The Bully Blues
I never meant to be a bully.
In kindergarten, when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, a schoolyard terrorist from the bowels of Hell never would’ve been my answer. Princess, doctor, a famous actress? Sure. Maybe even a mad scientist if I could take a pass on the crazy hair. But I was never supposed to be the mean girl. I already had a sister filling that role, and I sure didn’t want to grow up to be like her.
Then I hit the third grade and discovered Blubber, the book that changed my entire nine-year-old view of life. Poor Judy Blume—she had no idea of the monster that would spawn from the pages of her book when she first set pen to paper. And I’m not talking about her character, Wendy.
See, Blubber was about a group of fifth graders who started picking on one of the girls in their class: Linda, a meek, frumpy chick with a gray tooth who would rather roll over and play dead than stick up for herself. (In my humble opinion, I’d say it was probably the gray tooth that pushed those kids over the edge; jacked up teeth is just way too much material for any self-respecting bully to pass on.) Led by the class “It” girl, Wendy, the group carved out a little piece of Hell for Linda to live in, starting with renaming her “Blubber” and progressing to stripping her in front of other kids and turning physical assault into a fun, new game. Wendy even created a journal to help the group keep their daily torture fresh and exciting.
So I sat down with the book, one day. I’d already gone through my whole Beverly Cleary collection and was ready to move beyond Ramona and her zany adventures. And as I sat there, devouring each vicious page, the scariest thing happened: Wendy became my hero. My idol. She was tough, popular, and smart in a sarcastic, superior kind of way. But above all, she had power. And power is cool.
Looking back, I now realize that Wendy was supposed to be the complete opposite of what every nice little girl should be. She was supposed to be the after-school lesson teaching all us impressionable, wide-eyed kids how not to behave, how not to act toward others. I was supposed to walk away from Blubber with a bright and shiny understanding of the right way to do unto others: be nice, show compassion to the less fortunate, yadda, yadda, rainbows and puppies.
But at the time? Yeah, I didn’t see it that way.
I shut that book with a new outlook on life. Looking around my third-grade classroom, I beheld a land that needed to be conquered. In every corner was a classmate lacking direction, lost souls in desperate need of someone to lead them to a greater purpose. Their purpose was to carve out a new paradise according to me. And I was to be their leader.
They just didn’t know it yet.
Sneaking a piece of grape Bubble Yum into my mouth, I took stock of what I had to work with. Bobbie Franklin was hunched in the corner, hoping nobody noticed he had turned his nose into an all-you-can-eat booger buffet and was on his third round of refills. A group of girls in the row by the window were passing a note back and forth, oblivious to the teacher jotting marks against their names in her notebook each time the note switched hands. And the entire middle row floundered in a post-lunch sugar crash, slumped over their desks with crayons dangling from Kool-Aid stained fingers.
Yep. Lost souls.
My first step in classroom domination was to get an enforcer. Since I was the brains, I had to have some brawn, and Carla Brown was the obvious choice. She was taller than every girl—and boy—in the class, had fists bigger than our class hamster, and she would go along with just about anything. I could get her to do whatever I wanted. All it took was a smile and smuggled Baby Ruth, and she was firmly in place under my thumb. Check.
Mission defined, muscle on my side…now I had to find somebody to turn everyone against. For what is a tyrant without someone to terrorize? I needed a patsy. I had to have my “Blubber.”
And that’s where little Sheila Jameson came into the picture.
Sheila had just transferred into my class and hadn’t made any friends yet. She seemed like a nice enough girl, and in an alternate universe, we could’ve ended up being besties, but she’d messed up and made the classic rookie mistake: she tried to become friends with the girl I had already chosen to be my best friend. And the moment she’d dared to pick up that rock during recess to play hopscotch with my friend, it was on.
The secret to bending an entire class to your will is to never let them know you’re doing it. It’s their idea to hold their noses whenever Sheila walks by, because wouldn’t that be so funny? They want to turn away when she tries to talk to them and pretend she doesn’t exist, because—even though they can’t remember why—they kind of feel like she’s stuck up and deserves it. And if any of them ever starts to wonder if those thoughts might not be their own…well, that’s where Carla steps in.
