Bullies

“Does your mommy make you wear hand-me-downs?” The sneering tease stung Cara deeply.

Cara had her own sense for fashion, compared to the average seventh grader. Peculiar had been her chosen style. It had been the eighties and kids, including cool kids, crude kids, and every other kid in between, shopped at the mall. Cara would spend hours in the second-hand store trying to create the perfect ensemble. She loved bold colors and prints; she had no problem wearing polka dots with floral. Wool stockings under corduroy shorts worn with a rainbow wrap blouse felt comfortable to Cara. Every Friday, she wore a man’s button down with a loud bowtie and stir-up pants, like the ones Mary Tyler Moore wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Feathery Farrah Fawcett hair had been all the rage. Cara had a perm which she let run wild. Her counterparts wore cute little earrings of butterflies or semiprecious stones. Cara thought pierced ears too painful and strange; she wore her grandmothers clip-ons.

She had been an unconventional girl from an early age. Her friends wanted to play with Barbies, Easy Bake Ovens, paint their toenails and boy talk. She had been the girl running through the forest making magic, talking to the birds in trees and believing in forest enchantresses.

Cara set herself apart from others, whether she had intended to or not.

Wendy, a gangly eighth grader, had been the school bully. She had a meanness unlike no other; Wendy could be brutal. Her loud voice crashed over her crowded teeth and she could be heard through the halls of Jackson Middle School by all. Wendy took great pleasure pushing kids around. She would find their weaknesses and use it against them. If she saw a girl squeal at a worm on the sidewalk, she would collect a few and serve them up in some horrible way. Wendy lived on Pine Lake. People who lived on the lake were known for their troubles. Their homes were unkept. There would be trash and broken household items spattered throughout their lawns. Mothers stood on the porches with whiskey on the breath at dawn, as they yelled one last bitch complaint to their young broods while they hopped on the bus.

Cara’s parents were divorced but her life had been simple and mundane without wants for much. She lived in a mid-century ranch with raised flower beds. Her dad bought a new car every three years and when her mom started dating a dentist, she tried in vain to convince Cara that khakis and shirts with small animal patches on the left breast were cool.

Wendy had been the girl who always sat in the very back desk and mimicked the teachers. She probably scared a few of them as well. Her homework would be turned in late at best. On test days, she intimidated the person next to her so as to copy their answers. Sometimes she just boldly slept right through the entire period.

Cara worked hard to make the Honor Roll every term. She excelled in math and language arts. Science had been hard but she looked forward to the challenge of memorizing the Periodic Table or dissecting a pig’s heart. Eagerly, she raised her hand to answer every question posed by her teachers. Cara dreaded lunch, the twenty minutes in the gym before the first bell and the long walk in the halls between classes.

It started with mean glares whenever Cara passed Wendy in the hall, proceeded by sharp shoulder nudges, which seemed almost accidental. It didn’t take long to graduate from nudges to full shoves and body slams. Cara would disappear in her open locker but a harsh tug of her hair pulled her out of her hiding spot.

“I’d better not catch you alone in the girl’s bathroom.” Hissed Wendy. Terrified, Cara would wait for class to start then asked her teachers for a bathroom pass.

“Cara, sweetie, you couldn’t have gone between classes?” Her teachers would ask.

She couldn’t tell them the truth. She couldn’t just say she had been terrified by a girl who tormented her relentlessly every day. The teachers were lame when it came to stuff like that. Most, especially the male teachers, thought of it as a rite of passage to be bullied.

Wendy would yell horrible untruths about Cara, which everyone in the lunch room could hear.

“Are your parents too poor to buy your lunch? Do they make you eat government cheese or do you just go to bed hungry every night? I bet your dad drinks up his paycheck. My mom saw him at the liquor store. AGAIN!”

Cara received a free lunch for helping out in the kitchen. She needed a safe place to eat so it had been worth the tormenting from the other side of the window where she sold milk to the students.

Then came one spring morning right before first bell. Cara went into the gym like every other morning, looking for her friend Kat. Instead, she accidently locked eyes with Wendy on the other side of the gym. With a wicked smile Wendy nudge her friend and pointed towards Cara. She slithered across the gymnasium like a viper preparing for the strike. Before Cara could do anything, Wendy reached her. Without cause or warning, she smacked Cara hard across the face. The entire gym, which up until then had been booming with chatty teens and basketballs bounced around, stopped dead silent. The only sound heard had been the sting of Cara’s cheek and the roar of Wendy’s laughter.

Devastated, Cara just stood there and cried.

That summer Cara moved to a small neighboring town where no one knew her name or the suffering she had left behind. She worked hard all summer babysitting the neighbors two small children. Her wages kept adding up as did her desire for a change, a clean start to her freshman year in a new school. She shopped at the mall that year.

Cara, ever the maverick, would reinvent herself for the new social scene and the new friends she had hoped to make. She marched into Deb’s Fashion and went to work. She bought black and white striped pencil pants, three mini-skirts, a pair of purple pants which had a large flap on the front with eight buttons to hold it closed and finally a pair of jeans with zippers on each ankle. Next, she grabbed a silver and red polka-dot crop top, a blouse that buttoned up the side and two heavy turtleneck sweaters with sparkle thread woven throughout. She went to the shoe store, bought a pair of Doc Martin’s and Birkenstocks. She splurged on another perm which she teased high, and after half a can of Aqua Net, she showed off her newly pierced ears. Cara was ready for the first day of a new school.

