I was 14, in eighth grade, 1966.

The year when Nobody Liked Me.

I still remember the day that I found out Nobody Liked Me. I was working in the school library, shelving books, along with several other girls. These girls were the ones I hung out with, the ones who were my friends. They were chattering away about what they were bringing to a Christmas party being hosted by another girl from the class.

“What are you bringing to the party?” someone — I forget who — asked me.

“I didn’t get invited,” I said.

That was the first hurt, I think. All my other friends got invited to the party; I didn’t. I didn’t say a word about my lack of an invitation until I had to, there in the library, in front of the other girls and Sister Leon. I had to say, “I didn’t get invited.”

No one said anything, until Theresa finally spoke up.

“None of the boys likes you, you know,” she said helpfully.

Another sting.

“I don’t care if the boys don’t like me,” I said. (But I did.)

“Nobody else likes you either,” said Theresa.

I bit my lip and just tried not to cry. I kept on shelving books. No one else spoke up.

Later on, I tried to invite my other friend Linda to come over, or play on the playground, or something. All I really remember is that she said no, and I said, “So do you hate me too?”

And she didn’t reply.

I wasn’t overtly bullied. No one teased me or threw things at me or played ugly pranks on me. I was simply the Girl Nobody Liked. For the rest of the year I drew into myself. I didn’t talk much or try to do anything with anybody else. I just existed, doing my schoolwork and speaking when spoken to and trying not to draw attention to myself.

Sister Leon lectured the class one day on Christian Charity and Treating Other People Well, and I knew she was actually scolding the girls for shunning me. I was so embarrassed. When you just want to disappear, any attention, even when it’s on your behalf, is awful.

I began to cry myself to sleep every night. One night my mother heard me and asked what was wrong.

“Nobody likes me!” I wailed. I sobbed it all out to my poor mother, who held me tight and told me it would be all right.

“How?” I asked.

“We’ll have a graduation party,” she said. (In Catholic school, elementary school went through eighth grade; high school started in ninth.)

I was terribly skeptical about this tactic. What if no one came?

But Mom planned the whole thing: a Saturday afternoon party, a barbeque, Pop would cook hamburgers and hot dogs, we’d put the record player outside so the kids could dance, boys and girls, the entire class.

And like a miracle, it worked. Everyone accepted and everyone came, and they all had a blast, and all of a sudden I was no longer the Girl Nobody Liked.

But I have never forgotten that awful year, never. I’ve thought about many times over the years. I wonder if I overreacted to a silly girl being mean. I wonder if Theresa and Linda and the other girls realize how I felt that year. I wonder if Sister Leon really knew what was going on. But I do know this: forty-four fucking years later and I still remember that afternoon.

“Nobody likes you.”

BlogHer, a fantastic, growing, online community, is featuring Can I Sit With You? as part of their Back-to-School series. This is really exciting for us, and for the Can I Sit With You? community.

We are using the comments section on the BlogHer post to keep tabs on the stories people are talking about. Then we’ll take the best of those stories and feature them on this site, and  include them in in the third, forthcoming Can I Sit With You? book. Yes! We are doing it again!

Right now we’re featuring

• SJ Alexander: All’s Fair in Love and Mucus
• Michael Procopio: The Sound of Musicals
• Sabrina Enayatulla: If it Wasn’t for Caller ID, I’d Still Be Dialing Strong

Please join in the conversation over on BlogHer and add your own story, and tell your friends so they can be a part of the next book.

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Hope you’re having a great summer.

Jen

When I was in elementary school, maybe fourth or fifth grade, Liz Claiborne handbags suddenly became The Thing. Specifically, the kind with the tiny raised triangle logo covering the outside. As I recall, they cost about 30 or 40 bucks which, at that time and in that place, was quite a lot of money for a purse, especially for a little girl.

My parents tried, to some degree, to keep me from getting caught up in the materialism that often affects preteens, but all the popular girls had Liz Claiborne handbags and, being a distinctly unpopular child myself, of course I wanted one so bad I could taste it. At Christmas, they finally relented, and on Christmas morning, I unwrapped my very own brand-new Liz Claiborne. It was the first designer item I’d ever owned, and I could not have been happier. I couldn’t wait to take it to school.

The first day back to school after Christmas break, I walked into math class with the Liz slung over my shoulder. I sat down at my desk, and I could hear the popular girls whispering and giggling. I thought they were admiring my new purse. I guess I should’ve known something was rotten in Denmark.

“Hey, Kelly,” one of them finally piped up. “I love your new Liz.”

“Thanks!” I said. “I got it for Christmas.” I tried to look nonchalant.

“When are you gonna take it to church?” she asked pointedly.

I was confused. “I, uh … I took it to Mass yesterday … ?”

“No, I mean, when are you gonna take it to a real church?” She and the other girls burst out laughing.

That pretty much sums up my earliest experiences with people of different faiths than my own.

I still remember that moment vividly. I can feel my face burning, and I can feel the sting as I tried to blink back tears.

My parents came from different faith backgrounds. My mom’s family is, by and large, Methodist. In fact, some of our ancestors were Methodist Circuit Riders (and more than one of them is named John Wesley). My dad’s family was mostly Catholic. Because of negative experiences in their childhoods, neither of my parents have much use for churchgoing, and no one else except for my brothers (who are Catholic) attended church regularly, either. Nevertheless, my parents did their best to see to my religious education (my dad and I read my children’s Bible cover to cover a few times over the years), and I guess that education must have included some Catholic doctrine. I say “must have” because it was quite some time before I learned that not every Christian believes these things to be true.

At last, my mom decided that some good ol’ fashioned church would do me some good, so she sent me every week to Methodist Sunday School. After Sunday School, my friend Angela’s mother would pick me up on the corner outside the church and drive me and her four kids to Mass.

—-

If you’re at all less idealistic than my parents and I, then you can guess that this did not work out very well. More than once, an adult felt the need to tell me that they were praying for me because I was not a Christian, I worshipped statues and was thus going to hell.

