Recently I’ve felt disgusted with myself. I’m not pretty enough, thin enough, my skin is bad. I know I’m not a super model. I’m too short. When I was in third grade people started to tease me, they started to call me stinky. I didn’t understand why, I bathed every day, so it didn’t make sense to me. It got so bad that I started to carry around one of those cheap imitations of the designer fragrances and even that only seemed to make the name calling worse. This is what most adults call the awkward stages of life. I call it the start of my introversion.
By fourth grade everyone in my year was calling me stinky, even kids I didn’t know. Everyone that is except for two people. My best friend Nina, and this girl Kristen. Nina was in the special classes so I didn’t get to see her too often during school, and we had done something over the summer that forced our parents to tell us we weren’t allowed to play with each other any more. I’ll go more into this eventually.
Kristen was vivid and bubbly, she was so amazing, I loved her very much. Her and I grew closer, and started spending more and more time together. At recess she would always pick the same color section as I did. Blue was for the ball section, Red for jump ropes, Green for games like hopscotch and tether ball, and yellow was the quiet section. I always chose yellow, recess was the only time I could get away from classmates who enjoyed teasing me.
They picked on Kristen too but she just had a flare about shrugging off. I remember one day a group of kids came to mess with me in quiet section, they were yelling “hey stinky,” or “yo stinko” I did my best to ignore them but Kirsten just turned and looked at them with such fire in her eyes and countered with, something witty like sniffing me then saying “Patty you smell better them, you weren’t running around and getting sweaty like they were.” They would be annoyed of course and leave again, Kristen and I would return to our game of checkers. Then my world became dark again.
Kristen and I spent the summer together, every day we were playing dress up or dolls or checkers. One day I called Kristen’s house and no one answered, the day before she and I had made plans to go to the play ground and swing. I tried all day long to call her and see if she wanted to come out. That night Kirsten would leave my life forever. Kristen’s mom knew that I had been calling all day, and that night she had called to speak with my mom and dad. I was taking a bath and getting ready for bed. When I got out of the tub, my mom and dad called me down stairs and sat me down.
The news they told me broke me. I had lost Kirsten because of Kirsten’s step father. Kristen and her sister Jenna were removed from their home. My mother and father told me that he had molested Kristen and her sister and that children services had them removed from the home. Kristen called me that night to talk to me, she even apologized for not being there to go to the park. That was the last time I spoke to her. I asked her where she was, what her phone number was, when I was going to see her next. She couldn’t give me anything.
My mother and father had told me she and Jenna were moved to Levitttown. I knew that was far away and that I would probably never see her again, but there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t have something that reminds me of the time she and I had together. I loved her a lot, and every so often I’ll search the internet and the phone books hoping that just maybe I’ll come across her name. I don’t know what I would say to her today. Probably something stupid like “hey wanna go to the playground and swing?”
Two months later school started again, and so did the names. I didn’t have a friend to protect me. The teachers were blind to the torment I endured. I was in 5th grade now and things just weren’t the same without Kristen. That was also the year Nina and I started talking again and reforming our broken relationship. Before too long we were allowed to play together again, in short notice we had made up for the time we had lost.
However, Nina didn’t protect me from the names. Come to think of it, she didn’t really protect me from a lot of things. I only lived two block away from school so getting home was easy. 5th grade came and went uneventfully other than I graduated and advanced to the 6th grade. I was in middle school now. There would be new people and new faces. However the dark cloud loomed over me. Nina and I walked to school together everyday. I would be up at seven, and at her house by seven-thirty to watch Full House with her before we hurried to school.
The night before the first day of sixth grade was the most pivotal night in my life. This was the night I became a young lady and was no longer a little girl. I had gotten my first period. RIGHT BEFORE SCHOOL! Ugh. I was in the bathroom preparing for bed, going to the bathroom and I wiped. Blood… Of course I knew about the bird and the bees, I had known for a couple of years about sex and the male and female bodies, how they work etc… but experiencing it for the first time on my own and all logical thinking went out the window. I screamed for my mom. Mom had been hearing me call her all day, mom this mom that, and dad answered.
Well this wasn’t exactly something that you could tell a father without blushing at the tender age of eleven. I told daddy that I needed mom and that it was an emergency. So mom came up and asked what was wrong. I told her I was bleeding from my private area, and all she could do was laugh and hug me. Talk about confusion there. Anyway mom gave me the stuff I needed and explained to me that this was normal. I thought she was lying, because it’s not normal for anybody to bleed without being cut. Mom assured me this was normal and that it would be okay.
