I Ran Into My Bully and Didn’t Recognise Her — But She Remembered Me.
Can there be forgiveness in pity?
It was a beautiful summer’s day, and on my way back from the grocery store, I asked my friend Milan if we could drop by the flower shop. It’s a lovely shop, with lots of succulents and carnivorous plants. Vines descend from the ceiling. The air smells damp and earthy.
The girl behind the counter was arranging bouquets.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. She was an attractive-looking girl who fit right in with her surroundings: the bohemian clothes, the pale eyes set in a perfectly symmetrical face. She wore her long hair piled atop her head. The loose strands dangling to her shoulders were reminiscent of the vines that coiled through the shop.
I left ten minutes later with an armful of eucalyptus leaves, a small succulent, and a leafy, clustery plant that looked promising.
A few steps out of the shop, I heard someone call my name.
‘Stella! Is this yours?’
I looked around to see the girl run after me, holding a paper bag I’d evidently forgotten.
I thanked her and continued my way down the street.
‘How do you two know each other?’ Milan asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, with a looming sense of unease.
I have a tiny, barely noticeable mental disability where I have a hard time recognising faces. If a character from a movie puts on a different hat, he might as well be played by a different actor. Sometimes I don’t recognise myself in pictures.
‘Do we know the girl who runs the flower shop on the corner there?’ I asked my sister.
‘Pretty, our age, brown hair, my height?’
‘Yes!’
‘That’s either Lily or Nora. Half of those twins. You didn’t recognise her?’
Lily and Nora had been the fascination of the school: identical in every respect, pretty, athletic, smart, both equipped with an identically derisive sneer.
What they did to me was not nearly as bad as what some children must endure. There was no violence, no threats, no being followed home — just the constant fear that their gaze would fall on me, and the subtle but cutting humiliation that would follow. It happened often enough that I dreaded going to school and tried not to stand out more than I could help.
Lily and Nora had a friend, Rose, to whom their fearful power was extended for unknown reasons. Rose was like Crabbe and Goyle — the goon of the bullies. She was tall, with bulging eyes underneath a protruding forehead. Her small head sagged forwards on a strained neck, which gave her the appearance of a bird — but since she lacked both the menace of the predator and the innocence of prey, she mostly resembled a scavenger.
Rose and I had something in common: the choir conductor didn’t like us. To avoid his wrath as much as possible, we usually made sure to go to the bathroom before rehearsal started.
For reasons I could never fathom, Rose always wanted to know who was in the stall next to her. In the beginning, I was too afraid (and uncomfortable) to answer, but after a while, my curiosity for what would happen next got the better of me.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Stella.’
‘Oh.’
That was it.
We must have had this conversation hundreds of times. And though it wouldn’t have been my choice for a commonality, sometimes you have to work with what you have. So after about a year of this, I started to strike up small conversations while we washed our hands. Sometimes we would chat almost amicably, bonding over our mutual fear-tinged hatred of the conductor.
If hours later, I saw the twins with their court coming my way in the schoolyard, I would always glance at Rose. She never said a word. In the bathroom, when we were both preparing to face a common enemy, she was my ally — but lurching behind her two beautiful friends, she had a reputation to live up to. Her face looked waxy and pale, but it wore the same sneer as the twins.
‘Lily or Nora?’ I gasped.
‘Yup. Beautiful, aren’t they? A shame they’re so mean.’
‘She recognised me, she called me Stella. Oh, God, she must have thought…’
…what, exactly?
In a knee-jerk association, I had assumed that this encounter would somehow be the next humiliation, with the twins picking up flawlessly where they had left off almost twenty years ago. But maybe me failing to recognise her wasn’t such a bad thing.
Maybe she had noticed how unaffected I was by her presence.
Maybe she hadn’t expected such a frank, friendly and businesslike approach from me.
Maybe she thought I was that over it.
Maybe — and this was possibly the best option — she had realised I didn’t recognise her and felt small and insignificant.
Do bullies remember what they have done? Sally Rooney writes:
You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied. But by bullying someone else, you learn something about yourself you can never forget.
I wondered now how they recalled those years, and whether, that afternoon in the flower shop, there had been some kind of remorse behind those pale, unreadable eyes.
I’m not one to hold on to grudges. But I doubted it.
Being bullied didn’t “make me stronger in the end”. It also didn’t break me, or cause irreparable damage. I got away relatively unscathed, with some nightmares, a suspicious attitude towards all twins, and a distrust of the teachers who failed to protect me.
When I found out that I had ran into Lily/Nora, I felt extremely vulnerable at first – as if I had wanted to be properly prepared to face her.
Not because I would have liked to impress her or show her up, but because I’m still afraid of her even though I’m almost thirty, happily married, love the work that I do, it’s almost twenty years ago and I am a grown-ass woman.
Those cold eyes, set in those perfect, impassive, identical faces, still strike the fear of God in me.
I’m not proud of it, but I resent them ‘til this day. Not because they made me feel like prey (a feeling that quickly becomes very hard to shake), but because of how unyielding they were, how strangely devoid of emotion of any kind.
I resent them for their shrill laughter, their contemptuously curled lips, and the smiles that refused to communicate with the rest of their features.
This puts me in an awkward position. I believe in forgiveness, in moving on, in trusting that people will find their way in life and become better versions of their former selves.
I’m told forgiveness is a choice. Can I forgive the twins and assume that they maybe forgot all about it, that they were doing it because they were unhappy, that they’ve since become kind and gentle people? I have no proof for that theory, and I don’t feel like I owe it to them to look for it.
I’m too bitter, and possibly still too scared, to regard Lily and Nora with anything that resembles warmth.
But I think I feel sorry for Rose.
I can imagine a hawk spreading her wings vigilantly over her baby birds, protecting them, feeding them strips of what she has caught with her talons.
I can imagine a rabbit outrunning a fox and coming home, proud and tired, to her bunny family.
But where does a vulture go?
About the author
Here so you can learn from my mistakes: a singer/writer with a thousand competing passions and a longing for focus. Get your dose of excruciatingly personal stories and uppity advice.
