sadI do not have a library card because I grew up poor—very, very, After-School Special poor, cockroaches in my bedroom and scavenging from trashcans poor—and I was badly bullied by the kids in my school, leading, eventually, to a group of girls stealing and destroying my library books. I couldn't pay the fines. I couldn't even tell anyone what had happened, because when the scruffy little poor girl complained about the sweet, well-groomed rich kids who had each others' backs, well...I had been down that road. The only people who would believe me were my mother and my teachers, and all I could do by telling them was upset them. I couldn't change anything.
I'm not that girl anymore. But the idea of getting a library card terrifies me, because some small, irrational part of me is convinced, incurably, that if I were to get a library card, those girls from school would show up, and slap my books out of my hands, and leave me standing alone on the sidewalk, sobbing over the loss of one of the things I loved most in the world: the ability to walk into a library with my head up, feeling like the books were free for anybody who wanted to read them.
The library books weren't the worst thing that happened to me during my school career. I was weird, I was geeky, I had frizzy hair and glasses and didn't really "get" a lot of the unspoken rules of the playground. I blew grade curves and didn't let people cheat off me on tests. I was basically invented to be the school punching-bag. But the library books were one of the things I never got over, because the library books taught me, once and for all, that sometimes the bullies win. Sometimes, you can't fight back, you can't stand up for yourself like the adults tell you to, and the bullies. Just. Win.
Phoebe Prince lost, too. But she's never going to be a grown-up, secure from bullies, writing a post like this one. Because she lost to the bullies so hard and so overwhelmingly that she killed herself.
Megan Kelly Hall is organizing YA authors against bullying, in memory of Phoebe Prince. Please. Go and read what she has to say. Consider what the current culture of bullying is doing to us, to our children, to our nieces and nephews, to the children of our friends. Even bullying that you survive can scar you forever, and Phoebe isn't the first to take her own life over this sort of thing. It's gotten so much worse than it was when I was in school, and I cried myself to sleep for years over the bullying.
This needs to stop. We need to stop it.
Please.
April 19 2010, 21:22:45 UTC 7 years ago
My older cousin, four years ahead of me, "made up for" being overweight and the daughter of a single mother by being outgoing and a class clown. My younger brother broke all the grade-curves, but was accepted because he was happy to help his classmates after school. My younger sister was athletic and not afraid to shout down anyone who crossed her. Me? I was shy and lived in my books. Boys were not my thing; learning was. I couldn't stand that I was expected to pretend to be stupid, so I threw myself into my classes; the week I won both the school Spelling and Geography Bee, several boys tried to molest me because I was a girl and dared to try and "play smart." I loathed P.E. so much that I was always the first in and out the locker room, changing at apparently abnormal speeds, prompting several girls to start trying to steal my gym bag so that I would have no uniform to change back into, which they wanted to hand over to the popular boys as an offering. I wasn't a cheerleader or an athlete. I wouldn't let people cheat off my tests or homework. We were a small, tight-knit community; my mother was a well-known teacher, my aunt the PTO president, my maternal grandfather a popular deacon at the attached church, and my father the Scout leader. So everyone knew me, but no one wanted to be around me unless they wanted help on their homework or projects; they avoided me, but they had to play nice in front of teachers (which made me think I'd be safe; in fifth grade, I was publicly accused of being a lesbian because I preferred to hide in Sister Christine's classroom during recess, rather than be outside). The other teachers' kids, too, were no consolation: they wanted so badly to fit in, themselves, that they were happy to join in (one even tried to suffocate me by putting a plastic jump-rope around my neck, and very nearly succeeded). My family wasn't poor, but we were a lot less stable in our middle-class-ness, which made my hand-me-down uniforms (the norm at our school, where your entire family attended) and smaller lunches easy to mock. The one boy a year ahead who had a crush on me (I was 12, he was 13) was tormented even by one of the teachers. One girl, who transferred in when we were in sixth grade, was nice to me -- which started such a backlash against her that she transferred back out at the end of the year. I was elected Secretary of the school's student council, but had no power or illusions because I'd been told I was voted in only because kids were "scared of your mom. We thought it'd be funny to see how far you can fall." Everyone knew what was going on, but no one said anything. Most of the teachers just looked the other way.
My mother never knew, and as far as I can tell, I'll never enlighten her. What makes the feeling worse is that a lot of those kids stayed in the area, and when they see my mom, they always ask to be remembered to me..."We always had such fun in school together!"
I wish I could hug you.
AngelVixen :-)
April 20 2010, 04:15:59 UTC 7 years ago
Lola
April 20 2010, 05:46:50 UTC 7 years ago Edited: April 20 2010, 05:47:31 UTC
And I didn't take it as an accusation; I thought it a logical question. :)
AngelVixen :-)
April 21 2010, 06:47:06 UTC 7 years ago
Lola
April 20 2010, 04:34:21 UTC 7 years ago
I'm sorry.
April 20 2010, 05:54:45 UTC 7 years ago
AngelVixen :-)