Dear Bully

“You will never be anything with a voice like yours,” he says.

“Think about it.” I have thought about it for six years of speech

Therapy, one year of teasing, bullying, and I do not need to think

Anymore, but I do as he lets me go. I run down the linoleum hall

Thinking about it, wondering what happened to being safe, what happened

To being able to protect my sloppy tongue with friends. And I wonder

What if mean was frozen in a game of tag and nobody ever touched

Its fingers to let it go run free and it just had to stay there alone forever.

Abuse

by Lucienne Diver

I write humor because I’m not comfortable with emotion. When this anthology was proposed, I was sure I wouldn’t have anything to contribute. But as my stomach proceeded to eat itself alive and my heart to break for those kids who were bullied to the point where they felt the only way out was death, I realized I was wrong. I did have a story to tell. Sadly, there’s nothing at all funny about it.

I was molested as a child. Wait for it, I promise there’s relevance or there’s no way I would put this out there to the world. The man was a neighbor and someone who worked with my father. I was about seven. I was/still am asthmatic. The first time it happened, I was out for a bike ride through the woods with friends and had to stop because my asthma had kicked up, and they left me behind. Prey.

For years I never told anyone. Molesters are master manipulators. They try to make their victims complicit in their silence, telling them their parents will be angry or won’t believe them or giving them terrible options of “I could do this or this” and making it seem like a choice. For years, I felt terrible guilt. For years, I prayed to God every night to forgive me, because I was sure it was all my fault in some way. He never answered.

It wasn’t until I was around twelve that my mother had “the talk” with my sister and me about dangers, how we could tell her everything. . . . I was so upset that I excused myself, went off to my room, and wrote her a note (I’ve always escaped through writing). I’d transferred my anger. I still hadn’t forgiven myself, but now I was angry at her, at my father, at everyone for not telling me sooner how to protect myself and that I could have told, which is something I want everyone to know. So I’m saying it in case your parents don’t.

To say that she was upset would be an understatement. How she handled it . . . I can’t say that I blame her or that she did anything wrong, but it made things very difficult for me. My mother called all the mothers on the block and told them so that they could watch out for the man. Unfortunately, she also told them what had happened to me, and they told their kids. I don’t blame them, either—they were trying to protect their children—but the result was that everyone in the neighborhood knew. They knew what had happened; they knew the button to push to get a rise out of me. (In case you’re wondering, my father, with whom I’d always had a tumultuous relationship, called the man and threatened that if he ever came near me again, my father would make sure he lost everything. That was the day I started loving him.)

Now, I’d always been a geek, a brain, asthmatic, rail thin, always snuffling from allergies and out of school for my health issues as much as I was in. In short, there was no dearth of material to tease me about, but I’d always escaped into books, sometimes three a day. I wasn’t terribly concerned about playing outside anymore (wonder why) or what people thought of me there. But now the kids had a surefire taunt, something I couldn’t ignore, couldn’t not react to.