A version of this essay was originally published on BachelorGirl.net.

It was the first day of third grade. Leaves of all shapes, sizes, and colors hid the ground beneath us. Fall had swept in and ended the two-month summer break. All the kids were looking for new friends. People to hang out with during recess, the one fifteen minute period of freedom in their days. The shyest kids got up their confidence to make new friends, hoping to find friendships that would last forever and ever.

When a kid didn’t have a friend to share recess with, they ended up miserable. On this particular day my friend was absent. I scanned the playgroup looking for something to do. I eyed a girl with blonde streaks brushed through her top hairs and brown underneath. She was short, wearing pink camouflage pants and jumping to “Miss Merry Mac.” Two other girls twirled the jump rope. The rope went faster and faster, dirt flying up around them, when I walked up to them and the rope stopped. The girls fell silent.

The girl who had been jumping rope turned around to see what was going on. She saw a tall girl with an awkward brown bob haircut and bangs straight across her forehead saying, “May I jump rope with you guys?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be inside eating lunch?”

“No.” I said, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

“But you’re a fourth grader.”

“No I’m not.”

“Okay then, lets play Watermelon.”

Just then, the lunch bell rang; the girl and I walked next to each other, sat down, and ate lunch. This was the beginning.

That same afternoon I sat in the middle of the bus; seat seven on the left side. I waited for he bus to leave school so I could spill out the day to my mom. Blonde hair stuck over the top of the seat in row two. It was the same blonde hair from recess. I breathed in a large gulp of air and stood up. I walked the thin isle of the school bus, hands bumping along the seats. “Hey, you wanna come sit with me?”

“Sure,” she picked up her floral purple backpack and followed her back to the seat.

“Usually I steal Jeremy’s Gameboy and play Pirates of the Caribbean, you want to?”

“You’re a freak!”

“I’m assuming that’s a no right?”

“I’ve got some magazines, shall we?” she pulled out a large stack of “Time for Kids” magazines.

“Seriously?”

We both laughed and opened the first one. By the end of the bus ride every single person in all fourteen magazines had glasses and a mustache.

After weeks of “Time for Kids” and long bus rides we decided we wanted to make a difference in our school. Everything was divided. Boys played wall ball, and girls played tetherball. It was time for a girl to play wall ball!

November seventh, the bell rang and we raced outside past the wall ball courts and around the brick wall to the cart. We grabbed the first red bouncy ball we could see.

“Aw man!” the boys around us moaned, after all why would a girl play wall ball? We stood by ourselves and practiced on a nearby court. The next week we put ourselves to the test. We rushed out the doors and straight into line, ready to play our very first real game of wall ball. The blonde went first. She didn’t win. Then it was my turn. I beat the other guy, causing quite a riot. “You lost to a girl!” The boy walked off sulking. We were the best at the game, but every time we won someone got put down for losing to a girl. Other girls saw us playing and created their own version of wall ball, and by fifth grade more than half the girls at school were playing wall ball.

Wall ball was just the beginning; we eventually became the tomboys of the school. We wore baggy tee shirts and pants. We were both extremely athletic and in the fifth grade, we cut our hair. We came to school the following Monday with beanies on. We pulled them off in the classroom, surprise we both had buzz cuts. Disgusted looks arose on the faces of the students surrounding us. The teacher attempted to be supportive, but ended up making it worse. People asked us constantly why we wanted to do such a thing. Our haircuts made them uncomfortable. We struggled, but knew we were both dealing with the same awkward stares, confusion, and gossip.

A week following the haircut, we signed up for basketball. We walked in on the first practice and the coaches immediately adored us. We got into a habit of wearing miss-matched socks. On our birthdays, the coaches wore miss-matched socks in celebration of our friendship.
They took us to a college basketball game, and stood up for us in tough situations with referees. Once a referee attempted to prevent us from playing because we “weren’t really girls.” The coaches talked quietly off to the side to the referee and he apologized. That basketball season we lost all of our games, but it didn’t matter. The coaches’ influence made those three months memorable.

On the very last day of fifth grade we laughed and laughed on the bus ride home, celebrating our three years together in elementary school. Many girls didn’t accept us and talked behind our backs. Our families sometimes disapproved. But no one could change the way we wanted to look and act, it was who we were. As my friend’s stop arrived we hugged good-bye, our new middle school lives were about to begin.

Right before Valentine’s Day, my orthopedist decided that I should be hospitalized for tests. I’d been having crippling low-back pain for several weeks and the rest, pain medicine, and muscle relaxants he’d prescribed were not making me feel any better. I spent a week in the hospital undergoing a variety of tests to rule out structural abnormalities, cancer, and any other problems that could be causing the pain. They never found anything. The ultimate diagnosis: acute stress.

The year was 1983. I was eleven years old.

This is the story of me and my bullies. All these years later, a whole lifetime, and I’ve already used half a box of tissue preparing to write about it. I was just a little girl, deserving of love and protection, like every other child, but I didn’t know that. I thought I was different: unworthy, flawed, and fundamentally unlikeable. My bullies, and the adults who allowed their behavior to continue, taught me lessons that I’m still unlearning nearly 30 years later.

Full disclosure: I am changing names for obvious reasons. Also, emotional pain and time have worked together to make my memory pretty hazy. This is a true story to the absolute best of my ability.

When I showed up at Madison Middle School in August, 1982, I was scared. And while I think that probably every 6th grader at Madison was scared that day, I was unique in my level of terror. We’ll get back to the reasons for that later, but for now, just know that I was shaking in my summer sandals like there was a salivating tiger on my left and a tsunami wave rolling in on my right.

