Dear Bully

I don’t know why I was different. We were all poor. We all lived in public housing. We all walked to school; we all had white-labeled, black-lettered government peanut butter on our sandwiches.

No, I guess I do. I had buck teeth and crossed eyes and a stutter. The eyes straightened out with glasses, the stutter straightened out with speech therapy. Not much to be done about the buck teeth, but the funny thing is, nobody tormented me over any of that.

Saundra has lights.

It started showing up on chalkboards before class. It was written in the bathrooms, on the desks. I heard people whisper it, and whispering is menacing, but mostly, it was baffling. What did it mean?

Maybe I did have lights! If somebody would tell me what they were, I could get rid of them, right? Pinches in the water fountain line, not allowed to play four square at recess, sitting by myself at lunch because nobody would sit with me because

Saundra has lights.

Dodgeball again in gym, glasses broken again—three pairs in a row, until my mom wrote a note telling the gym teacher I couldn’t play dodgeball anymore because I was just too careless with my glasses, which were expensive. So I sat on the side and got hit anyway, and nobody wanted to be out because they’d have to sit next to me, and

Saundra has lights.

I ran away from school. I told my mother it was because people were mean to me, because everybody made fun of me, because I was extraordinarily, completely, and entirely alone. But you can’t run away from school, she told me. I needed to ignore them. I shouldn’t give them the satisfaction of a response.

So I put up with it for as long as I could, and then I ran away again. That time, my mother delivered me to my principal, who paddled me. Yes, I got paddled for running away from people who were tormenting me. It builds character, you know.

It wasn’t until sixth grade that I found out what it meant. Dionne wrote, in front of me, on the board while we waited for our teacher to come back from the office—

Saundra has lights.

And then she turned and scratched her head in demonstration.

Lice. Lice! I had been teased and isolated and pinched and pushed and building character over an insult they couldn’t even spell! They weren’t even smart enough to spell lice, L-I-C-E, lice, lice, lice! I was eleven years old and full to bursting with self-loathing and hatred and they weren’t even smart enough to spell a four-letter word!

It didn’t occur to me how many people must have known it was spelled wrong but just went along. And I learned to just go along, too. By the time I got to high school, I was quiet and odd. I didn’t know how to talk to people or look them in the eye—

Saundra has lights.

So I didn’t, and I managed to unnerve people all the way through junior high, all the way into high school—the place where people still threw ugly words at me, but added their fists to it.

Nobody gently put a hand in the middle of my back at the top of the stairs and pushed.

It was a pap, a concussive blow—pap into the front of my locker, pap at the top of the stairs, pap when I was standing too close to the benches in the locker room. I learned to lean against walls and creep down stairs. I learned to be afraid if people were standing behind me. And I believed them when they said if I got on my bus with them, I wouldn’t get off.

I quit going to school. I spent all day—all winter—in homes that were being built near my bus stop. I quit thinking about later and next week and when I grew up. I gave up one Friday night and swallowed all the prescription pills that my mother kept on the kitchen windowsill.

Lights out.

I was fourteen. I was a freshman.

My brother found me before it was too late. He called my mother; my mother called the doctor—they didn’t feed me charcoal; they fed me mustard until I threw up. But we never, ever talked about why I ate those pills.

But I’m talking about it now. Twenty years after my attempt, I realize it’s still happening everywhere, and everywhere people keep wondering how this happens.

Here’s the answer: learning to fit in, learning to get along, ignoring it, and being the better person don’t work.

Asking victims to save themselves doesn’t work. People need to intervene. They need to give up on disbelief, on stupid, gossamer lies—oh, it’s not that bad, you’ll survive, high school is only four years.

They need to start listening. They need to hear us say: It’s that bad. Four years is too long. It has to stop. Putting faith in the idea that it will make a difference—we’re all sharing our bullying stories. This one is mine.

I hope it’ll be a light.

The Soundtrack to My Survival

by Stephanie Kuehnert