Dear Bully

And that led to the scariest moment of my life—the day I swung an aluminum bat at some boy’s head for twisting the knife about my abuse. That day, I could have done irreparable harm to another human being. I could have killed. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t decide to swing the bat. It was already in my hand, and then it was in motion. I’d never before experienced the “vision gone red with rage” thing I read about in books, but that was exactly what happened. If my vision hadn’t cleared and I hadn’t seen his face at that very last second, stricken with absolute terror, there’s no telling what would have happened. I managed to pull the blow, and he lived to tell about the experience . . . and get me into all the trouble I deserved. But I was a hair’s breadth away from murder. I’m not pulling the punch now, here. Sometimes it’s better to tell.

I wish it went without saying that bullying is horrible and dangerous, for the perpetrator as well as the victim. The target can just as easily turn his or her rage outward as inward. If bullies won’t stop for the sheer humanity of it, I hope they’ll stop for the simple drive for self-preservation. To this day, I’m horrified by what I almost did. If I hadn’t pulled my swing, I’d have had to live with what I did forever. The bully would have had to live . . . or die . . . with the consequences.

I didn’t grow up in a family comfortable with emotion. I’ll never forget getting into trouble when I cried or having my father send me to my room once with a book called, I believe, The Erroneous Zones, which postulated that emotions were societal constructs and that the reason we felt sorrow, for example, when our grandmothers died was that that was what was expected. I think that day with the bat, I started to accept, not that emotions didn’t exist, but that they were dangerous things. That was the day I started to shut down.

It hampered my relationships and my writing for many years. Maybe still. It’s hard to emotionally invest your reader when you refuse to open yourself to emotion to begin with. But maybe, just maybe, I’m getting better. Maybe opening the floodgates with this might even help me on the road to recovery.

The Boy Who Won’t Leave Me Alone

by A. S. King

It’s him again. This time he’s grabbed me right between my legs from behind and I feel his fingernail pinch against my pelvic bone as I snap my legs shut. My whole face is hot and I can’t hear anything but white noise. I’m frozen—like always. My brain is kicking the shit out of him right there on the linoleum math-wing floor, but my body is completely still, like the way things must feel after a bomb explodes.

It’s gone on for six months now—ever since he told his whole team I was a lesbian. Six months since they all started sniggering and grinning at me all the time. Threatening smiles. Sickening laughter. All because I wouldn’t kiss him. “What are you—some sort of dyke?” he’d asked, and then he’d listed my dyke traits: no makeup, short hair, Chuck Taylors, men’s Levi’s. Plays sports. I thought we were friends. I thought he understood I just didn’t want to kiss him.

The first time it happened, I was at my locker. He came up behind me, grabbed my breast, and whispered, “I can turn you back.” It was fast—maybe three seconds—and he was gone. Later I swear I could still feel his hand there, like a ghost of what happened. It haunted me for days.

The second time we were in gym playing volleyball and he smacked my ass as if to say “good play,” but he did it three times, and he wasn’t smacking anyone else’s ass. Two gym teachers were there. Neither of them said anything. When I told him to stop, he just said, “Whoa. Didn’t know you were the sensitive type.”

The boy likes to breathe into my ear, and sometimes he licks it if I don’t flinch fast enough. Last week he pinned me against the hallway wall and stared me down until I pushed him away. A teacher poked her head out from her classroom and he put his hands up, smiled, and said, “Hey! Only kidding. We’re friends, right?” On his way down the hall past me, he whispered, “One night with me would cure you.”

I’m not a lesbian, you know. I mean, I don’t think I am. I’ve never been into a girl and I did have a boyfriend—before all this started. But right now I can’t see the attraction to guys at all. Though it’s probably not a great time to ask.