I went to my classes and listened to the rules. So many rules! Do you remember how it was, how they threatened you and swore that they wouldn’t help you no matter what, because for God’s sake you’re not babies anymore and if you think this is like elementary school then forget about it and do you have any idea what it’s like in the REAL WORLD?!? Well, do you? Rules for the bathroom. Rules for the lockers. Don’t be late. Don’t forget your book. Always have your paper, your pencil. Don’t chew gum, don’t talk, don’t run (but don’t be late!), don’t eat, don’t swear. Do your homework; no, not like that! Put your name here, the date there (write it out), the period number in that place. Use pencil, no always use pen, no never use pen. That’s the wrong paper! Did you write in your book? Put a cover on it!

Here’s what I heard: Shut up, sit down, and if I never have any reason to notice you, or even glance in your direction, then you’ll be just fine. Teachers have no niceness to share; being ignored is the best you can hope for.

I was all alone. The Albuquerque Public Schools have a different system now, whereby all kids from several elementary schools feed to one middle school, and then several middle schools feed one high school. Not so back then. My elementary school fed four middle schools, with just a tiny handful of us going from Zuni to Madison. There were no familiar faces around me; I was surrounded by strangers in every class. My family might as well have moved across the country over the summer.

There were seven class periods per day. My 6th period class was PE. I had kind of looked forward to “changing out” because it seemed grown-up, something that you saw in the movies. Obviously I had a warped sense of what’s glamorous! And thus we arrive at problem number 1, the first thing that my bullies found to target about me: no breasts. I mean none. Nada, zilch. I didn’t know it then (and would have been devastated if I had), but I was still a year away from any action at all in the puberty department. But to be honest, I might as well have been wearing a big ole’, flashing neon sign on my head that said Pick on me! I am your willing victim!

I always had a hard time making friends, had struggled socially from the very beginning. My parents like to tell the story of my first day at pre-school. There was a one-way mirror so parents could observe, and they were stunned by what they say: me, a little girl who would not stop chattering, ever, while at home, sitting quietly and observing the other children. Silent. I was always terrified in social situations, and so excruciatingly sensitive to every perceived slight, even at that young age, that I usually believed that everyone around me hated me.

As I moved through elementary school, every year the kids were a little less tolerant of difference, a little less willing to befriend, or at least leave alone, the shy, awkward girl in the corner. Complicating matters was the fact that I was very intelligent and had a huge vocabulary for a child my age. This was probably due to the fact that my parents were both well-educated and used their own wide knowledge of words when speaking to me. I used my big words and that, coupled with my shyness, earned me a reputation as “stuck up.” It’s laughable, now, that I was accused of being the very thing that I’m most NOT. (God, that’s an awful sentence. Sorry ’bout that.) All I wanted was some friends, some kids to talk to me and play with me at recess.

The most ridiculous piece of this particular part of the story is this: my second grade teacher told my parents that I would have more friends if they could make me stop using so many big words. True story, and a damn sad example of an “educator.”

I always managed to make a few friends, but never more than 2 or 3 at a time, and I was consistently a target of teasing by the girls in my grade. The worst bullying I endured while I was a student at Zuni happened when I was in 3rd grade. Two 5th grade girls started to mess with me on the bus every day on the way home from school. They spit in my hair, over and over, all the way home, to the point that I arrived home with saliva dripping onto my shoulders.

Gross, right? Here’s what’s grosser: the bus driver either didn’t notice or didn’t care, because she never said a word. Neither of my parents called or went to the school to insist that something be done, nor did they ever (not once) drive me home from school to spare me the torment. No other child on a bus jammed full of students ever tried to intervene. Only my little sister, in kindergarten at the time, tried to defend me.

I was in third grade in 1980, so 30 years ago now. I still remember the names of both those girls, can still feel the hot shame that nested behind my face when they taunted me and spat on me.

My elementary school experiences had primed the pump; I was more prepared for my middle school bullies than I was for middle school literature and science.

There were three of them: Kathy, Karen, and Tanya. I don’t know if they knew each other before 6th grade or if they fell together that year, but they joined forces and made me their common enemy. It was a campaign of terror that, while not unique to middle school girls, is certainly most common among them. Virtually all of it happened in the girls’ locker room, though they got away with plenty out in the open, during PE class. Our coach joined in just enough to make it clear that he wouldn’t be a source of support.

The details are lost to me. There was lots of name calling. I know they snapped my bra strap plenty, after I begged my mom to buy me one so I could keep my non-breasts covered. They pulled my ponytail hard, so that my head snapped back and hurt my neck. Mostly, though, they relied on the name calling and the taunting, and I almost never answered them. I just took it, because I believed it was mine to take.
By Halloween, I was in agony all day, every day, dreading 6th period. I cried every evening at the dinner table with the misery of it all, and my parents tried to be sympathetic. Eventually, though, they were annoyed, then angry, at my inability to resolve the situation. They encouraged me to fight back, to punch or kick or hurt the girls to make them stop. They sent me to a counselor in hopes that she could convince me to fight back. No luck. I was far, far too afraid of authority to do any such thing.

How afraid of authority was I? In three years of middle school, I was never (not ever, not even once) late to a class. I was in agony from a full-to-bursting bladder at least once a week, but I would not risk being late to class by using my 5 minute passing period to go to the bathroom. At Madison, the lockers are in long halls that are kept locked except before and after school and before and after lunch, so we had to make sure we had everything we needed as there was no running to a locker between classes. One time (ONE TIME) in 3 years of middle school, I forgot one of my books. (Funny how pain makes some memories fuzzy, and leaves some of them so sharp.) It was my English book, the class I had right after PE during 6th grade. I was shaking and sweating through 5th and 6th periods because of forgetting that book.

And my parents and my counselor wanted me to punch someone?

I went to the school counselor for help. She decided a session involving Kathy, Karen, Tanya, and I was in order, so that we could air all of our grievances. Clearly, the school counselor had a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the situation. She saw a conflict among peers, when in fact it was a victim/perpetrator situation. We sat in her office and the three girls told me all the things that disgusted them about me. (I don’t remember most of what was said, but I do recall that one of my facial expressions was a problem for them.) Thus emboldened by quasi-approval from a school authority figure, the girls re-doubled their efforts.

