Growing up, my family listened to a popular local radio station in the morning. One part of the morning show was to announce birthdays that people had called in. It was my birthday (1997), and we were listening to the radio as usual.

DJ: “…and we have [My Full Name] from [Hometown] who turns ten today. A double-digit midget, how about that? And next…”

I was speechless. I would have been thrilled if not for the second part. I was already small for my age, and I knew the kids at school listened to the same station. I begged my parents to keep me home from school, but they refused. I walked into the home room and saw several other kids grinning.

Kid #1: “Hi, [My Name]! I knew you were a midget!”

Me: “I’m not.”

Kid #1: “I heard it on the radio.”

Me: “Well, I’m not.”

Kid #2: *Singing.* “Double-digit midget! Double-digit midget!”

Teacher: “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s settle down.”

For the rest of the day and several days after, those two kids called me a double-digit midget every time a teacher wasn’t around. I tried to tell my teacher, but they denied it, so nothing happened. When my next birthday came around, I told my parents *not* to call the radio station.

This story is from a while ago, so it has been paraphrased.

It’s my first few weeks as a teacher in a big and busy secondary school. I was a teacher at a quiet and rural primary school before this so being in a diverse part of London is very exciting for me.

I’m doing some paperwork and admin in the school office after lessons, and a coworker is on the phone to a parent.

Coworker: “Yes, Mrs. [Name], I’m not surprised you were expecting my call. It’s about [Student Name]’s grandmother.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Yes, this is about the dolls.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Yes, I understand there was bullying, but we have processes for these kinds of things. Your mother creating – and I’m reading from the complaints here – your mother creating voodoo dolls of the alleged bullies and parading them outside the school is not one of our formalised processes.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Well, yes, we do know it was meant to be them because your mother had their names sewn on to them.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Yes, the bullying did stop, but now I have four other sets of parents complaining and saying we have witches in the school. I hope you understand why that puts us in an awkward position.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Yes, I know your mother can’t speak English, which is why I’d like you to have a word with her and tell her she can’t be threatening our students.”

Pause.

Coworker: “Thank you, and have a good evening.” *Click.*

Well… we didn’t get THAT in my little home village!

It’s me, the author of this story, with a sort of comical one from the same school year. It’s how I ended up meeting one of my best friends during that year before I moved.

Partway through the school year, we got a new transfer student in my class. I’ll call her S. Now, for a bit of context, I was a bit on the short side and chubby (5′ even, or about 152cm, and about 120lbs, or 54kg), a bookish goody-two-shoes who preferred books and drawing over sports and socializing, and as mentioned before in a previous story, I’m autistic, so I was a prime target for bullying

Within two days of her being in our class, S had singled me out as a target. It was awful. S was nearly twice my size and stood a good head and a half taller than me, so I couldn’t fight back in any way. Among other things, she stole my clothes while I was changing in the locker room and ran to the other side of the gym, and I couldn’t go after her because I was in my underwear, and she pinned me up to the lockers by my throat more than once because I tried to tell her off. Teachers wouldn’t do anything more than a slap on the wrist, and when she did get in trouble, she knew it was me and doubled down on her bullying.

One day, I had been in the sixth-grade English classroom during lunch because I had volunteered to help my teacher rearrange our desks to make room for our upcoming lesson project (writing impromptu scripts and making performances). The desks were arranged in two rows on either side of the classroom, leaving a narrow walkway between the two rows so the students in the front rows could get to their desks.

While I was finishing up, I’d stepped into one of these walkways to help write the lesson plan on the board, and my teacher stepped out… and S stepped in, seeing me by myself, and decided to trap me in that little walkway by getting directly in front of me in such a way that I couldn’t even move the desks to get out of the way.

I don’t remember exactly what was said, pretty sure S was taunting me and trying to goad me into doing something. What I do remember, however, is that I was getting pretty tired of her bullying me, so I braced against the wall behind me for a moment and threw myself forward.

According to my dad, I have linebacker shoulders (straight and wide) and I tackled S halfway across the classroom to get her out of my way. I don’t know how I managed that, I just know that I did, and by some blessing, I didn’t get in trouble for it. My teacher came back in right before the tackle, and saw how S had me pinned in, so she vouched for me.

I thought it was over, but the following day during recess, S decided to pin me in again, this time looming over me while I was sitting with my back to a railing. She was furious with me because she had gotten caught red-handed in bullying me, and I’m not sure what she was planning to do. Thankfully, one of the teachers saw her and yelled at her to back off, which gave me an opportunity to run, bolting into the field.

