Dear Bully

I fought to overcome my shyness. Forced myself to look around and smile. Tried to work past the nervous twitch in my belly, to look accommodating and friendly. My efforts were met by curious looks, piercing glares, dissecting stares—causing me to hunker down and retreat, keeping quiet, keeping to myself, staring out the window, praying it soon would be over.

A long, bumpy ride on a bus with bad shocks.

A quick trip to the office and then on to class with a pink slip clutched in my fist.

An awkward introduction in which I was forced to stand before the chalkboard, stand before my new classmates, stating my full name and where I’d moved from, while my gut clenched so badly and my face turned so red, I swung my long brown hair before me, hoping I could somehow hide behind it, pretend I wasn’t really there.

A move I’d soon learn to regret.

A move that haunted me for the next five years.

“Did you see the way she swung her hair?”

“Did you know she lives in that house?”

And by lunch, a group of older girls, girls who were ten to my nine, had taken it upon themselves to rename me.

No longer Alyson.

No longer “new girl.”

“Stuck-up Bitch” is what they called me.

They even created a song to go with it—one that made liberal use of my new name, accompanied by lots of hair tossing.

But despite the lyrics professing that I thought I was “sooo bitchin’,” I’m here to say I felt anything but.

I may have lived in the biggest house in the neighborhood, I may have had long hair and nice clothes, but all of that was just a Band-Aid meant to cover the truth.

My life was a mess.

I was the poster child for low self-esteem.

And despite the big house, I soon would be poor.

With parents on the verge of divorce, a mom struggling to deal with the demise of everything she’d known for the past twenty years, and a dad who, on the rare occasions he chose to come home, made it a point to either berate me or ignore me, my entire world was collapsing to the point where my home life and my school life became mirrors of each other. Making it impossible to determine which was more miserable.

The stomachaches were getting so bad I started coming home early, until one day, feeling particularly overwhelmed by it all, I mentioned the bullying, the name that they called me, only to be told to ignore it. If I ignored it they’d soon move on to something else.

But ignoring it didn’t work. If anything it just made them sing louder. So I kept quiet. Didn’t mention it again.

Mostly because I felt ashamed.

When an entire group of kids decides to reject you at first sight, without talking to you or getting to know you, without giving you a chance to prove yourself—it does more than just hurt, it makes you question your entire being, your self-worth.

Those were the days when nobody spoke about bullying. It was something boys did. Primal. Survival of the fittest. Perfectly normal. Kids will be kids. Easily handled with a shrug, a look the other way, a mumbled comment about soon growing out of it and moving on to better things.

And certainly no one acknowledged that girls were capable of it. Capable of crafting a systematic form of social terrorism that consisted of snide looks, passed notes, and whispered insults when adults and teachers were present—progressing when they weren’t to outright lies, rumors, physical aggression, and, in my case, a horrible song I couldn’t escape.

They sang it on the bus. Sang it during recess, and again during lunch. Sang it when they passed by my house after school, and on weekends, too. After a while they even grew bold enough to sing it right out in the open, in front of my teacher, who shrugged, looked the other way, pretended not to hear.

By eighth grade it was over.

After five solid years, it seemed they’d finally grown bored and moved on. But while the taunting may have ended, the effects lingered for much longer than I care to admit. And I always swore that if I ever got published, I’d write a book about a girl who experiences something similar in the hope that my experience might help someone else. That book turned out to be my second novel, Art Geeks and Prom Queens.

And though it seems like this story is over, there’s still one last bit left to tell. About a year ago, completely out of the blue, one of my bullies sent me an email.

She wanted to apologize, to tell me how horrible she felt for the way she’d chosen to treat me back then. Having kids of her own, she could hardly believe what she’d done. It was the sort of thing she’d never tolerate from them. And though she tried, she couldn’t really answer the why. I was new, had long hair, had a big house—at the time, it seemed like enough.