Sometime shortly after the New Year, my mom and I were at the grocery store when I turned to see Kathy standing next to her own mom’s grocery cart. She squinched up her eyes and pulled a disgusted, I-smell-something-nasty face. I yanked my mom’s sleeve and whispered, “That’s one of them, one of the girls from PE!”

We finished our shopping and when we got in the checkout line, my mom went to speak to Kathy’s mom. No big surprise here: the next day I caught hell. Karen and Tanya were furious that I got Kathy in trouble and tripled their harassment, stealing things from my locker and encouraging other kids in our PE class to join them in harassing me.

Eventually, the stress took its toll and I landed in the hospital. The back pain was so bad that I couldn’t sit or bend over. Except sometimes I could. The pain was not constant, and I have never admitted this to anyone, ever. I felt guilty about that for many years, but not anymore. I didn’t know how to communicate my anguish, didn’t know how to get the adults in my life to hear me, and letting them believe that the pain was more than it was was the only way I knew to get any relief. I missed two weeks of school and it was pure bliss, like taking off a 200 pound backpack I’d been staggering under for 6 long months.

Note to parents: if your child is so stressed out that he or she is in the hospital to rule out spinal cancer, something is deeply wrong.

I walked into the girls’ locker room on my first day back to school and Kathy turned to Karen and Tanya and, sneer on her face and disgust thick in her voice, said, “Look who’s back.”

I made it to the end of 6th grade. I faked sick a few times, though I never refused to go to school. My parents did not express any sympathy or take any action on my behalf. Once, my dad said to me, “If this is the way you act at school, it’s no wonder you don’t have any friends.” My mom got angry at the dinner table several times, saying, “Can’t we ever talk about anything other than you and your problems?”

And so, by the time winter became spring, I had learned my lessons, and I had learned them well.
What my bullies taught me:

• I don’t matter. My suffering is not important.
• I am socially unacceptable, worthy only of rejection.
• I’m weak, a loser, destined to be a social bottom-feeder, or worse, absolutely alone.
• The best I can hope for, in my relationships with others, is to be left alone.
• I am a fundamentally unlikeable person.

What the adults taught me:

• I’m unworthy of help.
• To identify or talk about a problem is to whine or feel sorry for myself.
• When I ask for help, I will not get it.
• The way other people behave toward me, no matter how bad, is my fault.
• I am a fundamentally unlikeable person.

I was never again bullied the way I was in 6th grade. There were some girls here and there, throughout 7th and 8th grades who taunted me, and I never had many friends, but that sort of systematic torment was over.

But any social confidence I may have had (did I ever have any?) was shattered. Throughout the rest of middle-school, I went to the library during lunch rather than risk rejection in the cafeteria. Books, always my favorite escape, became even more important to me. I tried to hide, to blend into the background. I hated myself, hated everything about my life. I had increasingly frequent episodes of depression, but I had learned by then that there was no help, and so I just showed up and went through the motions until I could get back into my books, back into the quiet solitude of my bed.

High school was better. Much, much better, in fact. I never had any social confidence, didn’t make friends easily or feel comfortable with people, but I had some friends. Kathy, Karen, and Tanya all went to the same high school and, amazingly, I never had a class with any one of them. I saw them sometimes, in the commons or on the walk across campus, and the dominant feeling I had when that happened was fear. I hated myself for that fear, hated that I was still so weak, but I couldn’t shake it.

I went about living my life. Sixth grade was a painful memory. In my early twenties, I thought about that year a lot and wished for the chance to do it again, to stand up for myself, to bring my adult strength to a child’s situation. But as my own children approached the age I was when I was abused by my classmates, my thinking changed.

I started to recognize that Kathy, Karen, and Tanya were little girls, too. They were so large in my memory, so much more powerful than I was, that they had become something other than children for me. They were just as young as I was, caught up in personal turmoil about which I know nothing. Why did they do what they did? I don’t know, but it seems pretty unlikely that they were bad kids whose parents didn’t care what they did. In fact, I’d guess that Karen and Tanya’s parents would have punished them for such behavior just like Kathy’s mom punished her. I think they were probably very nice girls from their parents’ perspectives. I think they would have been shocked to find out what their daughters were doing at school.

As I came, over several years, to this new perspective, my anger at the adults involved grew. How could they just let me suffer that way? And of course I know how, in a rational, removed sort of way. They didn’t know what to do; they didn’t know the breadth and depth of the problem. They’d been conditioned to believe that, unless there is physical aggression that leaves marks, the problem isn’t significant enough to warrant any real attention.

But past rational, past the adult-me who is raising children and sometimes making big mistakes and who understands that shit happens and you can’t always fix it, there is an eleven year old girl in a blind red rage. I was a little girl. The coach, my parents, the school counselor, they were adults. Their responsibility, first and foremost, before anything else, was to keep me safe. And they failed. They failed big.

In my adult life, I’ve had almost no contact with any of the people with whom I went to school. I didn’t go to any of our reunions, didn’t call or write, didn’t even exchange Christmas cards. Finally (finally!), as I moved deeper into my 30s, the pain of those years started to recede. Sending my eldest to 6th grade was indescribably gut-wrenching, but for the most part, I didn’t think about it much anymore. Although I’ve always been afraid that my children would bully or be bullied (I probably wouldn’t handle that very well.), they’ve been much more confident than I ever was. We still live in Albuquerque; my kids are students in the same school system in which I was educated, but things are different now. They take bullying more seriously.

Last year, I joined Facebook. While I was skipping sleep in that first week, hunting down old boyfriends and making sure my kids weren’t posting their phone numbers for all the world to see, I found all three of them: Kathy, Karen, and Tanya. For weeks, I thought about contacting them, telling them how much they had hurt me. I would see their names show up in comments to mutual friends and it was like a tiny stab. I turned it over in my mind, even starting, then discarding, a few messages.