But I didn’t stop at isolation. Each day was a new opportunity to ask myself, “What would Wendy do?” And each day was a time for poor Sheila to find out.
I basked in the demented joy of messing with Sheila’s head. Throwing stuff at her in class and pretending she was making it up became one of my favorite games. Whenever it was time for our class to go to lunch, I always tripped her in the hallway or pulled her hair. And if she was stupid enough to tell on me, I pulled an innocent baby face, accused her of tripping me, and got her butt sent to the corner. I was a demon child with the face of an angel, and I knew how to use it. My sisters had taught me well.
My reign of terror ended the day Sheila transferred classes. In reality, my power was already on the decline by the time she left, but I was holding onto its fading glory for all it was worth. In my quest for control, the one thing I’d forgotten was that third graders really don’t have that great of an attention span. It didn’t take long for everyone to get bored with picking on Sheila, and once they figured out she actually was a pretty nice girl, there was nowhere to go but down. And the fact that Carla’s mom had put her on a diet and I could no longer bribe her with Baby Ruths also didn’t help the cause.
Thus went my dreams of being Wendy.
I wish I could say that making a girl’s life so miserable she had to flee to another class opened my eyes to the error of my ways, but I can’t. I didn’t fully comprehend what a horrible snot I’d been until a few years later, around the time I got to middle school and found myself buried under the lowest rung of the social ladder, where I got to be picked on for just breathing. Karma is a mother.
But even without the “what goes around, comes around” lesson of life, I eventually would’ve felt bad about what I’d done to Sheila. Once I got older and was able to look at things with a slightly wiser eye, I understood that life was not a book, and treating someone like dirt just because I could didn’t make me cool and sure didn’t make me better. I guess I started to look at the world around me as being more than just a story about “self” and finally saw it as a living picture, made up of the feelings of others.
Going forward, I did learn to use my power of manipulation—err, I mean persuasion—for good instead of self-serving evil. I stood up for other kids who were getting messed with and shunned cliques like Bobby Franklin shunned baths. If you’re gonna be a leader, lead people to something good. Maybe if I’d been nice to Sheila and welcomed her into my circle instead of turning her into a hated outsider, she could’ve had a wonderful school year, made lots of friends, and been on track to being President of the United States (okay, getting carried away, but you get my point).
When I list some of my biggest regrets, I will say that my third-grade power trip to Hell is up there. The thought that I may have been the negative catalyst that shaped a little girl’s life still bugs me. And yeah, I was only nine-years-old, but so was she.
And she never saw me coming.
I never meant to be a bully.
In kindergarten, when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, a schoolyard terrorist from the bowels of Hell never would’ve been my answer. Princess, doctor, a famous actress? Sure. Maybe even a mad scientist if I could take a pass on the crazy hair. But I was never supposed to be the mean girl. I already had a sister filling that role, and I sure didn’t want to grow up to be like her.
Then I hit the third grade and discovered Blubber, the book that changed my entire nine-year-old view of life. Poor Judy Blume—she had no idea of the monster that would spawn from the pages of her book when she first set pen to paper. And I’m not talking about her character, Wendy.
See, Blubber was about a group of fifth graders who started picking on one of the girls in their class: Linda, a meek, frumpy chick with a gray tooth who would rather roll over and play dead than stick up for herself. (In my humble opinion, I’d say it was probably the gray tooth that pushed those kids over the edge; jacked up teeth is just way too much material for any self-respecting bully to pass on.) Led by the class “It” girl, Wendy, the group carved out a little piece of Hell for Linda to live in, starting with renaming her “Blubber” and progressing to stripping her in front of other kids and turning physical assault into a fun, new game. Wendy even created a journal to help the group keep their daily torture fresh and exciting.
