Meeting the bully challenge.
Lindsey Richards Barnes
I always both loved and hated going back to school. Getting new school supplies was magical. Everything was fresh, colorful and brimming with potential. I don’t think I have ever not delighted in office and school supplies.
My mama felt the same way about fabric stores and could spend hours searching the bolts for just the right shade of turquoise green to complement her freckled skin. My sister gets lost for days in craft stores, being the artsy one in the family. I have found her squatting in the aisle, trying to decide between burnt sienna and raw umber paints for over 15 minutes. My weaknesses are book stores and office supply stores. Time doesn’t exist in these stores for me and hours and my money evaporate like magic.
We would also get new clothes and shoes for the new school year. It was not easy to get a proper fit when you’re not done growing and you spent your entire summer walking barefoot on gravel roads. You almost don’t need shoes, when you’ve built up soles of steel like I had. Same thing happened with clothes. I had spent all summer in seersucker shorts and cotton tee shirts and now plaid and wool was in my dresser.
New classes, new teachers, new clothes, new books, new friends, it was all just so exciting. I would sail through the first month of school still on my high of fresh potential. Maybe even make it to my first report card of the year before the anxiety would set in. I had performance anxiety because I so wanted to make good grades, I had social anxiety because I’m an introvert and being around a lot of people all day long is exhausting to me, and I had a normal pre-adolescent dollop of anxiety about my looks, smells and weight.
Adding to this was a brand new school bully. This one was different, special. Calvin had hemophilia, a disease that makes it near impossible for your blood to clot properly. Royalty has often suffered from hemophilia because of their tendency to inbreed to maintain a royal blood line. The rest of us are safe because of our blood line diversity. There’s a lesson right there.
So for whatever reason other than royalty, Calvin had hemophilia. Everyone in the school was briefed that no one could push, kick, shove or wallop Calvin because he was a delicate flower that would wilt at the slightest touch. We were instructed that even if Calvin asked us to, we couldn’t even push him on the swings. That’s how I remember it being explained, anyway. There were two ways this situation could have been played out. One, breakable fine-china Calvin could have been appreciative of everyone’s concern for his wellbeing and gone on with his life. Nope. Calvin didn’t choose that route. Now that Calvin had this impenetrable shield of empowerment that the faculty was enforcing, fragile, little Calvin turned into a raging, 10-foot-tall bully.
I was in a dilemma of the highest order. I am from a law-enforcement family. From birth, we were taught to stand up for ourselves and to also stand up for those who couldn’t fight their own battles. We were taught that the fear of something bad happening was often way worse than going through the actual bad event. If a bully ever said to us that they were going to meet us behind the gym after school, it wasn’t acceptable to fret all day long and then appear behind the gym, shaking from the fear that built up. No, we were told to throw our books to the floor at that moment and say, “Why wait, I’ll beat you right now!”
You understand my problem then, right? I’m coming home every day in tears, frustrated and hurt. It’s not like the final bell signaled my release from this ambulatory boil of a person. He rode the same bus that I did so I got lambasted with an extra 40 minutes of abuse. I started faking illnesses. My grades slacked off. My mother sat me down for a talk.
She told me that if no one else was coming to save me at school, I’d have to save myself. She’d already called the school and they told her they were not going to be able to help. With Mama’s blessing, I was to save myself. Looking back, I’m sure more instruction on exactly how I was to save myself from being bullied would have helped.
The next day on the bus home, after a full day of hair pulling, stupid insults and crying, I snapped. I absolutely shattered. I don’t even remember doing it. Calvin had his arm resting on the back of his seat while trying to grab another girl’s hair. His arm was right there. He was laughing. She was crying. His arm was right there. Anyway, I bit him. On the arm. I bit him hard. He wailed. He cried. He stopped pulling hair. I had the foresight to do this right before my stop so I popped off the bus happier than I’d been in a month. I heard birds singing and saw the sun shining once again.
Of course my parents were called into the principal’s office. It was my dad’s habit to go to these meetings, even if they were on his day off, in his full Virginia state trooper uniform. It set the tone. Yes, he had a habit of doing this because I was regularly involved in something that required the principal’s intervention. My dad eventually became president of the PTA, because he was there about me all the time. I was book smart, common-sense stupid.
The other member of my team, my mama, could be quite persuasive but she also had a tendency to flair in anger, so meetings were full of possibilities as far as her reactions go. I didn’t get to attend this meeting but my mom said that it was very simple. I was getting bullied, the school said they couldn’t help, so she encouraged me to stand up for myself as there didn’t seem to be another choice. I don’t know the school’s reaction or Calvin’s parents’ reaction. I know I didn’t get in any trouble at home and I was a damn hero at school, so I saw it as a win. It wasn’t my best choice, I know. I do not recommend biting a hemophiliac. In the moment, it seemed the thing to do and my life improved greatly because of it.
Calvin was out of school for weeks and then became a ghost whenever I was in the same room. He didn’t say anything hateful to anyone anymore. He transferred to another school after a year. I had other bullies in life and dealt with them as best I could without biting. I was sorely disappointed to realize that bullies graduated high school, just like I did. Bullies do not stay locked in your past. No sirree, bullies will pop up throughout your life like a horrible game of whack-a-mole.
I have no easy answer to why some people become bullies, how they choose their victims and how the victims should fight back. Every September I remember my back-to-school bully and what happened. I’m not saying that breaking out the steak sauce and get to biting is the ideal way to stop bullying. I’d never say that. That would be irresponsible. I’ll just say, good luck and Bon Appetit!
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2024 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!