My bullying story involving girls is when I was in 8th grade. I hung out with a girl named Cindy during the summer between 7th and 8th. I met her through another friend who I had gone to church with a few times. I didn’t go back to the church because it was fire and brimstone and speaking in tongues and it scared me—but that’s a tangent and another story altogether. So school starts and I naturally drifted into my usual circle of friends from the last school year, though I also attempted to include Cindy. Cindy was very possessive and apparently didn’t feel I was doing enough for her as a friend. I did have my bestest best friend Karen already and Cindy could barely tolerate her even though Karen was nice to her.

One day I got off at my bus stop and Cindy got off with a big thug of a girl. It was not Cindy’s bus stop and it wasn’t even Big Thug Girl’s bus. BTG does all this fake polite stuff and asks if she can hold my books and proceeds to gently take them out of my hands and put them on the ground. Then she tells me I might want to take off my clean white sweater (a cardigan) so I won’t get it dirty. As I’m taking it off and asking why it should get dirty, a side punch explodes in my ear. She grabbed my hair and was swinging me around by it. At some point Cindy took my sweater and spread it on the ground and sat on it. When the beating was over and I went staggering home with blood and bite marks everywhere, my mother didn’t even mess with the school. We piled in the car and went to the police station. I remember on the ride there my hair was coming out in big clumps as I was massaging my sore scalp.

I never saw either of the girls ever again, even to this day. Cindy was sent to Catholic school (by her Pentecostal parents) and I don’t know what the heck happened to BTG. She just disappeared.

Strange how this bully talks brings up things for so many of us that transports us instantly to our past.