Call me Emo

When I was in middle school, I once observed a feud that developed between this Asian girl and this semi-white trash girl, we will call her WT girl. It was junior high and the middle school I attended at the time wasn’t known for its stepford children. Some pretty mean kids from the ghettos of Maryland suburbia attended that school. So the feud between these two girls got intense. In the locker room, I observed as sixth or seventh grade girls surrounded this Asian girl and then dished out ugly and hurtful insults at her. Her looks, her body, her b.o., her choice of sexual partners even. I don’t remember what the insults were, but I highly doubt they were all that original or creative. Nonetheless, it was quite painful to watch this girl get bullied. She was clearly outnumbered and ostracized.

WT girl kept talking about “beating” her up and “kicking her ass”, classy comments like that. So the big day arrives and the two of them faces off in front of a large crowd of people. I was one of the onlookers. Even before WT and A girl started anything, A girl starts crying hysterically and says brokenly that her mother told her that she shouldn’t fight because it wasn’t the Christian way. That Christians don’t fight and aren’t violent. I swear, I’m not making this up. So WT girl goes up to her and pushes her around, roughs her up a bit, but almost uncertainly and half-heartedly. All the while, A girl has her face buried in her hands and she was crying, but she didn’t hit back.

I guess I’m relating this story now to illustrate two things. One, I’m a big wimp. I didn’t try to stick up for her at any point in the game. Granted, she wasn’t my friend and I had no real obligation to, but I did think it was wrong that everyone picked on her. I guess WT girls had a lot of WT friends. Anyway, the mob effect can be kind of scary and for a 12 or 13-year old kid, I wasn’t looking to join the party and get some nasty blows coming my way.

Secondly, I think ever since then, I developed a protective shell of my own. Although this incident had really nothing to do with me, I experienced it somewhat vicariously and I was always scared to think about what if I had been that A girl and I had to be bullied or pushed around by a whole mob of angry, overly hormonal teenage girls? Case in point, back in elementary school I was quite a tough little cookie. I got into fights with kids before, mainly because it was like a knee jerk reaction. You don’t like what someone said? Just push them. Pretty soon I earned the reputation, well undeserved, of being “the one you don’t mess with.” But that was after all elementary school. Then the small fish graduates to go to a bigger pond and there, she sees all these scary ass big and tough people that she doesn’t want to mess with either. Then she realizes that she is a small fish after all and contented herself to floating quietly in the background, to avoid the predators. I am now that fish.