T.R. Shockley
Elementary and Middle School

Throughout school life, I broke more bones than anyone did. First, I broke a right index finger, falling out of a tree house built with a friend. Later, steering my bike by only using the handle bar streamers, I broke three toes in my left foot. Just before entering the seventh grade, while riding sidebar on a friend’s bike, a foot caught in the front wheel spokes, another autograph trophy, this time for my left wrist.

In the ninth grade, I cracked the heel in my left foot. Don, Mike, Aerial and I sneaked into my a friend’s backyard pool area while they were away. Showing off, as I was rather inclined to do then, I jumped, not from the diving board, but from the guesthouse roof, and … I almost made it. The twenty-foot flight though the air was bliss until my left heel hit the side of the pool deck, as I tumbled into the pool. The doctor said I should have a cast, but I couldn’t see anyway to tell my parents how it happened. Even to this day, the mild pain of my heel during the winter months reminds me of that blissful flight through the air and the screaming pain encapsulated within air bubbles, as I rolled to the bottom of the pool, my friends quickly by my side to help.

Victoria Baeger Daffner
Fourth or Fifth Grade

It was the teasing by the other elementary school kids that solidified my shyness, and has kept me from easily making friends ever since. Interestingly enough, I still remember trying to lash back at the kids who teased me.

It was valentine’s day, and I sent a card to one boy, calling him a “regurgitated eggplant.” It must have been fourth or fifth grade; I remember how he read it, giggled and showed it to one of the “prima bulliettes”, and then looked at me, puzzled, as if he just realized the hatred I had for all of them. Almost as if he had joined in the “fun” around him, and suddenly saw that I was not having “fun” with these girls. I cannot remember much more about him, but I think he might even have stopped.

The problem was the girls never did. Maybe they never do, as I have met the same type of girl over and over again. The girls who do only see problems in others, who need to gossip about or ridicule others — do they even know they are doing this because of their own subconscious inferiority? I cannot give them credit for cognitive reasoning. I just leave them to their tabloids and cell phone chatter.

Solveig Pederson Zarubin
Ages 6, 8, and 15ish

Scene: me, a little tomboy-looking girl, with short brown hair which was long and blond fairly recently. Sitting in a first grade classroom, with a worksheet in front of me.

I already knew how to read, and I could read well before kindergarten; it seemed like I’d been able to read forever. Many others in the class either weren’t reading or were reading much more slowly than I was. The teacher had given us a worksheet to do, and was walking around watching us work.

I had already finished the assignment. I was curious what everyone else was doing — and how did they do it? Which parts were they still working on? Nosiness that I still have today! So with nothing else to do, I was looking around…

And heard my name — and then the teacher sternly saying, “Eyes on your own paper!”

I didn’t realize she was talking to me, or what she was talking about.

“Not me!” I thought. “I was already done!” How could I be cheating? I was just looking around to see how everyone else was doing.

I’m pretty sure I got in trouble for that, and one lesson I think I unconsciously got from this was: “Getting too far ahead of the group, being too smart, or otherwise standing out from the crowd — can be trouble!”

Later on in second or third grade, we would be assigned to read a story from our reading books. It always felt like the teacher gave a humongous amount of time to read a story that was only three or four pages. I could always finish it really quickly, but then had nothing to do. Or nothing to do without calling attention that I was done so abnormally early — I thought that if I started reading or doing something else it would be so obvious that I was done way earlier than everyone else.

I didn’t want to seem different or weird. I thought that everyone must notice that I was done and think I had cheated on the reading somehow, like my first grade teacher had assumed.

“She must have been skimming, or just skipping parts. She couldn’t have read it already!”

So I would page back a page or two when I was done -– carefully checking around me to make sure I matched the page everyone else was on. I could be a bit ahead, but not too much. Then I would re-read that page, and then look around and see if I needed to re-read it again, until more people were done. I’d see people triumphantly finishing and then being happy to be “done” — yet I had been done for a long time and felt like I had needed to wait for them.

In upper elementary and moving on to middle school, I realized that raising my hand every time I knew the answer to a question could also be dangerous. I was worried about what people would think: “she’s a know-it-all” “She’s a goody-goody teacher’s pet…”

And I didn’t really want to raise my hand for every single question, that would get annoying to everyone. And isn’t it better for the others to have to answer the questions too?