So I sat down with the book, one day. I’d already gone through my whole Beverly Cleary collection and was ready to move beyond Ramona and her zany adventures. And as I sat there, devouring each vicious page, the scariest thing happened: Wendy became my hero. My idol. She was tough, popular, and smart in a sarcastic, superior kind of way. But above all, she had power. And power is cool.
Looking back, I now realize that Wendy was supposed to be the complete opposite of what every nice little girl should be. She was supposed to be the after-school lesson teaching all us impressionable, wide-eyed kids how not to behave, how not to act toward others. I was supposed to walk away from Blubber with a bright and shiny understanding of the right way to do unto others: be nice, show compassion to the less fortunate, yadda, yadda, rainbows and puppies.
But at the time? Yeah, I didn’t see it that way.
I shut that book with a new outlook on life. Looking around my third-grade classroom, I beheld a land that needed to be conquered. In every corner was a classmate lacking direction, lost souls in desperate need of someone to lead them to a greater purpose. Their purpose was to carve out a new paradise according to me. And I was to be their leader.
They just didn’t know it yet.
Sneaking a piece of grape Bubble Yum into my mouth, I took stock of what I had to work with. Bobbie Franklin was hunched in the corner, hoping nobody noticed he had turned his nose into an all-you-can-eat booger buffet and was on his third round of refills. A group of girls in the row by the window were passing a note back and forth, oblivious to the teacher jotting marks against their names in her notebook each time the note switched hands. And the entire middle row floundered in a post-lunch sugar crash, slumped over their desks with crayons dangling from Kool-Aid stained fingers.
Yep. Lost souls.
My first step in classroom domination was to get an enforcer. Since I was the brains, I had to have some brawn, and Carla Brown was the obvious choice. She was taller than every girl—and boy—in the class, had fists bigger than our class hamster, and she would go along with just about anything. I could get her to do whatever I wanted. All it took was a smile and smuggled Baby Ruth, and she was firmly in place under my thumb. Check.
Mission defined, muscle on my side…now I had to find somebody to turn everyone against. For what is a tyrant without someone to terrorize? I needed a patsy. I had to have my “Blubber.”
And that’s where little Sheila Jameson came into the picture.
Sheila had just transferred into my class and hadn’t made any friends yet. She seemed like a nice enough girl, and in an alternate universe, we could’ve ended up being besties, but she’d messed up and made the classic rookie mistake: she tried to become friends with the girl I had already chosen to be my best friend. And the moment she’d dared to pick up that rock during recess to play hopscotch with my friend, it was on.
The secret to bending an entire class to your will is to never let them know you’re doing it. It’s their idea to hold their noses whenever Sheila walks by, because wouldn’t that be so funny? They want to turn away when she tries to talk to them and pretend she doesn’t exist, because—even though they can’t remember why—they kind of feel like she’s stuck up and deserves it. And if any of them ever starts to wonder if those thoughts might not be their own…well, that’s where Carla steps in.
But I didn’t stop at isolation. Each day was a new opportunity to ask myself, “What would Wendy do?” And each day was a time for poor Sheila to find out.
I basked in the demented joy of messing with Sheila’s head. Throwing stuff at her in class and pretending she was making it up became one of my favorite games. Whenever it was time for our class to go to lunch, I always tripped her in the hallway or pulled her hair. And if she was stupid enough to tell on me, I pulled an innocent baby face, accused her of tripping me, and got her butt sent to the corner. I was a demon child with the face of an angel, and I knew how to use it. My sisters had taught me well.
My reign of terror ended the day Sheila transferred classes. In reality, my power was already on the decline by the time she left, but I was holding onto its fading glory for all it was worth. In my quest for control, the one thing I’d forgotten was that third graders really don’t have that great of an attention span. It didn’t take long for everyone to get bored with picking on Sheila, and once they figured out she actually was a pretty nice girl, there was nowhere to go but down. And the fact that Carla’s mom had put her on a diet and I could no longer bribe her with Baby Ruths also didn’t help the cause.
Thus went my dreams of being Wendy.