Ultimately, I decided not to do it. If the first lesson my bullies taught me was “I don’t matter,” how bad would it hurt if the message I got back said, “I have no idea who you are. What the hell are you even talking about?” I knew that would hurt more than I could bear, so I gave up on the idea.

And then.

On March 24, the day before my birthday, a message from Kathy showed up in my Facebook inbox.

Gobsmacked.

I’m at a loss to describe what happened to me in that moment. I was sobbing and shaking before I finished the first sentence. How can a wound that old still be so tender? I can’t answer that, only tell you that it was.

Far from forgetting me, she remembered 6th grade often. These are her some of words:*

My oldest kiddo is ten and we just had his parent/teacher conference this past week. At every conference since he was in kindergarten, his teachers always comment about how accepting he is and how he goes out of his way to be kind and be a good friend to all of his fellow students. And while that is nice to hear about my child, it always makes me think of how I treated you and how for a very long time I have wanted to find a way to get in touch with you to tell you how sorry I am.

Not forgotten. NOT a person who doesn’t matter. Me, worthy of consideration. Me, worthy of the time it took to write a thoughtful, heartfelt apology.

I lay awake all night that night. I thought of nothing but Kathy, and 6th grade, and the other girls, Karen and Tanya, for several days. The letter turned my world inside out, brought me to my knees, and when the storm had passed, a Kathy-shaped piece of pain rose out of me and floated away, and in its place? A new friend. Kathy and I have exchanged more than a dozen messages since that first day and with every message, we’re a little more comfortable, a little less tentative and nervous. I giggle and joke and call it my Facebook miracle, except it’s not really a joke at all.

* * * * *

Recently, bullying stories have been all over the news, stories of girls who ended their lives because of abusive treatment by their peers. For all the anguish I experienced during 6th grade, when I came home from school, the taunting and teasing stopped, completely, until I went back to school. Back then, we didn’t even have cordless phones and answering machines, much less internet and text messages. I can’t imagine I would have survived if Karen, Kathy, and Tanya had had 24/7 access to me.

I’ve long wondered why they did what they did, but even Kathy doesn’t know*:

For many years now, I have questioned why I treated you so horribly when we were in school together. And as much as I’ve thought about it and as much as I’ve tried to figure it out, honestly don’t know why. Maybe peer pressure of trying to fit in, maybe joining in with others so that they wouldn’t pick on me, or maybe I was just a horrible, horrible person. Maybe all of the above. But whatever the reason, it does not change the fact that I was wrong to treat you the way I did. I want you to know how very sorry I am. I know I caused you tremendous pain and suffering because of my actions. I want you to know that my apology is sincere and heartfelt. From the very bottom of my heart, I am so very sorry for the abusive way I treated you when we were in school.

Parents, talk to your kids about bullying, because any child can be a bully. Any child can get caught in the swirling social morass of middle and high school. I don’t vilify my bullies anymore; we were all little girls. We were children who, lacking adequate supervision and guidance, found ourselves tangled in a situation that got too big for us. Adults should have saved us, and I do mean us, not me. I suffered from years of shame; Kathy suffered from years of guilt. (Perhaps Tanya and Karen have suffered, too, though I don’t know.) Adult intervention could have protected us all.

Know what your kids are doing at school, how they’re treating other children, and find out what their school’s bullying policies are. Find out if they follow those policies, how they are enforced, and what the grievance procedure is. If there isn’t a policy in place, or if the policy is inadequate, work with some other parents and pressure the school to change it.

And if your child is being bullied in school, do not wait, do not hesitate, do not be scared. Just make it stop. Find a way. I can’t tell you how to make it stop because every situation is different, but if you need the courage to confront the school, you email me and I will pep talk you to the moon. As parents, keeping our kids safe is job one. You can do it.

Because honestly? I would have been better off if my parents had done anything, up to and including letting me hang out at home and read books all year. Academically, I learned something between nothing and absolutely zero that year. How could I have learned? That’s like locking someone in the tiger pen at the zoo and insisting they write a 2,000 word discourse on surplus transfer and the birth of capitalism.
And Kathy: thank you. From my toes to my head, thank you. I know you feel guilty, but hear this my friend: I forgive you, wholly and completely.

* * * * *

*I’ve included portions of Kathy’s message to me with her permission. Because for all the painful lessons I learned from my bullies, I also learned this one: It’s important to play nice.

For more information about bullying, go to Stop Bullying Now!

I was sitting in a trailer making a papier-mâché bust of Donkey Kong when I got into my first fight with a Deaf person. It was 1986 and I was in the middle of first grade at Reilly Elementary School in Austin, Texas, where my family had recently moved in order to facilitate my dad’s job defending free speech (and, some Republicans publicly argued, child pornographers) through the Texas Civil Liberties Union.

The deaf girl’s name was Meghan. She was one of four Deaf kids in our class, and because of them we had two teachers, our regular one Ms. McHenry and our sign language teacher Ms. Eckelcamp. I remember we spent a lot of time that year learning how to sign. For some reason the main tool they used was the song “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. So to this day I can sign the sentence “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” but I can’t say “Where is the bathroom?” This is kind of like my grasp of Spanish; thanks to my diverse elementary school in Brooklyn (which I started once we’d moved back to New York from Austin), I learned to sing entire songs in Spanish but never learned the basics of the language. When I am in the Dominican Republic in April and someone asks me for directions, my only choice will be to say “En mi viejo San Juan/Cuantos sueños forjé/En mis noches de infancia/Mi primera ilusión/Y mis quitas de amor/Son recuerdos del alma.”*

*Translation: In my Old San Juan, many dreams I forged in my childhood years … My first illusion, and my grief of love are memories of the soul.

Anyway, back to Meghan and our rumble. Meghan was red-headed and pretty, and I was, as I have previously documented, a total (albeit cute) weirdo:

That’s her, behind me in the red penguin outfit. She is obviously jealous of my high-waisted sweatpants and awesome pigtails.

