She never said a word, not after what they did to her. The Gang screwed her up. We all thought she was beyond help. I didn’t suppose I could actually do something. The first year I came to Heinbury she was happy, smiling. When I look back, I never really saw her with many people at lunchtimes, but she was fine… wasn’t she?
Then the Gang got involved. They didn’t like her ‘attitude’. She wasn’t cool enough, didn’t have enough respect for them. Whatever she was doing just didn’t cut it for them, so they started it. Every day, the name-calling and the emotional beatings. And we just stood there, watching, doing nothing. How could I have been so stupid? Just standing idly by while a girl was being torn apart from the inside out.
After a while, I guess she just couldn’t hold herself together anymore – she lost herself. She wouldn’t come to school, dressed in grey and looked like the picture of death itself. She didn’t work in class, just scribbled down a couple of notes then stared ahead. Slowly her grades deteriorated from straight A’s to C’s, D’s, even to F’s. She hid in the bathroom at lunchtimes, perched nervously on the top of the toilet seat, nibbling at her sandwich as if it were poisoned. As I said, the silence was awful.
One day I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. So I did something small. To me, it was tiny, something done everyday, something as easy as using an iPod. But to her, it was a grand gesture, a bold statement, an amazing moment that flipped her world upside down. I walked over to her in her cubicle and pushed the door open slightly. I touched her gently on her pale, skinny arm and said, “Hi”. For a while she just stared at me, open-mouthed. There was a suspicious glint in her eye. I tried again, “Are you ok?”
At this point she began sobbing wildly, and when she caught her breath, she looked me desperately in the eye and whispered, “No, I’m not”. So I sat there with her as she cried long-awaited tears into my shoulder. People walking past stared at us like children through the bars at the zoo, but it didn’t matter to me.
The next day I walked with her the counsellor. And the next day, and for two months longer. I think it started to work during about the fifth session. Whatever was doing it, she was getting better. It could have been that I gave her someone to open up to. It could be that I invited her round after school so she didn’t have to hide from the Gang.
Whatever it was, she began to regain some of herself as a person. I even saw her smile into nowhere for no particular reason at all sometimes. Nowadays, she’s just as much my rock as I am hers. I know she’s still working on it, and she can slip at any moment, but I’ve got her back.
I can’t believe it didn’t stand up for her before… I just wish I had realized how much part I was taking in the bullying by not doing anything at all. It wasn’t affecting me, I’d thought I was an innocent bystander – its taken me so long to realize that you’re are either on the bully’s side of that of the victim. There is no in between.
So do something about it. Something small, something easy, it might mean the world to someone.