Even though I knew the answers to most or all of the questions, I would try to figure out how many times I could/should raise my hand without attracting too much attention. Every third question? Once or twice per class? Just wait for the teacher to call on me?

This always felt very unnatural but also much safer.. Eventually I was thinking so much about how to spread out my participation, that I wound up just not participating most of the time in class. Safer, but also quite mind-numbing as a constant practice.

In high school, the grade in several classes, including U.S. History, was based on class participation. The history teacher was also rather intimidating, making it even harder to respond in class, although he eventually became one of my favorite teachers. Because I really wanted to keep a good grade, and I was so used to not participating, I had to really consciously plan that I would raise my hand at least once or twice every class.

Even now, as an adult, sometimes I still need to work on “raising my hand” (especially in a large group) and being comfortable with achieving and showing my talents.

Having good role models at work, joining public speaking/leadership groups like Toastmasters, and increasing my self-confidence by trying new things and succeeding at them has really helped this.

I still have trouble speaking out and expressing myself, especially with new people, but I think I’ve gotten better. (One co-worker told me after I joined Toastmasters – “When I first met you, you were really shy and you really didn’t speak up too much. But something happened - You seem
like a *real person* now!”). Um…Thanks, I think!

I really admire kids I see now, who understand that it is okay to be smart and to let your abilities show, without being afraid of being accused of cheating or “showing off.” Kids who are confident in their abilities and who have been encouraged by their parents and teachers to develop them.

Emily Willingham
Middle and High School

When I was 13 years old, I went to boarding school. My parents, fed up with the failure of their liberal social experiment that involved sending their freakish, too-young, and too-weird oldest daughter to public school for eight years, had given up and opted for a posh boarding school that promised all the best in higher ed.

Public school had been a complete misery for me, starting with a friendless stretch in elementary school that involved daily taunting from the mean girls and continuing into middle school that seemed like a daily existential nightmare that would never let me out alive.

I literally was threatened every single day — every single day — with promises that the threatener was going to “kick my ass.” People called me on the phone at home to make this threat. People left me notes in my locker, whispered it to me in class, accosted me as I emerged from my oblivious father’s car. Girls tricked me with deliberate offers of friendship, only to run away giggling with their friends at what a gullible ass I was. How dare I even believe that they would want to befriend the likes of me?

I lived in complete, daily terror. Why they wanted to kick my ass was unclear. I was small (then). I was a year younger than everyone else, having started first grade at age five because I’d been reading since age three. I was unquestionably strange, reading things no one else would or could read, thinking about things that no one in that school was anywhere near thinking about. I was socially clueless and never could figure out how other children associated with each other. I guess I do know why they wanted to kick my ass. With all that going for me, I may as well have been walking around with a big red target on it.

It wasn’t that my parents didn’t know about the bullying. I was in one of those situations where defending myself invariably got ME in trouble, and my parents got the phone calls. My father went so far as to teach me to box. I guess he thought it would be best to leave me in this godawful, godforsaken public school in Waco, Texas, a middle school so hardened that the principal was compelled to come on the PA system the first day of school to remind students not to smoke in the hallways—and I was being left there to box my way out of it.

Straight from this terrifying milieu to a boarding school full of upper-class snobs? You might think that the latter was an improvement. It’s true that I didn’t have people kicking my ass every day. These better-educated, smarter, richer people simply had slightly more clever ways of messing with me. And it was worse in the end because I actually had to live with them. My daily existential hell of middle school had become a No Exit of an entrapped freshman year, surrounded by people who seemed hell-bent on making me miserable night and day. And even 27 years later, as I look back, the only real reason I can divine, the only trigger for this systematic, targeted behavior, is that they were just cruel people. As we learned from The Simpsons, sometimes, people (and elephants) are just assholes.

I emerged from this crucible of fear and emotional torture at age 14, no longer at boarding school, back at a public school in Waco, Texas. Once again. But it was a “better” public school (i.e., full of kids from the wealthy side of town).