For some reason we had art class in a trailer about 200 yards away from the school proper. So the visual you should have now is: me, looking like a fashion-challenged Punky Brewster, and Meghan, looking like a little princess, sitting in a trailer in Texas making Donkey Kong heads out of paper and paste. I swear I did not provoke her. She just glanced over at my work and gave me a withering look.

“Mine is beautiful,” she said in her tiny Marlee Matlin twang. “Yours is ugly.” Fightin’ words if I ever heard ‘em! I totally went Donkey Kong on her ass.

No, just kidding. I started crying. I was seven. And even then I was extraordinarily passive. I’m like Buster from Arrested Development; I curl up into a ball and play dead at the slightest hint of violence.

In case you are wondering, here is what the signs look like:

“Beautiful“:

“Ugly“:

In second grade, perhaps inspired by Meghan, I made the following book:

It’s all about how this girl Cathy learns sign language so that she can learn how to say “Step off, you ginger bitch!” to a Deaf girl who insults her sweet video game-inspired sculpture.

Ok, that’s not true. It’s about how Cathy learns sign language so she can be friends with a Deaf girl named Zoelemonoe.

Stop laughing, that part is true. I was totally awesome at making up names.

The first time you met somebody who shared your same name, it was the summer following seventh grade, at soccer camp in Montecito. For the Jennifers and Heathers and Tiffanys of the world, this kind of thing happens early on, before anyone knows that it is strange. But as it was — though there had been plenty of Anns, Annes, and Annies in your past — there were few, if any, Annas wandering about your section of Southern California. To meet another one was eventful, if for no other reason than because it suggested that there might exist a place somewhere in which you would not always be just slightly different, always just a little bit off.

You were at soccer camp with Cindy Corsakov, the girl from Clearpoint who had befriended you on an AYSO soccer team the year before. You had never met somebody like Cindy Corsakov: effortlessly social, bubbly, and so generous with her compliments that you guessed she must be under the mistaken impression that they were something that grew freely on trees, rather than being a resource so rare and precious that they required a specially trained pig to sniff them out. Cindy’s world was intoxicating, if suspicious: everything was fun, everything was exciting, and each new person represented a new opportunity, instead of the need for devising a new defense mechanism.

And when she flattered you, there was such a mastery in her light hand that sometimes you caught yourself believing that the things she said about you were sincere. You began to think of her compliments not as flattery, but rather the natural response that came from dealing with someone so wonderful as you must clearly be. This was how she became one of your best friends, and it was how she remained one of your best friends for precisely two years. After that, there was to be a dramatic falling out, the specifics of which you would misplace among other lost artifacts of tweenage years, packed away where they could never again be found, along with your faith in the nice things she said, of which you would claim to have been suspicious all along.

You were at soccer camp with Cindy, but this was not the first time you had been there. This time was to be so different from the first year — last year — which was the year that you were told you would be rooming with Megan Fairfield, only to discover on arrival day that Megan had already made plans to room with Courtney Valentine, because they were best friends, after all. And really, you only knew Megan a little bit, it was your parents who were friends, and besides, everybody felt bad about the mixup, and that’s why one of the adults came up with the idea to bring in a third bed into that tiny room that housed just one pious seminary student during the academic year. They had all agreed that this would be the best plan — three girls in a dorm room — that it was the only way to be certain that nobody would be left out. The adults, of course, had been careful to wipe away from their language any indication of who might hypothetically do the leaving and who my hypothetically be left, and you went along with the plan, superficially, agreeing to it as if it were not the worst idea you had ever heard in your life. You allowed them the luxury of feeling better about things, holding out just long enough so that your parents could get back into their yellow Volvo sedan and drive away. And then you gathered your things from Courtney’s and Megan’s room and went next door, and silently went about unpacking your things and making up your bed, again, and the business of applying yourself to soccer: the love of it, and the getting-better-at-it of it.

But this year was different.

You were still only there for one week, but this was a different world. There were kids who became girlfriend and boyfriend for the week, making out in the tiny dorm rooms in between soccer practices and cafeteria lunches. As it happened, the room you shared with Cindy was uniquely situated so as to facilitate late night discussions out the window with the boys two floors below. This was how you first heard the eponymous Violent Femmes album, shocking as it was, and why when you went home you would go into Licorice Pizza and ask for the cassette version of it with a muted voice, requesting that the counter clerk give you the one with the picture of the little girl looking through a window on its cover. This year, instead of studiously ignoring the social element of soccer camp, you were in the center of it, and it was a relief, for once, to not have to worry about what people thought.

The Other Anna was a year younger than you and she was from Encino. You were not totally sure where Encino was, but you did know that the wealthy girl in The Karate Kid had been from there. Based on this, you figured that Encino — wherever it was — must be a pretty exclusive place, if the object of Ralph Macchio’s affections had hailed from it, and so The Other Anna must be a child of privilege. Naturally, there had been other demarcations of class, though you would not have recognized them as such at the time: her hair was long but boasted perfectly feathered sides the likes of which you had never been able to accomplish with your own hair, and her clothing covered the requisite brand trifecta of tweens of the early-to-mid-eighties (Guess, JAG, Esprit). But most significantly of all, while the rest of the soccer campers used regular Chapstick during long days on the soccer field, the Other Anna had Bain de Soleil lip balm, which came in a delicate case with a longer, more elegant cap.

The Bain de Soleil lip balm was of particular note to you because it was the very brand you had begged your own mother to buy for you for soccer camp before leaving home. She had refused, and the decision had been logical: Bain de Soleil lip balm was twice as expensive as PreSun15, which clearly worked just as well. That your family could have afforded the Bain de Soleil lip balm was besides the point: it was a needless expenditure of extra money based on superficial preference for packaging. Had you been older, or better trained in pitching the intangible differences and market value of things like beauty in presentation and subtle social language expressed by commodity choices, perhaps you might have negotiated better for yourself. Perhaps then you might have been able to convince her of how essential it was to have the Bain de Soleil brand, but instead you were stuck with the PreSun. But to be fair, though there was no way that the fact the Other Anna had the Bain de Soleil lip balm could escape your notice, it only bothered you slightly. Because this year, you were with Cindy, and you were having a great time at soccer camp, and the subtleties of lip balm envy are nothing when you have already survived a week long camp with no roommate and come back for more.

