Episode 1: Like Daughter, Like Father
Flashback: Linkhorne Middle School, 1987
Of course, I’m no different. I was bullied as a child—it lasted a full Wednesday morning during my seventh-grade year, and I was bullied by my good friend Jared*. We weren’t best friends or anything, but Jared and I were cool. I had a few classes with him, and we liked the same kind of music. We ate lunch at the same table, we talked every day, and, well, we were cool.
Then, for whatever reason I couldn’t figure out, Jared woke up on a Wednesday morning and decided we weren’t, in fact, cool. Not at all.
The seventh-grade boy culture I grew up in was a mixture of loud laughter, perverted humor, physical violence, and constant change. Combine all that with internal questions about why everyone smells like an armpit all of a sudden, and you have boy life at Linkhorne Middle School.
So when I came down the largest hall in the school that Wednesday morning, I didn’t notice anything odd—aside from the utter strangeness that middle school exudes. Everything seemed to be as normal as a day in seventh grade could be.
Then I saw my friend Jared.
As he walked by, he said, “What’s up, wimp.” He didn’t call me wimp, but wimp is near to what he called me, so we’ll go with that. I passed him, laughing to myself and thinking that he was just joking.
Quite a bit of my life as a middle schooler required me to forget name-calling and pushing almost immediately. Just laugh it off. After our first class, though, he came directly to me and called me a wimp again, and then pushed me.
I knew this was different.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked. He was smiling, too, but he looked angry. “Why would a wimp like you be smiling?” His voice grew louder, which caught everyone’s attention in the hall, and I figured we were no longer friends. (Yeah, it’s always taken me awhile to catch on). Sooner than either of us realized, we were surrounded by other seventh graders, and the hallway got really loud.
Before I go on here, I need to make it clear: Jared and I were friends, but he didn’t know everything about me. The one thing that, later, he wished he knew: my father was a golden gloves boxer, and dad is a pretty good teacher, too.