If my hand is raised. He cringes when I speak. Every time
My mouth opens, he cringes. Everyone whispers
About it. Whatever he wants, I know it can’t be good.
Not me alone with him and his porn star mustache and talk radio voice.
My dad has just died. My step-uncle has just touched me.
I am not prepared for even the smallest of blows, but there
He is—an earthquake of a man, always rumbling, always ready
To tremor my life into something that’s just rubble.
“You are here because of your s’s,” he says.
My s’s . . . My s’s . . . My . . . I pick at a hangnail, shift
My weight, look out the window at Jackie running
From Paul Freitzel, laughing . . . laughing . . . happy . . .
Back in first grade, I refused to talk because everyone laughed at my voice, at those s’s that slurred around in my mouth and refused to be still, those hopeless, moving things. Jayed Jamison imitated me to giggles, calling me Carrie Barnyard, St. Bernard, pulling my hair, chasing me at recess, knocking me down so my tongue tasted dirt and pine needles invaded my mouth and then he’d start it all over again, hissing s words in my ear, sss-sausage, sssss-snake, shshshs-shiver, all those sloshy s’s. Everybody just watched. Everybody took tag turns mocking my voice so
I stopped talking. I stopped
Moving my tongue. I gave
Away my lunch, my snacks
Until people loved me too much
To be mean. And slowly
—what an s word—
I started moving again, whispering
Words and thought forward
While Jayed stayed stuck in first grade.
We moved on to second and cursive writing,
Haikus, and Mrs. Snearson who wore fatigues.
I thought it was over.
This seventh-grade recess, Mr. Q ends all that.
He says, “If you don’t fix your ridiculous voice,
You will never make anything of yourself. You will be a loser
Forever, Carrie. No one wants to love a girl that sounds like you.
No one wants to hire a girl like you. Don’t you want
A life?” He perches on his desk and I stare at too-tight chinos
And a porn mustache and manage to say, “But . . .”
He cringes, lifts a finger, stops my words.
“You will never be anything with a voice like yours,” he says.
“Think about it.” I have thought about it for six years of speech
Therapy, one year of teasing, bullying, and I do not need to think
Anymore, but I do as he lets me go. I run down the linoleum hall
Thinking about it, wondering what happened to being safe, what happened
To being able to protect my sloppy tongue with friends. And I wonder
What if mean was frozen in a game of tag and nobody ever touched
Its fingers to let it go run free and it just had to stay there alone forever.
Abuse
by Lucienne Diver
I write humor because I’m not comfortable with emotion. When this anthology was proposed, I was sure I wouldn’t have anything to contribute. But as my stomach proceeded to eat itself alive and my heart to break for those kids who were bullied to the point where they felt the only way out was death, I realized I was wrong. I did have a story to tell. Sadly, there’s nothing at all funny about it.
I was molested as a child. Wait for it, I promise there’s relevance or there’s no way I would put this out there to the world. The man was a neighbor and someone who worked with my father. I was about seven. I was/still am asthmatic. The first time it happened, I was out for a bike ride through the woods with friends and had to stop because my asthma had kicked up, and they left me behind. Prey.
For years I never told anyone. Molesters are master manipulators. They try to make their victims complicit in their silence, telling them their parents will be angry or won’t believe them or giving them terrible options of “I could do this or this” and making it seem like a choice. For years, I felt terrible guilt. For years, I prayed to God every night to forgive me, because I was sure it was all my fault in some way. He never answered.
It wasn’t until I was around twelve that my mother had “the talk” with my sister and me about dangers, how we could tell her everything. . . . I was so upset that I excused myself, went off to my room, and wrote her a note (I’ve always escaped through writing). I’d transferred my anger. I still hadn’t forgiven myself, but now I was angry at her, at my father, at everyone for not telling me sooner how to protect myself and that I could have told, which is something I want everyone to know. So I’m saying it in case your parents don’t.
To say that she was upset would be an understatement. How she handled it . . . I can’t say that I blame her or that she did anything wrong, but it made things very difficult for me. My mother called all the mothers on the block and told them so that they could watch out for the man. Unfortunately, she also told them what had happened to me, and they told their kids. I don’t blame them, either—they were trying to protect their children—but the result was that everyone in the neighborhood knew. They knew what had happened; they knew the button to push to get a rise out of me. (In case you’re wondering, my father, with whom I’d always had a tumultuous relationship, called the man and threatened that if he ever came near me again, my father would make sure he lost everything. That was the day I started loving him.)
Now, I’d always been a geek, a brain, asthmatic, rail thin, always snuffling from allergies and out of school for my health issues as much as I was in. In short, there was no dearth of material to tease me about, but I’d always escaped into books, sometimes three a day. I wasn’t terribly concerned about playing outside anymore (wonder why) or what people thought of me there. But now the kids had a surefire taunt, something I couldn’t ignore, couldn’t not react to.
And that led to the scariest moment of my life—the day I swung an aluminum bat at some boy’s head for twisting the knife about my abuse. That day, I could have done irreparable harm to another human being. I could have killed. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t decide to swing the bat. It was already in my hand, and then it was in motion. I’d never before experienced the “vision gone red with rage” thing I read about in books, but that was exactly what happened. If my vision hadn’t cleared and I hadn’t seen his face at that very last second, stricken with absolute terror, there’s no telling what would have happened. I managed to pull the blow, and he lived to tell about the experience . . . and get me into all the trouble I deserved. But I was a hair’s breadth away from murder. I’m not pulling the punch now, here. Sometimes it’s better to tell.
I wish it went without saying that bullying is horrible and dangerous, for the perpetrator as well as the victim. The target can just as easily turn his or her rage outward as inward. If bullies won’t stop for the sheer humanity of it, I hope they’ll stop for the simple drive for self-preservation. To this day, I’m horrified by what I almost did. If I hadn’t pulled my swing, I’d have had to live with what I did forever. The bully would have had to live . . . or die . . . with the consequences.