It had been hot that week, and you had taken to putting the PreSun around your eyes to keep them from getting sunburned while you were on the soccer field. It was a stop gap solution to stopping the sunburn damage, and you had made it in the moment, and thought nothing of it, at least until the Other Anna came up to you and asked to see the lip balm that you had been putting around your eyes. You agreed, though you were unsure as to why she cared, and the Other Anna looked at the lip balm, examined its lackluster brown and orange packaging, and then looked at you with something like unkindness and disdain. She demanded to know why you had been putting it around your eyes and you explained that you had been sunburned, that you just wanted something there to protect that skin from the glare. The Other Anna continued to look at you with annoyance, until she ceremoniously dropped the tube PreSun into grass in front of you, like something not worthy of her time or touch, and walked away.

Surprised, you picked up the PreSun and put it back in the pocket of your soccer shorts. You did not know what to make of The Other Anna, much less of the subtleties of tweenage caste systems and the semiotics of lip balm in Southern California. And besides, before you could blink, the ball had been thrown in again, and the Other Anna was off towards the other goal, and you headed back to defend yours, before the rest of the week blurred past you with the kind of speed that only the last breaths of childhood can carry.

Elementary School

When I was little, my neighbor and I used to spend lots of time making prank phone calls. Because even back then, I liked to waste whatever talent I had acquired by age 9 to do things like prank call 9-1-1.

The ’90s, if you recall, were a time of great discovery and invention– caller ID, call waiting, The Internet, Slip ‘n Slide, Pocket Rocker. It was a really great decade to grow up in. We had layered socks, stirrup pants, big bangs, and slap bracelets. But the MOTHER of all greatness showed itself when my elementary school published its first phone book.

I remember our teacher handing them to our class at the end of the day. I ran my hands across the freshly copied and cut cover. It was yellow with the face of a fox (our school mascot) on the front. It had a black, wide-spiral bind, and as I tucked it into my backpack, the wheels started turning. THIS WAS HUGE. Having access to a list of phone numbers that included THE ENTIRE STUDENT BODY, INCLUDING FACULTY was like having the ability to become invisible, or fly. Putting that kind of power in my tiny little hands was like telling Dick Cheney that he’s going to be our next president.

It’s just not a good idea.

We got the phone books on Friday, so after I got home, and ate dinner, I called my next door neighbor Sandy over to play. Sandy was essentially my first friend on this earth since our parents lived next door to each other even before my older sister was born. We’d been in all the same classes since first grade, and when she got to my house, we locked ourselves in my parents’ room, and experienced prank calling like no fourth grader had ever before known. We made dozens of phone calls that night. We pretended to be boys calling girls who liked them, we called students’ parents pretending to be teachers, and I think we might even have called some of my sister’s friends just to mix things up.

Once we made it through the entire fourth grade (and a few of Uzma’s friends) we flipped to the faculty section and found the listing for our teacher, Mrs. Shaffer.

Mrs. Shaffer was the teacher that every rising fourth grader wanted. She was young, tall and blonde, and always wore the coolest clothes. She had two daughters who were much younger than I was, and she was a wonderful teacher.

But wonderful or not, no one was going to be spared tonight. WE HAD A SCHOOL DIRECTORY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, and just when you thought calling my sister’s friends was an all-time low, Sandy and I proved that we could in fact, SINK LOWER.

We made about six phone calls to her house, laughing, coughing, and making funny noises each time she picked up. Sometimes she would hang up first, sometimes we would. At one point she said, “Okay, this isn’t funny anymore,” and I nearly wet my pants from laughter so explosive I actually feared for my life.

Seriously. Who knew you could laugh so hard you thought you might die?

After we composed ourselves, and realized Sandy would have to go home soon (her mom already called twice) we decided to end on a high note. We mustered up a lot of courage to call Mrs. Shaffer, but that was only the beginning. Sandy and I were about to go all Braveheart up in my parents’ bedroom before the movie even came out. We flipped a few pages, and BAM, there it was: Mr. Nelson, the principal.

Our school principal was a really nice guy. He was always walking the halls, and it felt like he knew everyone by name. He was the “pal” in the word when you learn how to spell it, and his son David was in our class.

It was my turn to make the call so I picked up, and dialed.

“Hello?”

“shmdfjefijuestu…BAHAHA”

CLICK.

My neighbor and I started laughing hysterically, and then decided to do it again.

The phone rang, and I tried to hold in my laughter.

“Hello?”

“djdiehenvb…”

“Sabrina, I know that’s you.”

Oh crap, it was David!

“We have caller ID so you should really stop prank calling us before I tell my dad.”

I quickly hung up the phone.

“THEY HAVE CALLER ID!!!!” I shouted to Sandy. Her face went pale.

I was a deer caught in headlights, the fly that just felt the frog’s wet tongue on my butt, the little white bunny that stumbles as the hawk swoops in. This was not supposed to happen — it was like watching Mel Gibson die in the first 15 minutes of the movie.

We didn’t know what to do. How do you UNDO a prank call?

Sandy and I laid low for the rest of the weekend, hoping things would blow over and David wouldn’t say anything to his dad. But just when you think things can’t get any worse, Murphy’s Law rolls into full affect, and on Monday, I nearly pooped my pants in school.  As the class was settling in, and all of us took our seats, Mrs. Shaffer stood in front of the class and made an announcement.

“Over the weekend some of you thought it was funny to prank call my house,” she said. “I just want to tell all of you that I know who it was. I’m going to let it go this time, but if it happens again, I will be calling your parents.”

AHHHH. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? DOES EVERYONE HAVE CALLER ID??????????