And somehow, from pretty much the day I started, I walked across the threshold with a new attitude best summed up as, “Bring it on. I really don’t give a s*** what you think.” I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how it coalesced for me at age 14. I don’t know why the onset was so sudden. I wished I’d been able to adopt it much earlier. And it was this attitude that left me alone at the dance during that first homecoming my tenth-grade year at my new school.

I knew almost no one. Homecoming followed soon after school started, and in a fit of…something…independence? self-assertion? hope? … I went, alone. I dressed myself in a nice two-piece outfit. I stood alone in the stands and watched the football game, I went to the dance and sat, alone, through the entire night as my peers, some of whom had been attending school together since kindergarten, danced the night away, locked in speechless, adolescent embrace. I never spoke a word to anyone the entire night.

I held up. I told myself I was happy, it was fine, I was just looking at things, an observer, OK to be on my own. And it was true. It’s how I’d always been happiest, sitting silently with my own thoughts, watching people who were so different from me they almost seemed like aliens, observing their behaviors, feeling more aware of everything around me than any of them.

So, I was happy.

Until I got into my parents’ car after the dance, and my mother — occasionally known for not being the button on the cap of discretion — asked me irritably, “Why did you even come to this dance? You’re all alone, and everyone else has a date.”

With those pointed words, she nailed any moxy I’d mustered up about the whole thing to a cold wall of reality. I crumpled. Inwardly.

Until I remembered that sitting there in those stands, alone, watching and observing and taking mental notes, was just about the most fun I’d had in a school environment in years. Until I remembered that I hadn’t myself made any of the decisions in my life that had dragged me through the mud and terror of daily bullying and torture. Until I recalled that attending this dance alone had been my very first salvo in asserting myself as Me, as an individual, not a fearful, terrorized creature creeping into school every day, hoping to go unnoticed. Until I started saying to myself, like a mantra, “Bring it on. I don’t give a s*** what you think.”

Stephanie Yuhas
First Grade

One morning in first grade, the principal made an important announcement. “There is a severe head lice epidemic,” he grumbled through the loudspeaker. “The nurse will call classrooms in one at a time tomorrow to check for head lice.”

Kelly, the pig-tailed girl that hated my guts from the moment she saw me in kindergarten, turned and gave me an evil smile, “Maybe when they’re checking for lice, the nurse will also see that Stephanie has the COOOTIES!” she snarled.

The entire class laughed. The teacher shushed everyone to listen to the rest of the morning announcements.

I looked over at my friend, Alia, who glanced at me sympathetically. Alia and I knew each other from our special ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Kelly frequently picked on Alia as well for wearing a religious head covering to school, so we bonded through the shared torment.

“Alia,” I whispered. “Do you tink I have dah cooties?”

She shrugged, “I heard Jimmy B. got dah cooties so dey sent him away.”

“Do you know vhat cooties are?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she replied. “But dey sound yucky!”

Samantha, a girl that claimed to know everything about a whole lot of nothing, couldn’t resist chiming in. “You have the cooties if you wear all the same clothes all time like Stephanie does.”

I looked down at my clothes. I just wore what my mom gave me; I didn’t know there was a problem.

Patrick, the kid that was always picked first during gym class, chimed in. “You have the cooties when you have ugly brown spots on your skin like THIS!” he said, as he pointed to a small mole on my face.

“Ew, you touched her, now YOU have the cooties!” yelled Kelly.

“Nu-uh!” Patrick protested. “Last summer, my doctor gave me the ‘Circle-Circle Dot-Dot Cootie Shot’. Now I can’t catch cooties, EVER!” He stuck his tongue out at her.

“QUIET DOWN CLASS!” the teacher ordered. The morning announcements still droned on. I looked down and nervously scribbled on a piece of paper with an orange colored pencil.

“Alia probably has the cooties, too. I can tell because you and Stephanie can’t say words right.”

“I think Kelly’s dah one with dah cooties,” Alia muttered under her breath.

I kept to myself for the rest of the day and tried not to cry. By the time Anyu came to pick me up from school, my face was flooded with tears.

“Everyone says I have the cooties and I don’t want to go away like Jimmy B*!” I blubbered. “I need a shot from the doctor!” I thrust a piece of paper into my mother’s hands. It’s a bit faded today, so here is the transcription of what I wrote:

KUTYS
Brown spots and if you wear the same clothes all the time. If you can not say words right. Patrick Chan can’t get it he had dot shot in his arms.

