Writer's Block: Anti-bullying month

[Error: unknown template qotd]Between the ages of eight and eighteen, everyone was a potential bully to me in my high school. The girls changed from day to day, sometimes, when we were alone, being kind, talking to me, listening back, laughing at my jokes. But as soon as it was a group, any form of friendship just turned into finger pointing, giggling and sarcastic questions about who I was seeing at the time, what I was wearing and who my friends were... I never had many friends, I disliked wearing feminine clothes, and I had little interest in getting a date back in my grade through high school years. They started rumors, about my sexuality, about supposed boyfriends and girlfriends, about my intelligence to my hygiene. Nothing was safe. I was loudly addressed in the locker room for making eye contact with a peer and had to listen to a chorus of 'Lezzie, lesbo" as I got dressed. I was slapped in the face inside a classroom while the teacher sat at her desk, and I was kicked as I walked down the aisle to the white board to write an answer.

While the girls normally bullied with isolation and disapproval, the boys were usually louder, and just as cruel. I've been swung at as I've walked down the hallways, so that I had to throw myself against the wall to avoid being hit. Jabbed in the stomach with a stick so hard that it caused a deep scrape and a bruise. I've had my backside groped in the middle of class, had things like spit balls, rubber bands and paper clips thrown at the back of my head. By far, the worst bully made sure that I had no name for ten years of my life. I was no longer Noelle. I was Stupid Whore. I wasn't allowed to draw, he'd rip my notebook from me and tear them out, citing later that the scratching of a pencil in class bothered him. He'd call me out in the hallway, in the lunchroom, on the playground, wherever he could find me, and make remarks about me and my family. My mother and my father both received equal mockery from him. I couldn't speak in class, lest what I say come back in the form of a taunt or a chant later for being bold enough to answer a question.

The walk home was just as miserable. A group of boys took to waiting outside the apartment complexes, making sounds like a cow to me as I passed by, telling me my mother was a whore, my father was stupid, my mother was sleeping with their father and so on. If I crossed the street, they threw rocks at me. If I tried to walk past and ignore them on their side, I was shoved around. If I tried to defend myself, that was naturally mocked as well. I couldn't even speak to my friends without it turning into some form of punishment. While roughhousing, I tore one of my friends shirts. I apologized, offering to sew it. One of the other children on the street who had been watching heard this, and called out "Maybe you can sew your pussy shut too!"

On the bus, I was forced to listen to one boy who made up a song about how much I didn't matter, and how ugly and stupid and slutty I was. I received little help and no sympathy: When I became sick on one of the rides, and was unable to reach a bucket in time, and was forced to sit the rest of the ride with vomit on my hands and coat, one of the riders kneeled in his seat to face the rest of the bus, announcing that "Hey guys, Noelle's throwing up! Hey guys, look! Look, she's throwing up!" Laughing at me, pointing me out as I kneeled on the floor and tried to hide myself.

The only reason I managed to get through school was the two years of homeschooling in the middle, between the middle of the year in seventh grade and the middle of the year in ninth grade. I also always had my parents to come back to, and a loving home that understood and tried to help me. Never again, since leaving high school, have I ever been put through this level of bullying.