Dear Bully

The remainder of fifth grade was pretty much downhill from there. Aside from a few high points, including a friendship with a wonderful girl named Katharine (also a new girl, who had just moved from England), I remember fifth grade by these events:

At the end of week one, I scored a lunch seat at the “popular” table, and when I laughed at popular guy Eric’s joke, I wound up spewing out a bright red slushy, through my nose

, all over him. Any shot I had at being anything but the fifth grade’s Superdork was gone at that moment.

Once, while flirting with Matt, the boy I liked, I threatened to “bop him over the head” with my notebook if he didn’t stop teasing me. The class’s Little Miss Popular, Saria, overheard and shouted to the entire class, “Kristin wants to bop Matt! That means she wants to have sex with him! Bop, bop, bop! Ewww!” I thus became known as the Superdork Who Wants to Have Sex with Matt.

I finalized my outcast status midautumn when Saria stopped by my desk to loudly ask what celebrity I would want to sleep with if I had the chance. “Uh, I don’t really want to sleep with any

celebrities,” I stammered. Considering that I was ten and hardly knew what sex was, I don’t think that was a particularly odd answer, but to Saria, apparently it was laughably foolish. Within five minutes, the entire class had been informed that I was a “frigid bitch” who’d never have a boyfriend.

Yep, fifth grade was miserable. Led by Saria, the “popular” students tortured me endlessly. They made fun of the nondesigner clothes I wore and told me I dressed like a boy. They laughed at the Oldsmobile station wagon my mother drove, while they roared off with their parents in expensive sports cars. They told me that the cool guys they loved, people like Jon Bon Jovi and Joey McIntyre, would never go for a flat-chested, plain dork like me, so I might as well just die now, because no one important would ever love me anyhow. (It never occurred to me that Bon Jovi and the New Kids were also rather unlikely to fall madly in love with any of the snotty ten-year-olds surrounding me, but I digress.) I went home from school and cried into my pillow a few times a week.

My mom kept telling me it would get better. I didn’t believe her. I thought that in Florida, maybe I’d be a geek forever. I’d always be wearing the wrong clothes, thinking the wrong things, and totally missing the boat when it came to boys.

That was around the time I read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was a book that changed my life. I realized that in a way—on a much, much smaller scale—the bullies of the fifth grade were a little like the people who stole the life of that sweet, young, hopeful girl. Like the Nazis, I thought, the bullies didn’t think for themselves; they just dressed the way they were supposed to dress, thought the way they were told to think, and tried their best to make life miserable for anyone “different.” Anne Frank’s situation had been infinitely, unbelievably worse than mine; yet she’d remained hopeful and refused to let them steal her spirit. Maybe, I thought, I should try to do the same.

When I went to a new school for sixth grade, things began to change. I stood up for myself from the start. I didn’t let people walk on me. And although I still didn’t cloak myself in designer duds, I committed early on to being proud to rock the clothes I wanted to rock. I thought often of Anne Frank’s words: “The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” Like Anne Frank, I couldn’t control the world around me, but I could

control my own perspective and what went on in my own heart.

By high school, I was still doing things that would have gotten me bullied in fifth grade: I was in the marching band; I was making straight As; and I still dressed in jeans and tees because they were more comfortable than designer dresses and heels. I was still flat-chested; I still hadn’t slept with a boy; I still had silly crushes and said silly things.

But here’s the difference: By high school, I’d made a decision. I was never going to be the coolest kid in school, nor would I wear the most expensive clothes or date the popular boys. But I was going to be me. And instead of letting people make me feel bad about myself, I was going to surround myself only with people who were kind, even if they were outcasts, too. And furthermore, I was going to stand up for people I saw being picked on.