Anonymous #1

<all names mentioned are fake>

“Harper started it,” is what I said to the teacher that day. It was not a special day by any means, but it was for me. It started regularly, I got ready and ate my breakfast in the morning. I boarded the bus and sat on the one seat nobody else would sit on. Soon all the kids on the bus exited and swarmed our school, going towards their teacher’s classroom. We went through some lessons our teacher had prepared for us. I knew the answers, but there was no need to voice my thoughts. Lucy would answer the questions instead. She was our teacher’s favorite, and well-liked by most in our grade. However nice she might have seemed; Lucy and her friends were not. I spent years at this school being teased, and overall outcasted due to these children. I remember some of their thoughtless remarks; “your food looks like barf”; “what’s wrong with your name? “; “weirdo”; “poopy face”.

My friends were fellow outcasts, and we shared this common experience. We wanted to complain, but we knew our school would do nothing to these children who they adored. We hated this. I hated this. I hated that we were ignored since we didn’t look as bleached as we were supposed to. I hated the way people would assume I was in ESL (English as a second language) even though I had known them for years. I hated the laughter that followed our mere existence, and the stares when our teacher mentioned anything remotely foreign. I hated seeing people who I loved and cherished getting thrown under the bus just because they were different. My friends and I concluded that that these mean kids were horrible, but we knew we should just avoid them before they had the chance to hurt us. However, times started to change. These kids started to grow up – it wasn’t that cool to be mean anymore. There weren’t as many giggles when me and my fellow misfits walked down the hall. We soon renounced the title of “losers” to just “those kids”.

We started to meet more people, people who were nice to us. But even though things had changed, the wound that had been left behind was still there, and Lucy and her cronies were still trying to make it deeper. This leads me back to that ordinary day. After recess we returned to our classroom and started to do a work sheet - a group assignment. This kid, Harper, started talking to me. She started off by telling me that she saw something crazy. I was intrigued, what could this acquaintance, wannabe popular kid, possibly tell me? She started to speak loudly “, You know that friend of yours - Nena. You know how she’s been avoiding you”. Kids around us started to listen. Harper continued,” I saw her talking to Lucy during recess.” My heart sank. I knew my friends were starting to forgive these kids who used to bully us, and I knew that Noella had left me to hang out with some other kids this very day. I asked her “Are you sure?”, and Harper replied “Yeah”.

She wanted a reaction, and she knew she could get one out of me. She wanted to seem cool, making a dunce mad. She knew that I was angry, but she didn’t know how angry, how fed up. I couldn’t comprehend the absurdity of her comments. All I could think of was betrayal. My friend who braved this journey with me, my friend who cheered me up after a bad day, my friend who had been bullied alongside me decided to talk to this gremlin, my friend who I considered as close as family had deserted me the way countless others had done before. I started to walk towards Nena. She, unaware of what Harper had said, turned to look at me, and I socked her right in the nose.

Nena held a bandage close to her nose as the teacher took us out of the classroom. My teacher told me to apologize to Nena. I refused, instead I spit out what I thought had happened. Somehow, through my angry reply she deduced that I wasn’t entirely at fault, and that Harper had instigated something. She called Harper into the hallway. One question from the teacher, and she cracked, spilling lore and explaining what had not been explained.

Our teacher looked at us and pardoned Nena and me. Nena was mad at me, understandably, yet she understood what I had done. We walked into the classroom and finished our work, hearing snickers, sneers, and that little girl’s tears.