Dear Bully

U. “Unbelievable. What did you do?” “Nothing.” “What will you do?” “I’m still thinking about that.” “Maybe he’s going to apologize. Or maybe he’s not done bullying you yet.” “Oh, yes he is,” I said.

V. “Life is very strange,” she said. “Very, very strange. Who would ever have imagined?”

W. “Why me?” I asked, as if there might be an answer to that question after all this time. We laughed.

X. “Exactly,” she said.

Y. “You can’t take it personally,” my mother said, wiping the tears off my cheeks, my chin, my neck with her soft hand. (But I wanted to die. But I wanted to die. I remember so little, but I remember clearly: Because of him, I wanted to die.) “If you weren’t there to bully, it would just be someone else. You’re going to be stronger and happier after you live through this, I promise you.”

Z. How could she have been so wrong? (So wrong. So kind.) How could she have been so right? All the years and friends and family and the sorrows and the strength I would need and the laughter. On the other side of that forever was the future, and it was so much better, and all I needed to do was to keep on living to get to it.

They Made Me Do It and I’m Sorry

by Cecil Castellucci

ILLUSTRATED BY LISE BERNIER

Simplehero

by Debbie Rigaud

I’m not what you would call a tough girl. In fact, I’d say I’m more of the scaredy-cat persuasion. I’ve never been in a school-yard fight. I was always of the opinion that someone as bony as I should avoid physical confrontation. So imagine my confusion when my friend Desiree told me that I protected her from a notoriously fearsome bully our freshman year in high school.

“You don’t remember?” she asked me during a recent phone conversation. “That’s how we became friends!”

Me? Defend Desiree? Desiree is one of the boldest people I know. Smart and opinionated, the girl can debate any attorney, seasoned politician, or TV judge to the ground. And with a flash of her dimples and a quick turn of phrase, she’ll yank you out of your proverbial box and introduce you to a fresh perspective. But that’s the Desiree from the later high school years and beyond. As she tells it, she was in a very different place at the start of freshman year.

“Tanya* wanted to fight me, so she made up this story that I was talking about her brother on the bus,” recounts Desiree. “I was terrified—Tanya was huge, and I’m not a fighter. You and Rhonda were there, and you said, ‘She didn’t say that. I was on the bus and I know that’s not true. She doesn’t even catch the bus!’”

The story started to sound vaguely familiar to me, but it wasn’t crystal clear until Desiree uttered Rhonda’s now legendary words: “You’ll have to get through me to get to her.” That’s when I got a visual on the day. We were in the school’s lower level in the hallway by the lockers. As she charged toward Desiree, Tanya looked ten feet tall. She was wild-eyed with flaring nostrils, and her husky voice blared a loud and angry alarm. I remember thinking, Tanya’s got the story all wrong. So I told her the truth. But Rhonda’s style of defense was on a whole ’nother level. Rhonda matched Tanya in size, so she stepped between Tanya and Desiree and said, “I will not let you touch this girl. You’ll have to go through me to get to her.” That quelled everything outright. Tanya backed down and walked away.

I knew Des had run-ins with bullies her freshman year at our all-girls academy. But I never understood why. Des was as unlikely a target as I was a bodyguard. She is a tall, attractive girl from a prominent family in her suburban town. She has five older brothers—one of whom was an NFL player at the time. But as Desiree explains it, two things made her a target throughout her childhood—her dark skin and her Caribbean heritage.

In grammar and middle schools, she was called every derogatory name for “black” by lighter-skinned African-American classmates. The catchy commercial jingle lulling TV viewers to “Come Back to Jamaica” became “Go Back to Jamaica.” And each year she dreaded the public reading of her classmates’ annual “hot list” of girls (ranked by the boys) and boys (ranked by girls). Desiree was always at or near the bottom of that list. “I wanted to quit school even back then,” she recalls.