Often I will relate a story from my youth to a friend or my husband that takes them aback, this story is about a group of “friends” I had in high school that created an entire burn book dedicated to lil ol’ me.
TW: Emotional Abuse, self harm
M., A., J., K., KK. One guy and four deeply entrenched girls vying for his approval. M. found cruelty to be entertaining, and thus a plan formed – they got a blank composition notebook and filled it cover to cover. There was manga about my ‘giant’ underwear they’d seen in my bedroom while hanging out at my house.
They passed it around and around and filled it with complaints, diatribes, jabs and rants about how much they hated me, and how terrible I was (I mean, I was) and how they were all just pretending to like me so they could hang out at my house and use me for our pool.
The day I found the book they had nearly run out of pages, and I didn’t know who the book belonged to, or what it entailed, I handed it off to someone else to check for a name in an effort not to be nosey, but they went pale and told me it wasn’t a good idea for me to read it, so of course I read it. I was in shock. I didn’t see the names in there, but I knew the handwriting from passing notes with them over the years.
I resolved to take the book to the school counselor, that plan derailed rather quickly however when someone who bullied me fairly often made a snide remark about my (lack of a) mother. Something shifted in me.
I followed him back to his lunch table, where his friends and team mates were sitting, grabbed him by the shoulder and punched him with everything my young body had, threw my full hip into it, and wound up ‘jerseying‘ him.
Luckily for us both, a couple of my near by friends saw what was going down and dragged me off to the girls room while he went to the principal to tattle about his wounded pride (Getting beat up by a girl? Damn. Getting beat up in front of your friends by the weird fat goth girl? Savage.)
I wounded a bathroom stall door and a tampon machine, as well as my knuckles. I thrashed and screamed and cried and fell into a pool of myself on the floor surrounded by a few girlfriends. Eventually, I composed myself and took the book to the counselor, walked there by one of my actual friends.
We tell the counselor everything, and then I get called down to the principal’s office where I’m informed I’m being written up for the fight, and I will be getting suspended; that is, until the counselor furnishes him with the burn book dedicated to trashing me behind my back, and the cruelty contained within.
The principal calls my father in, and says they have to take action because the guy I got into a fight with made a formal complaint and obviously had witnesses, so I was offered a one time deal, they were sending me home for a week long ‘suspension’ and if anyone asks, that’s what it was, but in reality the principal took pity on me and said to take it as a mental health break.
It would have been, but for the fact that we had to leave our phone unplugged for the whole week unless we were making a call. As it turned out M., A., J., K., and KK. all caught real suspensions for the burn book.
They spent the first day off calling my house over and over again and saying vile things to me and telling me to remove myself from the census, I’m unlovable, unwanted, etc. They all knew I’d made attempts on my own life. All the venom asshole teenagers could muster. This wouldn’t be my last run in with the gang, but it’s definitely one of the craziest situations I found myself in.
EllyRox 