School, Part 2

Suzanne was one of the pre-teen smokers, not one of the popular girls.  She was a year older than me and constantly harassed and insulted me because of my queer boyishness, which was in her eyes just plain grossness.  I remember trying to ignore her, a failed strategy if there ever was one.  Finally came a day when she attacked me physically as well as verbally.  She came at me, not realizing that I kept the school library’s only judo book out for months at a time. When she put all her weight into shoving me, I grabbed her wrists, pulled hard and stepped aside.  She flew into one of the little bushes that lined the sidewalk leading up to the school entrance. 

Suzanne left me alone for a while after that, and then she went on to middle school a year ahead of me.  When I reached middle school, she resumed her usual insults and flinging of rubber bands from her braces at me on the school bus.  The school bus was always the site of the worst misery.  It was also where Suzanne applied her make up in the morning since I imagine her mom would not let her leave the house with as much eyeliner as she wanted to wear.  Does it ever suck to be an adolescent girl.

When I first arrived in middle school, there was no question in the mind of the average observer that I was a boy.  In my mind I was neither masculine nor feminine, but everyone else consistently read me as masculine.  I passed all the time, much to my chagrin, considering the resulting bullying, scorn, disapproval, ostracism and depression.  Around 1987, it got back to me that one of my classmates asked, “Who will want to marry a girl who looks like a boy?”  I barely knew what a lesbian was but people asked me if I was one.  I denied it, of course. I liked both girls and boys, but not too much considering that they were universally such a bunch of assholes. 

This was an enormously painful and lonely time. At recess one day, some one shoved me from behind.  I started to turn towards them, but then I got shoved much harder and knocked heads with this kid Jesse.  I got this strange greenish bruise on my cheek the next day, and it actually took me a while to figure out where it came from.  I must have been so shut down that the event did not immediately register.  Days later, I learned that the girl who pushed me was angry because she told her friend that she thought I was cute.  She was subsequently humiliated upon learning I was a girl.  I had been the object of a crush and revealed as a deceiver all without my knowledge or involvement.

I never talked to anyone about that experience until I was an adult.  It is very telling that I was so ashamed and never spoke of it, not to a parent, not to a teacher, not to anyone.  I thought somehow it was my fault.  My appearance had caused a series of tiny dramas: first attraction, followed by deception, then humiliation and finally revenge.  But my part in this soap opera only came in at the very end, for the revenge.  Too bad I could not understand at the time that none of this was about me, it was about the confusion, fear and anger (and a little bit of desire) other people experienced at the site of an adolescent butch girl.