Dear Bully полностью

So, dirty kid in dirty clothes, mouthful of braces, bra straps chronically slipping down my arms. What would you do if you were a middle school girl? Would you make comments? Mean ones?

You might. Some kids did, most didn’t. I was never without at least a couple of friends. Things sorted out as I got older and figured out how to take care of myself. Meanwhile, the family drama shifted from beer and septic tanks to my dad’s horrific lung cancer. He was sick throughout my high school years and died shortly after I turned eighteen.

By then I’d found my social niche. The former teasers got older, too, and nicer. We all ended up friends, more or less. To this day, doing laundry is my favorite household chore.

The kids who teased were wrong to be mean, and it hurt a lot at the time. But, you know, at least they noticed something was wrong.

I kind of wish the grown-ups had, too.

Kicking Stones at the Sun

by Jo Knowles

When we were kids, my brother, sister, and I took the bus to school every morning. We lived in a rural area and didn’t have one of those cool-seeming bus stops where a bunch of kids from the neighborhood gather and wait together at some selected spot. We waited alone at the end of our driveway. In the early years, my brother, who was five years older than me, would ham it up while we waited. He’d go out in the middle of the road and adjust his feet just so on the double yellow lines. We lived at the top of a hill and he’d get down into a tuck position and say he was about to make history skiing on the longest skis in the world. My sister and I would jump on and ski behind him.

When we got a little older, I remember following his lead as he’d look up at our house to make sure our mother wasn’t peeking out the window, and then stuff the winter hat she made him wear into the mailbox. I stuffed mine in, too, because if he was too cool to wear a hat, I wanted to be as well. When we got off the bus that afternoon, we’d grab our hats and saunter up the driveway like the angels we never were.

And then in the days just before my brother stopped riding the bus, before he saved money for his own car, I remember how he used to kick pebbles across the road and into the field on the other side. The sun would be coming up in late fall (our bus picked us up at the ungodly hour of 7:00 a.m.), and when I picture him there now, I imagine him kicking stones at the sun with all the grace and rage of a beautiful boy caught in a world that wasn’t ready for him.

These are the things I want to remember about my brother. His joy. His skill. His coolness. I loved him so. But I also remember getting on the bus, almost always in the same order. Me first, then my sister, then my brother. I’d sit up front, my sister in the middle, and my brother, bravely, day after day, way in the back.

From my seat behind the driver I could look up into the big mirror she used to supposedly keep her eye on things and see my sister busily talking to her friend, and farther back, my brother. I can see his dirty-blond hair. I can see his face, turning bright red. I can see his eyes, watering. I can see the boys sitting behind him, leaning into his face, saying words that penetrated his heart in some permanent way that shaped him and changed his course for years to come. I see them smash his head against the window. And I see the bus driver, staring straight ahead, humming to the radio.

And then the names.

Faggot.

You little faggot.

Sicko.

These images and words have stayed with me all my life. They have stayed with me just like the other stories my brother told me much later. About how his fourth-grade teacher used to torment him because he was new. From away. But mostly because he was different. We would joke about how Mr. L. had gaydar and what that really meant. But we knew it wasn’t actually that funny. He told me about how his eleventh-grade teacher said he should just quit school because he would never amount to anything. How he took him out in the hallway during history and slammed him up against the locker, called him a loser. And how, when he and his two best friends went to the principal to report the teacher, the principal didn’t believe them.

I was twelve when the real fighting started. I remember the screaming and the crying as my parents pleaded with him not to smoke. Not to drink. Not to do drugs. Not to stay out late. Not to go there or there or there. Not to leave. I remember the pain on his face as he struggled to explain how desperate he was to get out and be with the people who accepted him. I see the agony. The frustration. He just wanted to be loved. To be understood. But he didn’t have the words to explain it all. And my parents didn’t know how else to protect him. And so he ran away.