I wish I could say that making a girl’s life so miserable she had to flee to another class opened my eyes to the error of my ways, but I can’t. I didn’t fully comprehend what a horrible snot I’d been until a few years later, around the time I got to middle school and found myself buried under the lowest rung of the social ladder, where I got to be picked on for just breathing. Karma is a mother.
But even without the “what goes around, comes around” lesson of life, I eventually would’ve felt bad about what I’d done to Sheila. Once I got older and was able to look at things with a slightly wiser eye, I understood that life was not a book, and treating someone like dirt just because I could didn’t make me cool and sure didn’t make me better. I guess I started to look at the world around me as being more than just a story about “self” and finally saw it as a living picture, made up of the feelings of others.
Going forward, I did learn to use my power of manipulation—err, I mean persuasion—for good instead of self-serving evil. I stood up for other kids who were getting messed with and shunned cliques like Bobby Franklin shunned baths. If you’re gonna be a leader, lead people to something good. Maybe if I’d been nice to Sheila and welcomed her into my circle instead of turning her into a hated outsider, she could’ve had a wonderful school year, made lots of friends, and been on track to being President of the United States (okay, getting carried away, but you get my point).
When I list some of my biggest regrets, I will say that my third-grade power trip to Hell is up there. The thought that I may have been the negative catalyst that shaped a little girl’s life still bugs me. And yeah, I was only nine-years-old, but so was she.
And she never saw me coming.
I never meant to be a bully.
In kindergarten, when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, a schoolyard terrorist from the bowels of Hell never would’ve been my answer. Princess, doctor, a famous actress? Sure. Maybe even a mad scientist if I could take a pass on the crazy hair. But I was never supposed to be the mean girl. I already had a sister filling that role, and I sure didn’t want to grow up to be like her.
Then I hit the third grade and discovered Blubber, the book that changed my entire nine-year-old view of life. Poor Judy Blume—she had no idea of the monster that would spawn from the pages of her book when she first set pen to paper. And I’m not talking about her character, Wendy.
See, Blubber was about a group of fifth graders who started picking on one of the girls in their class: Linda, a meek, frumpy chick with a gray tooth who would rather roll over and play dead than stick up for herself. (In my humble opinion, I’d say it was probably the gray tooth that pushed those kids over the edge; jacked up teeth is just way too much material for any self-respecting bully to pass on.) Led by the class “It” girl, Wendy, the group carved out a little piece of Hell for Linda to live in, starting with renaming her “Blubber” and progressing to stripping her in front of other kids and turning physical assault into a fun, new game. Wendy even created a journal to help the group keep their daily torture fresh and exciting.
So I sat down with the book, one day. I’d already gone through my whole Beverly Cleary collection and was ready to move beyond Ramona and her zany adventures. And as I sat there, devouring each vicious page, the scariest thing happened: Wendy became my hero. My idol. She was tough, popular, and smart in a sarcastic, superior kind of way. But above all, she had power. And power is cool.
Looking back, I now realize that Wendy was supposed to be the complete opposite of what every nice little girl should be. She was supposed to be the after-school lesson teaching all us impressionable, wide-eyed kids how not to behave, how not to act toward others. I was supposed to walk away from Blubber with a bright and shiny understanding of the right way to do unto others: be nice, show compassion to the less fortunate, yadda, yadda, rainbows and puppies.
But at the time? Yeah, I didn’t see it that way.
I shut that book with a new outlook on life. Looking around my third-grade classroom, I beheld a land that needed to be conquered. In every corner was a classmate lacking direction, lost souls in desperate need of someone to lead them to a greater purpose. Their purpose was to carve out a new paradise according to me. And I was to be their leader.
They just didn’t know it yet.
Sneaking a piece of grape Bubble Yum into my mouth, I took stock of what I had to work with. Bobbie Franklin was hunched in the corner, hoping nobody noticed he had turned his nose into an all-you-can-eat booger buffet and was on his third round of refills. A group of girls in the row by the window were passing a note back and forth, oblivious to the teacher jotting marks against their names in her notebook each time the note switched hands. And the entire middle row floundered in a post-lunch sugar crash, slumped over their desks with crayons dangling from Kool-Aid stained fingers.