This was a prescription for disaster. My mother launched into a complete panic attack.

“Oh, my GOD! Did you put your mouth on da vaterfountain?”

“No!”

“Did you use somevon else’s sippycup?

“No!”

“Did you shit down on dah toilet?”

“Um…”

“DON’T shit down on dah toilet, Stephie! You’ll catch DISEASE!”

I continued to bawl.

“I can’t handle it!” she screamed. She immediately called the school and hollered into the phone to anyone who would listen. “Do I need to take her to the Emergency Room? We don’t have insurance!”

The person on the other end of the line must have thought my mother was taking about the head lice epidemic, so they explained the lice checking procedure. As soon she hung up, she called Nagymama into the room, and sat me down underneath the hottest floor lamp on the planet. They hovered above me with a magnifying glass, pulling and poking at my head for what seemed like hours. If they even found so much as a piece of lint, they put it on a piece of paper at watched it for ten minutes at a time. Eventually, they gave up and Nagymama made me dinner. Instead of explaining The Truth about Cooties or even how to avoid head lice, she immediately called her sister to complain about how difficult it is to be a mother.

I went into school the next day and got my head checked – no lice, no cooties, nothing! Ironically, after the visit to the nurse, Patrick was immediately pulled out of class and was mysteriously absent from school for the next few days.

I guess his cootie shot didn’t work after all.

[*The truth is, Jimmy B’s parents got a divorce, so he moved to Florida with his mom. He does not nor did he ever have the cooties.]

This tale originally appeared on American Goulash, which is a story-sharing project much like Can I Sit With You?, and which we encourage you to visit and support. -Eds

Trish Lange
Elementary School

I was basically a walking bullseye my entire childhood. In elementary school, I was foot taller than everyone else including some of the teachers. I wore leg braces for several years which required me to wear big, clunky shoes all the time … even to bed. I was a brain, a geek. Other girls had posters of the New Kids on the Block, I had posters of Kirk and Spock.

The other girls either taunted me or just flat out ignored me. The guys taunted, mocked, pushed, and shoved me. I never had a date. I went to Prom by myself.

My parents tried their best to support me. They’d always say, “Someday, all this will make sense. God must have a reason why you’re going through all this. Just try to hang on.” I thought they were full of it, but had little choice but to hang on by my fingernails until I could escape to college.

And escape I did. Free to really be me, I flourished. I had wonderful friends, met a wonderful man (my now-husband), and graduated with highest honors.

Fifteen years on, through a turn of events, I am now working in the same school district that I attended as a child and that my own children now attend. Teachers have come and gone, buildings have changed, but unfortunately, kids have not. Predators still circle the classroom or the playground. Smelling the blood in the water, they still seek out the weakest prey in the crowd.

I am no longer prey, but remember so well what it’s like to be surrounded by sharks. God’s reason for my childhood torment has become abundantly clear. All the pain I endured has made me a steel safety cage for my own children and for those other tiny fish in the sea, strong enough to help ward off any kind of shark attack.

Stephanie Chin
First Grade through Fifth Grade

When I was in second grade, we were tested and tracked into advanced placement classes, regular classes, and remedial classes. I was eight. I was put into the advanced class, and remember that it was a special thing, to be among the students who got to touch actual human brains and do what I later realized were the same types of logic games as on the LSAT.

And this after I had entered first grade refusing to read more than necessary. I recall that at the beginning of first grade, I was one of the worst readers. Of the four siblings in my family, I learned to read the earliest in my life, but didn’t enjoy the process and saw it as a chore until my first grade teacher, Mrs. Winer, opened the fun part of reading to me. At the end of that year, I was reading at a fourth grade level, and was admitted to the elite group of students who tested well enough to receive extra training. I even recall the finger exercises we did during the test that determined our placements. Fingers up, down, then out to the side, and again.

In fifth grade, everything changed. Once again, a test determined our classes level: advanced, regular, and remedial. Again, I was put in the advanced class, but this time it was different. All five local elementary schools funneled into one school for fifth and sixth grade, and so students were reshuffled. Some students who hadn’t been in the advanced classes were moved in based on their test scores, and others were moved out.