A new school, brought Cara face to face with a new set of bullies. The rules were simple, dress like a farmer in the small agricultural town, not like a groupie from Depeche Mood. Nothing had changed.

“Holy shit new girl,” Came the broken voice of a prepubescent boy when she climbed on the school bus, “Your pants are making me dizzy, take them off!” The entire bus, including the driver, erupted with laughter. Cara would have the next four years cut out for her.

During the late eighties and two years after Cara graduated from high school, she had become a young and almost confident woman. Cara lived in the city with her innovative city friends, accomplishing the college experience.

One summer day, she was invited by Kat, her old school chum, to a party at someone’s home in the country. When they arrived the smell of stale beer and loud sloppy drunks greeted them at the door. The keg was tapped out and the conversation rested on looking for a sober driver.

Cara stated from the shadows, “I’ll drive.”

An exaggerated lisp of a woman’s voice called from the dim distance, “I’ll go too, I have a fake i.d.”

Cara and the incredibly drunk woman would go get more beer.

“Oh my God, I remember you.” Sneered the sloshed girl who sat a few inches away from Cara.

That voice smacked Cara across her face.

“Oh.” She mustered.

“Don’t you remember me?” She teased.

“No.” Cara lied. The shame and fear had been hidden so deep because she buried it long ago and like mercury rising on a June day; slow and steady it started to make sense. Her laugh confirmed what she had been too afraid to confront. Cara could never forget that laugh. Wendy, the bully, who had tormented her life for three long years back in middle school, sat shoulder to shoulder with her driving down the dark road.

“Sure, you remember me. I was the one who picked on you in middle school?” She had laughed while slurring her words and wagging her finger in Cara’s face.

Cara pretended she had no idea what the woman was talking about. “Nope, I didn’t go to your school. I just came to this party with a friend. Sorry.”

Without any remorse she continued, “Yeah, yeah, of course it is you. Remember that time I slapped your face in the gym?” She reminisced.  

“Nope, sorry. You have the wrong person.” 

“Awww, why ya gotta be such a bitch about it? We were kids back then.” Her words spat out.

Why do I have to be such a bitch about it? For three years you made my life a continuation of fear and shame. I couldn’t even use the girl’s bathroom because I was terrified you would be there. It had been extremely painful to get pushed repeatedly into the lockers, down on the floor and into a random wall. The sting from the smack had been nothing compared to the burn of humiliation from practically the whole school witnessing that attack. All of this had raced through Cara’s head.

“Sorry, you have the wrong girl.” She said softly, with a less than convincing shrug of her shoulder.

Unlike Cara, a productive member of society, Wendy grew into an adult bully, whose days were passed working odd jobs here and there, not to mention hard parties every weekend. Cara thought she looked hard, older than her actual years.

Cara wondered if Wendy would hit her again.

Instead, they drove in silence.

Farm country meant miles upon miles of fields planted in commodities. Larger towns were at least an hour drive in any direction. Convenience stores popped up every so often on the corner of a state highway and a county road.

They found a party store to replenish the booze on a dark corner centered in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans. Cara figured they were at least ten miles from the house party. The man working the store had been built of exceptional proportions. He looked a lot like the cartoon character Pluto from Popeye, intimidating, bristly and even sinister.

Heading back to the beer case, Wendy walked like she owned the place. Pluto snarled as Cara asked for a pack of Marlboro Lights. She handed him a five-dollar bill. As he handed back the change, she realized her transaction had finished. Done. She could walk out the door and leave. She could just get in her car and never have to see Wendy again. It would be the closure she never knew she needed, until just that moment.

Cara didn’t waste any time rethinking her decision. She had seen Wendy still checking out brands of beer. Swiftly she went to her car, climbed in, clicked her seat belt and shifted the car in reverse. Shaking, there had been no turning back. She became more self-assured in her decision with every mile put between her and Wendy.

That night had been dark; the moon had not yet risen. Heavy humidity thickened the air and with the window down, Cara heard the crickets in the fields singing her a victory song. The corn sweated its fragrant scent of anticipation for another harvest. She lit a cigarette and took out her ponytail. The breeze from the summer night whipped her hair. She let out a scream of triumph and sped back to the party.

When she returned, she quickly found Kat, “We need to go.” she whispered.

“What? No. We just got here, where is the beer?” Kat exclaimed loudly.

The last thing Cara wanted had been to draw attention to herself and face the barrage of many questions.

“We need to go right now.” If her tone didn’t shout urgency, her eyes did.

“Ok.”

The house vibrated with loud music and the echoes of drunken voices. Cell phones and texting were somewhere in the future. The blare of the party would override a phone call from a payphone. Wendy would have dissipated in the drunken thoughts of the party goers that night. Cara kept asking herself as she drove away from the party, who was the bully now?

Who was the bully now?