didn’t go to school the next day. I stood on my front porch for an hour that morning and stared at the unmown grass, unmoving and silent. I felt hopeless, but I also didn’t feel much of anything else. I wasn’t in pain like the night before. I just wasn’t…anything. I heard my parents talking in low voices inside: “Something seems really wrong. Do you think she’s depressed?”

The next day at lunch, I walked into the cafeteria. I looked at the empty table. I turned around and re-entered the bright Florida sunlight. I scanned the outdoor seating, round cement tables with big red umbrellas. I saw a girl sitting alone. I thought maybe she was a little weird, because every time I had seen her that year she had been wearing the same dance T-shirt, but she wasn’t in my current social circles, and that meant she was safe, probably.

“Can I sit here?”

Her seafoam eyes looked up at me warily. “Sure.”

I grinned with all my slightly crooked, gapped British teeth.

I talked her ear off for the next hour. The next day, I found her again. The next day I went with her home from school. And the next, and the next.

The first months of our friendship, I pretended to love Shania Twain, young John Travolta, and chocolate soy milk. But I quickly discovered that for Erin, I didn’t need to pretend to love anything. She gave me space to fill out all my awkward corners and edges, to expand and stretch and gesture, to be my true self in all my annoying glory, all while never leaving my side.

By the end of that year I stopped pretending to love things, and started asking myself what I did love. Avril Lavigne. Bottlecap belts. Chicago the Musical. The psychological bullying didn’t stop at school, but it didn’t really matter anymore. Erin became my true best friend. The next year, we’d meet Emilee. In ninth grade, the three of us would meet Jess. Together, the four of us would weather everything life brought our way, filling out all our awkward corners and edges.

It’s been over 14 years. Erin still hasn’t left my side. None of them have.

When I was a senior in college, I went to a house party. Like a weird dream where people you’ve known show up at places they wouldn’t be, Makeover Girl was there. She had driven in from out of town, and was sitting alone on the couch. I took a deep breath, and sighed it out. I walked over and sank my weight into the cushion next to her.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hey.”

“How’ve you been?”

She looked at me, a little surprised. “I’ve been good…how’ve you been?”

We talked for an hour. I asked her about her time in college, her friends, her hopes for the next few years, her family. I told her a bit about what college had been like for me.

I started to ease up from the couch. She looked at me and hesitated for a moment. “You know, I think I was pretty harsh to you, sometimes, when we were growing up. I wish I hadn’t been. You’re actually pretty cool….Wish I knew you sooner.”

My two-dimensional paper construction of her blew over and made way for her awkard corners and edges. “Yeah, me too.”

The truth is, I’m not mad at her. If she hadn’t organized the class against me, and led everyone to leave me alone at a 40-foot table that day, I never would’ve sat down at a 3-foot table two days later. I wouldn’t have met my best friend, the start of a four-person sisterhood that would shape, and in many ways save, the rest of my life. Makeover Girl gave me my family, knowingly or not.

Sometimes, sitting alone at a 40-foot table can be the best thing that ever happened to you.