Dear Bully

In the morning I sit on my front steps and tighten the laces of my Rollerblades. I do this carefully because in the afternoon I won’t have time to make adjustments. As soon as camp ends, I’ll have to slip into them and skate for my life.

The thought makes me queasy, so I pop a tape into my Walkman: Faith No More’s The Real Thing, side A.

I am freshly turned thirteen and in love with Mike Patton, the lead singer. He has long brown hair like mine and when he head bangs in his music videos, you can see that his skull is shaved underneath.

I nod my head in time with the driving guitar riff, slap the side of my peach and gray skates, and push off. It takes four songs to get to my junior high.

As my hair blows out behind me, snarling in the wind, I decide to shave the underside of my head, too. I’m sick of the way it knots up no matter how much I brush it, and it’s too hot to have long, thick hair clinging to your neck.

Especially when being chased by a pack of girls who have nicer Rollerblades and longer limbs.

“You want it all, but you can’t have it,” Mike Patton croons into my ears—to me it is crooning, others might view it as shouting. In the video for this song, he stomps around, swinging his hair and glaring intensely at the camera. I don’t just love Mike Patton because he’s one of the hottest guys on MTV. He knows how I feel.

I wanted a torment-free summer. Last year I was still trying to fit in with Liza/Brooke/Dani, the three-headed popular-girl beast from grade school, who accidentally-on-purpose burned my forehead with a curling iron. I’d flinched and that was it: my legs tangled in the hoops they made me jump through once again. When we got to junior high, I gave up and they sprouted new heads—boy and girl heads.

The girl heads shouted, “Freak!” in the hallways because I wore Converse sneakers instead of Keds. In gym class, the boy heads told me that I looked like the guy from the Black Crowes—ugly, flat-chested, and greasy-haired. I hate that band. To get their songs and the beast voices out of my head, I blasted Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, side B, Courtney Love shrieking, “Is she pretty on the inside? Is she pretty from the back?”

Summer was supposed to be my time to shine at the theater camp open to students from both of my town’s junior highs. Since the Liza/Brooke/Dani beast wasn’t there, I actually tried out and got a role in Grease instead of hiding behind the scenes on stage crew.

I hadn’t known that the beast from Emerson, the other junior high, would be worse.

I arrive at camp with the angry “Surprise! You’re Dead!” blaring in my ears. The drums rat-tat-tat-tat like machine-gun fire and Mike Patton screams about torturing someone who wronged him. For a moment I feel strong enough to stand up to anyone, but then I meet the blue eyes of Rachel, the Barbie doll who leads the Emerson girl beast. I scurry inside and try to enjoy the day, rehearsing my beloved Grease songs and forcing smiles at the few cast mates who don’t hate me.

I eat lunch with my stage crew friends and go home with one of them after camp. Mia has Rollerblades, too. I warn her that last week Rachel and up to six other girls chased me home every day. Mia believes that since there are two of us, they’ll leave us alone, but I’m prepared.

My Rollerblades are already laced and I have a tape in my Walkman: the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, side A. I saw an old live video of them on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Johnny Rotten is not pretty like Mike Patton, but his snarl makes up for that. When I was in second grade and intimidated by the teacher of my gifted class, my mother told me to “keep a stiff upper lip.”

Stiff upper lip, I always thought while suffering at the hands of the Liza/Brooke/Dani beast. Now that I’ve discovered Johnny Rotten, I think, Snarled upper lip.

Rachel leads a pack of four cackling girls after Mia and me. They all have shampoo commercial hair and curves like high school cheerleaders. I look like a third grader by comparison, but at least I’m fast and so is the music that keeps me moving. Instead of worrying about what will happen if they yank me to a stop with their manicured claws, I picture the kids in the Sex Pistols video slam dancing in big, black boots and the safety pins shoved through Johnny Rotten’s ear. I can barely understand his lyrics because his rage is even thicker than his British accent, but regardless, I think Johnny might understand me even better than Mike Patton does.

“Wow, Steph,” Mia says breathlessly as we clomp through her front door on our skates. “Those girls really hate you. You should have just done stage crew.”