In my previous story, I mentioned my asthma. Being that I was already out of shape and asthmatic, there was no way I was going to actually get away from S, but maybe the prey animal instinct kicked in or something, and I hoped that someone would notice that something was wrong. Sure enough, she caught up quickly, and the next thing I knew, she tackled me right back, slamming full-force into my back and sending me tumbling head over hind-end through the grass for several feet. Somehow, I landed sitting upright.

You could hear a pin drop in the grass. The entire sixth-grade class stopped what they were doing and stared at me and S, because S had tackled me hard enough to possibly hurt me. Perhaps they’d finally realized just how serious things were? I don’t really know. My mind was still playing catch-up with what had just happened, and one of my other friends ran over to make sure I was okay and to help me up.

After the initial shock wore off, I did the only thing I could think I could do… I laughed.

I started laughing my eleven-year-old butt off. I don’t know why, but it just ended up being completely hysterical to me. Of all the things S could do, she just tackled me and sent me rolling like a bowling ball!

The rest of the day is a bit fuzzy after that. I remember going to the nurse to make sure I wasn’t hurt, then to the principal’s office in case I wanted to make a proper complaint. I don’t remember much else. I don’t even remember if S got brought to the office.

The next day, S found me in the hall at my locker. I had braced for the worst… but she apologized, and ended up laughing. Apparently, my laughing after she tackled me like that made me seem a lot tougher than I looked, because she’d tried to actually cause some sort of harm and I laughed it off. It caused her to end up developing a strange sort of respect for me, because no one was brave or crazy enough to laugh at something like that.

The rest of the year, she and I were actually great friends. She came to me for help on our classwork because her grades were slipping, and other bullies weren’t exactly jumping at the bit to go after their old perfect target with S in my corner. We ended up actually bonding, making it pretty sad when I moved and had to transfer out, causing us to fall out of touch. Sometimes I look back on those days and wonder how she’s doing.

Back when I was kid, I had a PDA that could do basic things like act as a calendar and play games; back then, in an ancient bygone era, this was an impressive and novel concept!

Then one day, a substitute teacher took it from me because she thought it looked like a calculator I could use to cheat on a test with. The teacher told me I could get it at the end of the class, but when I went to get it back from her, she couldn’t find it on her desk. I was less than pleased.

That same day, a friend of mine saw a kid known for bullying people and breaking the rules playing with the exact same kind of PDA. We suspected he had stolen mine from the teacher’s desk, but the only way to prove it would be to look at the content of the PDA to see if it had my information on it. We reported this to the teachers, but [Bully] claimed he never had a PDA like [Friend] had seen, and the teachers claimed they couldn’t do anything about the situation without proof [Bully] had my device. I was upset, but [friend] was livid and told me he would fix it.

Near the end of the day, [Friend] handed me back my PDA and told me it had been stolen by [Bully]. I confirmed it had all my information in it, so it definitely was mine.

I should mention that [Friend] and [Bully] had lockers right next to each other. So during the changeover between classes, when we were all at our lockers, [Friend] had waited until [Bully] set his combination lock on top of the locker and then swapped it out with his own. [Bully] proceeded to lock his locker with [Friend]’s lock, and then once [Bully] left [Friend] unlocked the locker, found my stolen PDA inside, then locked both lockers with the correct locks.

[bully] looked completely shocked and confused when he saw me with the PDA the next day. He seemed terrified that my having it meant he was caught and in trouble. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do anything to punish him without admitting to [friend]’s own theft.

My parents also called the school and filed a vocal complaint about the school’s losing an expensive device after wrongfully confiscating it. I got an official apology from the school’s principal, who suggested that since the thief ultimately ‘chose’ to return the stolen device, we should consider things settled now.

I’m involved in a summer program during the day, but one kid has been bullying me for the entire summer. None of the adults are willing to step in and put a stop to it, so by this point, I’m miserable.

Me: “Mom, can I not go back tomorrow?”

Mom: “Why? What’s going on?”

Me: “It’s [Bully] again. He won’t stop. I’ve had enough.”

Mom: “Well, suppose I go in tomorrow and have a little talk with him?”

Me: “What? No! Please don’t do that. It’ll probably just make things worse.”

Mom: “Just let me have a word with him. If it doesn’t work, you can quit.”

Me: *Reluctantly* “Well… all right.”

All I expected her to do was pull him to the side and just talk with him. What I didn’t expect was for her to chew him out to the point that he was cowering in fear.

What was funnier was that my mom is about 5’5” and very petite, and [Bully] was a little taller and three times as wide. By the time she was through, he was close to tears. Admittedly, I was a little scared, too, because I had never seen her that angry in my life. [Bully] never picked on me again.