Sandy and I looked at each other, and we knew the phone books would have to be put away forever. Our prank calling days were done.

Movies are filled with scary creatures: Dracula, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, Carol Channing — most of us can name one or two that frightened us when we were young. When I was growing up, the things created by the film industry to frighten our pants off swelled to include the likes of Freddy Krueger, aliens, giant, man-eating sharks, and the devil himself. Of course, these are characters designed to frighten us.They owe much of their success to the fact that they prey on our deepest fears:  the dark,  death, the supernatural, the unknown, Jazz Baby heiresses. Name your phobia and it’s more than likely been exploited by the film industry. For me, there was one film in particular that stand out as the scariest film of my childhood:

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

When I tell people that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang scared the hell out of me as a boy, the response tends to be, “Well, um, sure. I can see how that Child Catcher guy could scare any kid.” I suppose that’s true for some people, but that disturbing, putty-nosed man who sniffed out children never bothered me. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was rooting for him — he seemed was my greatest hope for ridding that film of the two creatures that scared me the most: Jeremy and Jemima Potts.

As the two cute-as-can-be children of Dick Van Dyke’s character, Caractacus Potts, Jeremy and Jemima were the manifestation of my two greatest childhood fears — abandonment and replacement. Where did these children come from? I squirmed in discomfort every time they screeched, “Daddy! Daddy!” I simply could not accept that these were Mr. Van Dyke’s children, because as far as I was concerned, Dick Van Dyke was named Bert and already had two children.

I refused to accept that Dick Van Dyke was playing a role in a different movie. To me, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the sequel to another film. I understood that he was acting, of course, but I found it difficult to grasp why he was also acting as though he had never even heard of Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael Banks,  or his old life in London. That the parents of Jane and Michael Banks were a banker and a suffragette made little impression on me — I considered Bert and Mary Poppins Jane’s and Michael’s true parents. And in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bert had left his family to start a new life with a new woman and a fresh batch of cuter, blonder children. He just changed his name from Bert to Caractacus and figured that no one would catch on.

Granted, my logic was shaky and the suspension of my disbelief was scattered and selective. But try telling that to a boy whose parents were divorced, and whose father had married a woman who was as pretty and young and blonde as Truly Scrumptious. My biggest fear in the world was that my father, like Bert,  would start a new family and forget all about the children he already had, that he would make a fresh start of everything. I would have absolutely none of it — neither my father’s new wife nor Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — for years. They scared me.

What made Bert leave? Whose fault was it? Was it Mary’s icy virginity or her addiction to cough syrup? Was it because the children were extremely stubborn and suspicious and rather inclined to giggle? I searched for Bert’s reasons for leaving in much the same way I struggled to understand my father’s.

It took me a long time to realize how unreasonable my fears were — and how unfair I had been to my own father for thinking he would ever abandon or replace me and my siblings. The amount of time he spent with me as a child should have made it clear that abandonment was not forthcoming. And my new stepmother was more eager to share my father with us than take him away, though I found that a difficult concept to grasp for years. There were to be no Jeremies and Jemimas nesting in the higher branches of my family tree.

The horror of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang faded as my fears remained unrealized. Jeremy and Jemima no longer scared me — instead, I found them irritating and saccharine. I eventually gave a silent apology to Dick Van Dyke. I should more than likely give an audible one to my father.

I made a very important discovery during a recent viewing of Mary Poppins, based solely on the sometimes literal, selective logic I had used upon Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In the last scene of the film, Jane and Michael Banks decide to spend some quality face time with the two people who pay for their upkeep, their biological parents. Out in the park, as Jane and Michael are flying their Votes-for-Women-tailed kite, Dick Van Dyke is right there singing with them — not at their sides, but he’s there on the ground, still looking out for them. He never, in fact, left.

It was Mary Poppins who left. While it’s true that the director was careful enough to add a bit of dialogue in which Mary fights back some tears at the thought of leaving by explaining to her talking umbrella that “practically perfect people never allow sentiment to muddle their thinking,” it is obvious that she is lying. Clearly, she feels that she will no longer receive the same level of adoring attention from Jane and Michael as she feels is her due. So she takes off.

After letting the winds carry her to the Continent, she tried to find  new way of life — one that might help her forget the traumatic emotional distancing she felt from Jane and Michael. She bleached and cut her hair, Germanicized her name, and hid away from the world in a nunnery for twenty-seven years. But, as is the tragic way of some Catholics who join the church to escape their true natures, the need for a child’s love was too strong. Only this time, as though making up for 27 years of drought, she connived to win the affections of seven attention-starved Austrian children, destroying expensive drapery, thwarting the marriage plans of a beautiful Baroness, and turning her new charges into illegal aliens by sneaking across international borders — all for the sake of her unquenchable emotional neediness and hunger for juvenile attention.

Now she, my friends, is one scary character.

In my family, a boy singing songs from The Sound of Music was nothing extraordinary– in fact, it was encouraged. The subtle changing of lyrics to suit any occasion was applauded by my elder brother. Sadly, singing “I Am Six, Going on Seven” in a voice approximating that of the eldest Von Trapp girl did not translate well to the playground of my elementary school. Worse, my impression of Ann-Margret’s frenzied “Smash the Mirror” number fromTommy was not received with applause but with baffled silence, then derisive laughter, which I found confusing since my brother and sister had both loved the impression as I performed it the day before. Upon review some thirty years later, it seems reasonable that a six-year-old boy writhing on the on the grass and pulling at his hair while singing in an exaggerated vibrato might make other little boys uncomfortable. It was clear to them that I was different. It was clear to me that they simply did not speak my language.

Several months ago, Michael pledged further support in the form of a second Can I Sit With You? story. Since that story has yet to materialize, and as we know you are pained to see this site so Procopio-poor, we’ve stop-gapped by uploading the audio from Michael’s performance at Seattle’s Annex Theatre.

Have a listen, enjoy, and please do send in any stories you may have. Especially if your name is Michael.