I remember two boys from my fifth grade class who had been a part of the advanced classes in their elementary school asking why they weren’t on the list for the advanced students’ enrichment classes. My fifth grade teacher was new. The boys convinced her that it might be a mistake, so she sent them down with us. I remember watching the enrichment teacher tell them that they were not allowed in, that there was no mistake, that they were no longer a part of the class. I was ten.

It didn’t make any sense to me, still doesn’t. Just based off a test, a single test, a single score, or perhaps two, one for math and one for English, their lives were detoured off the track they thought they were on and put on a different one, where they were told they were ordinary, and not smart enough.

At the time, I thought it was stupid, and I still think it’s stupid. I understand that a school sometimes has to make hard choices, but I don’t agree with the choices they made. I have since heard that the school has changed their tracking process so that any student can request to be a part of more advanced classes, and reassessment will only come if they do poorly.

In fifth grade, I had no way to show my confusion. It means a lot to me that the image is still vivid in my mind, of the white-haired woman barring entry to boys who I saw as no different from me, not understanding why I was allowed entry and they were not.

I acted out. I had no better way to show my misunderstanding, which I now think of as cognitive dissonance. I stopped doing work. Just stopped. I didn’t see the point. My life was determined by a test, not by my grades. I got lots of D’s. I was still smart, and didn’t fail, they wouldn’t fail me, but I wasn’t motivated. I didn’t see why it was important to do the work. In fact, I still don’t.

I recently learned that my mother had talked to my fifth grade teacher about it, and she had told her that I was just going through a phase, that I would come out of it.

I remember being asked by teachers about my work, where it was, whether or not I did it. And in response, I would “numb out,” a phrase that I have recently learned is used by mental health professionals to explain a phenomenon by which cutters and others who self-injure as a short-term coping mechanism to deal with their emotional issues. At the time, I thought of it as going “catatonic,” which I must have learned from a movie or a book. I would stare off into space, usually looking at the floor, and zone out so that their voices were far away. Sometimes, I would feel nauseated and need to throw up.

My parents tried to intercede. My father sat over me while I did my homework, but even if I did it, sometimes, I just wouldn’t turn it in. I would do everything last-minute and shoddily, using old standing cardboard pieces that my sister had used for her projects. I just didn’t care.

One time, my mother was so upset, she didn’t know what to do with me. For the first time ever, she grabbed me and I’m pretty sure that she slapped me, the only time in her life, something she’d promised herself she would never do, because she didn’t want to be like her mother. And I was ten.

Life didn’t make sense, and in many ways, I think it still doesn’t. People do what they will do. I eventually decided, on my own, that I wanted to find value in my own life, and that I wanted to plan for the future, and that meant getting more engaged with my schoolwork, because that would impact my future. I chose my life and my meaning because no one else could tell me why I should do what I was told. I triumphed when I got into Berkeley and left. I had never belonged in the boxes those tests had put me in.

Live life for yourself.

Liann Walborsky
Middle School

I am 43 years old. By all accounts, my time in junior high school (now called middle school) was a long, long time ago. Why is it that I can still remember quite clearly the awfulness of my peers during those years? 

Let’s start at the beginning. I changed schools in sixth grade. I had been attending a Jewish day school where my parents were unhappy about my level of secular education. They decided to send me to a true “prep” school — one replete with lacrosse, loads of preppy handbook wannabees and kids just itching to find someone who was different from them.

I was definitely in what could be termed an “awkward” phase — although looking back at pictures from that time, we all were. I was on the smaller side, had awful short hair, glasses and braces. Not much to work with. There were a few of us who were new that year and we all sort of hung out together.

The other girls, many of whom had been together since first grade, were extremely cliquey and exclusive. This was also the year that co-ed roller skating parties were all the rage, as was “going out” with a boy. Going out didn’t mean dating. It was more of a way of telling the world that you liked one another and would hang out at recess together. Needless to say, no one asked me to “go out” that year. 