Yep. Lost souls.
My first step in classroom domination was to get an enforcer. Since I was the brains, I had to have some brawn, and Carla Brown was the obvious choice. She was taller than every girl—and boy—in the class, had fists bigger than our class hamster, and she would go along with just about anything. I could get her to do whatever I wanted. All it took was a smile and smuggled Baby Ruth, and she was firmly in place under my thumb. Check.
Mission defined, muscle on my side…now I had to find somebody to turn everyone against. For what is a tyrant without someone to terrorize? I needed a patsy. I had to have my “Blubber.”
And that’s where little Sheila Jameson came into the picture.
Sheila had just transferred into my class and hadn’t made any friends yet. She seemed like a nice enough girl, and in an alternate universe, we could’ve ended up being besties, but she’d messed up and made the classic rookie mistake: she tried to become friends with the girl I had already chosen to be my best friend. And the moment she’d dared to pick up that rock during recess to play hopscotch with my friend, it was on.
The secret to bending an entire class to your will is to never let them know you’re doing it. It’s their idea to hold their noses whenever Sheila walks by, because wouldn’t that be so funny? They want to turn away when she tries to talk to them and pretend she doesn’t exist, because—even though they can’t remember why—they kind of feel like she’s stuck up and deserves it. And if any of them ever starts to wonder if those thoughts might not be their own…well, that’s where Carla steps in.
But I didn’t stop at isolation. Each day was a new opportunity to ask myself, “What would Wendy do?” And each day was a time for poor Sheila to find out.
I basked in the demented joy of messing with Sheila’s head. Throwing stuff at her in class and pretending she was making it up became one of my favorite games. Whenever it was time for our class to go to lunch, I always tripped her in the hallway or pulled her hair. And if she was stupid enough to tell on me, I pulled an innocent baby face, accused her of tripping me, and got her butt sent to the corner. I was a demon child with the face of an angel, and I knew how to use it. My sisters had taught me well.
My reign of terror ended the day Sheila transferred classes. In reality, my power was already on the decline by the time she left, but I was holding onto its fading glory for all it was worth. In my quest for control, the one thing I’d forgotten was that third graders really don’t have that great of an attention span. It didn’t take long for everyone to get bored with picking on Sheila, and once they figured out she actually was a pretty nice girl, there was nowhere to go but down. And the fact that Carla’s mom had put her on a diet and I could no longer bribe her with Baby Ruths also didn’t help the cause.
Thus went my dreams of being Wendy.
I wish I could say that making a girl’s life so miserable she had to flee to another class opened my eyes to the error of my ways, but I can’t. I didn’t fully comprehend what a horrible snot I’d been until a few years later, around the time I got to middle school and found myself buried under the lowest rung of the social ladder, where I got to be picked on for just breathing. Karma is a mother.
But even without the “what goes around, comes around” lesson of life, I eventually would’ve felt bad about what I’d done to Sheila. Once I got older and was able to look at things with a slightly wiser eye, I understood that life was not a book, and treating someone like dirt just because I could didn’t make me cool and sure didn’t make me better. I guess I started to look at the world around me as being more than just a story about “self” and finally saw it as a living picture, made up of the feelings of others.
Going forward, I did learn to use my power of manipulation—err, I mean persuasion—for good instead of self-serving evil. I stood up for other kids who were getting messed with and shunned cliques like Bobby Franklin shunned baths. If you’re gonna be a leader, lead people to something good. Maybe if I’d been nice to Sheila and welcomed her into my circle instead of turning her into a hated outsider, she could’ve had a wonderful school year, made lots of friends, and been on track to being President of the United States (okay, getting carried away, but you get my point).
When I list some of my biggest regrets, I will say that my third-grade power trip to Hell is up there. The thought that I may have been the negative catalyst that shaped a little girl’s life still bugs me. And yeah, I was only nine-years-old, but so was she.
And she never saw me coming.