Then she went down and told my dad what was going on, he got up went to the store and bought seven different kinds of sanitary napkins. Seven, not just one or two but SEVEN. This was coming from a man who doesn’t buy these things unless he’s food shopping and it can go in with the rest of the stuff he’s buying. Mom lit up the phone lines calling every female relative we had contact with. Grams, nan, Aunt Dee and Tracy. Several others as well. Everyone wanted to congratulate me. I was not thrilled, or happy, or even excited a little bit to have this done to me. I didn’t ask to bleed randomly, nor did I ask my mom to tell everyone in my family. This was humiliation at it’s best.
The next day I started school. I was armed with my school books and backpack, pencils, pens, paper, everything you needed for the first day of school. Except I had more. I had pads in the depths of my bag. Ew. I told Nina that I had gotten my period. She didn’t really seem to care. We went through the day, got our class assignments and went to class to get to know our teachers. I had a really pretty teacher name Mrs. Bowser. She greeted the class and explained her rules. It would have been a good year, had I been the only student in class.
Teachers are supposed to be there for kids right? Wrong. She was just like the other teachers, just as blind to the torment people were putting me through. This year my name had evolved from stinky or stinko to Fish. Again I bathed everyday, I made sure that took a shower in the morning before school and my hair was wet went I got to school so they could see that I did take a shower. I made sure that my girl parts were extra clean and didn’t smell funny. This was all in vain. No matter how many different times I tried a new hair style, or got new clothes they always found something to tease me on. My sneakers were their favorite thing to tease me about. My family couldn’t afford name brand shoes, so I was stuck with K-mart brand knock offs. No matter how much I cried and begged my parents to give me a pair of name brand shoes they never did. Dad’s excuse was they were too expensive and he wasn’t about to pay for a pair of shoes that I’m just gonna get dirty anyway. My cousin Katie gave me a pair of reebok sneakers. I was never more happy in my entire life. A pair of name brand sneakers that I could wear to school and finally fit in. WRONG! They still teased me about them, told me I had the logo sewn on them. They called them “freeboks” This tore me apart, no matter how hard I tired these kids just wouldn’t accept me for me. So eventually I just stopped trying. I stopped talking, and caring. This only gave them more fuel to go with. It also made me the easiest target for bullies.
By January of 1996, I was chased home almost everyday, most days the bullies didn’t catch me, but on the days they did, I paid for it dearly. Both my parents told me to stand up to them or keep running. I used to know 30 different way to get home. Nina was always there to walk home with me, but if they caught up with me, she just kept walking instead of helping me stand up to them. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven her for that. She was supposed to be my best friend and she couldn’t even help defend me when four girls pinned me down while a fifth one beat the shit out of me. Yeah we were real friends or so I thought.
I remember one time walking through the school yard to get to the main road so I could go home, and these bullies came behind me and pushed me into the mud. Everything got dirty. Thankfully my teacher had stayed late and seen what happened. She yelled out her car window for them to leave me alone and then drove me home the rest of the way. She had me sit on a towel so I didn’t get her seats dirty or bloody. I had a bloody nose, and a black eye and crying my heart out. She asked me why I allowed this to happen to me and I told her “I don’t know how to fight back.” She asked how long this was going on for, and told her. By the time I got home my mom and dad were waiting for me. They seen my teacher drop me off and bring me into the house. She told them what was going on and what happened. This did nothing to help the bully problem, in fact it only made it worse the next time they caught me.
I went home from school taking a longer route than before. I remember Nina and I were talking about the differences between a virgin Mary and bloody Mary She actually went into a bar and asked. Sure enough those bullies caught up and kicked me down, four held me down while one beat me up. They scratched me, dragged my face into the sidewalk, pulled my hair and dumped tapioca pudding in my hair. I haven’t been able to touch that type of pudding since. One of the ladies in the bar that we had asked about the virgin/bloody Mary seen what was happening and chased the girls off of me. This time I two black eyes and pudding in my hair. She took me inside and helped me get most of the pudding out my hair then she walked me to the bus station and gave me a token to get on the bus. I never got a chance to thank her. Two days later she was killed in a drive by shooting. I spent two days at home recovering from the ass beating I had gotten. By this time I was terrified of going to school. I knew that if this kept up I was going to end up dead.
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