2/8
From the moment I set foot on campus to the minute I left, I was in fight or flight. I didn’t really have any friends. No one to escape with, no confidante I could count on to have my back.
I remember walking through the cafeteria and a giant piece of green Jell-o hit me in the back of my head. I was carrying my lunch tray and headed for a table in the cafeteria until ‘WHACK!’ So I just keep walking – past the table where I was planning to sit – and kept walking and walking until I was outside. Held my head up and the tears in as though nothing happened... until I was alone. And then I sobbed uncontrollably with my lunch tray on my lap. I never found out who threw Jell-o at my head.
It was only one person, but my heart felt like it was THE WHOLE SCHOOL.
Doug Wilson was the worst. He made my life hell. I was in 6th grade and he was in 8th. And when I got to high school, I had two more years of him. So it started when I was 10, 11 years old and continued until I was 15.
He was nasty. He would body slam me into my locker. Always called me faggot, sissy, homo. He was the cliché bully you see in movies. He threw me into a trashcan. He once pushed me so hard I fell back into it. It was straight out of a John Hughes movie.
Doug also got a job as a grocery bagger at the Albertson’s that was within walking distance of my house. There was no avoiding him. If I saw him near one entrance of the school, I would walk all the way around the building to use the entrance on the other side to steer clear of him. Sometimes my mother would send me to the store and I would ride my bike a mile away to avoid seeing him.
2/8