Beginning in sixth grade, boys would walk up to me, put an arm around me and tell me they liked me (not). I guess nowadays this would be termed some sort of sexual harassment, but hey, in the 70s those days were far far away. I was also the butt of some sort of joke where  a song by The Kinks (remember them?) called “Girl, you really got me going” was changed to “Liann” instead of “Yeah.” Oh, the horror. I remember in a seventh grade science class one of the very cool boys (I think he has since done a stint in rehab and has never held a job) playing the game “hangman” on a piece of paper while we waited for the teacher to arrive. His puzzle was “Liann is ugly.” 

And then there were the girls. There was one, who for some reason made it her mission in life to talk about me in front of my face, and due to her semi-popularity would make sure that her friends did not include me. (To this day, I have not forgotten this person and would stil not be particulary unhappy to see her looking old and miserable.) Girls would whisper about me and make faces at me while I was standing nearby. Not sure what there was to say. No one really knew me or had any idea what I did or thought about anything. 

Truthfully, I’m not sure how I got through it. I know my mom would try role-playing with me and had me talk to a counselor at the school. Somehow by ninth grade things improved. I got my braces off, got contact lenses (changed my life), and grew my hair long. I was also lucky enough to spend some summers during those years at a camp far away where people actually liked me. I am sure this was a tremendous help.

When I talk to kids now (like a 13-year-old who babysits for me) I have great empathy for what she is going through. I have certainly moved on and built a life, but I remember with great clarity how I felt and how awful I thought it was to be in such a position.

We’ve been so distracted by publishing two books and flitting among the associated events that it took us a few beats to realize: it’s been over a year since we asked people to send us Can I Sit With You? stories.

Please, send us your Can I Sit With You? stories!

We know you have a wonderful tale or two from your school years, because so many of you have popped up at our readings — or emailed us — and told us so.

And who can resist the feel-good hat trick of getting a story published while helping to raise money for kids with special needs plus helping school kids in general feel less socially flummoxed?

So, damn it, tell us about your memorable social experiences in elementary and middle school. We want to share all kinds of stories: good or bad, triumphant or wrenching.

We always love to feature tales from former outcasts and underdogs, but would also like to hear more from those of you whose social seas were complicated by undercurrents like special needs and learning disorders, eating disorders, and gender or sexual identity. And then there’s the funny. We also appreciate the funny, and the wry.

Got it? Good. Here is your assignment:

1. Read our Mission Statement
2. Read our Submission Guidelines
3. Write your story (we’re only asking for 1000 words)
4. Send it to us!

If your story is a good one but you’re worried about making it shiny and slick, no worries. We are skilled editors, and will spit-polish as needed.

Don’t make us rap your knuckles with a ruler, pass you a nasty note, throw spit balls at you, or make fun of you on Facebook. Send us your story, and send it now.

In gratitude,

Shannon & Jennifer

Michael Procopio
Kindergarten

This is an excerpt from Michael’s essay The Cupcake: Through a Frosting, Darkly, which is about his overall distaste for said confections.

My first experience with birthday cupcakes left a bad taste in my mouth. A girl, who I shall call “Karen” (because that is her real name), was given a special 6th birthday party in our kindergarten class. Her mother was our ever-present teacher’s aide. For the special event, Karen’s mother had baked cupcakes into Scoopy’s ice cream cones, which would, I suppose, make them cone cakes. Karen’s was, unsurprisingly, more elaborate than the other cupcakes. Her name was even embossed on the cone. The rest of us got random names, none of which matched.

It is more than likely possible that I was jealous of the fact that, since Karen’s birthday fell within the school year and had a mother in a position of influence among the kindergarten-teaching set, she could be singled out for specialness, just as she was often awarded the title of “Wake-up Fairy”, which was bestowed upon the best napper in class on any given day. Snigger all you like, but I was a lousy napper and therefore, never allowed to play that particular rôle.

So it was with the most satisfying schadenfreude, that I witnessed the birthday girl bite off the tip of her tongue as she tucked into her special cupcake. The rest of us were shocked into silence when she screamed, the blood pooling over the frosting of her dessert as she opened her mouth to cry and dripping down the white apron-front of her party dress.

By high school, Karen was running around with the Heavy Metal crowd and, I believe, referring to herself as a “headbanger”. I’ve often wondered if that first taste of blood-tinged frosting influenced her future tastes. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.