During my freshman year of high school, I attended a very large high school.    In fact, at the time, it was considered the largest high school in the state.     At my freshman orientation, they told us there were 666 freshman in our class. 

Being a 14 year old with glasses, a shirt pixie haircut and not an article of name-brand clothing to my name– it was no surprise that I was considered a nerd.   Pairing these facts with the sickeningly high scores I got on the standardized testing, and the nerdness just oozed out of every pore in my body.      Because of my high intelligence (where that all that smartness went will have to be saved for another post), I was one of the few kids that attended this large conglomerate of a monster high school for one half of the day, and attended a smart kids “Academy” in the other half of the day.    During that time with the smart kids, it was a small group.  Maybe 60 of us in the entire city school district.    With that group, for one half of each school day, I fit in.  I had friends.  I was a somebody, and I mattered.

I went to school for the other half of the day surrounded by kids that were richer, prettier, better dressed and more popular than me.  In this school of 2,500 people I was a nobody.  I didn’t even register on the radar.  It was like I didn’t even exist. 

Especially to the Physical Education department.

When I was in high school, there was a graduation requirement of 4 P.E. credits needed to graduate.  That meant Physical Education was required each school year.     If you failed it during any quarter, semester or school year, it had to be made up in order to graduate.    For certain students (meaning the smarties and the jocks), the rules could be bent.  Since we spent one period of our school day on a bus travelling back and forth between smartsville and a midwest version of the O.C., we were given the option of taking what was called “Contract Gym.”    It was an excuse to not have to go to PE class and subject yourself to group showers and seeing how much more developed all of your classmates are then you.   Thank the Lord and tiny baby Jeebus that I got out of that.

“Contract Gym” was the easiest escape out of regular gym class, and the sorriest excuse for physical education I had ever heard of in my life.   There was only one requirement each quarter, and it was graded on a Pass or Fail basis.  Each student was required to write a 5 page report on any sport of their choosing.  No P.E. class 3 times a week, where you’d be subjected to units on dodgeball, basketball, or *ugh* RUNNING. 

What this all boiled down to was every 9 weeks (4 times each school year),  I had to get an encyclopedia and write 5 pages worth of stuff about a sport.  That was 5 wide-ruled pages of the largest handwriting I could muster without seeming too obvious,  straight from the encyclopedia.

Being the procrastinator that I am, I waited until the night before the 1st quarter report was due to begin frantically copying out of the encyclopedia.   I wrote my 5 pages, and then went to school the next day with those 5 pages of drivel.

And I never turned them in.  

In this huge high school that was a maze of hallways, stairways and classrooms numbered in all kinds of a crazy fashion, and having never been to P.E. class, I had no idea where the office was of the P.E. teacher who collected the reports.   I was too embarrassed or shy or whatever to ask anyone, so I ended up not turning the paper in.  

I could always do it the next day, right?

The next day came and went, as well as the next day.  I kept thinking each day I would get called to the Principal’s office (which I also wouldn’t be able to find) and get in trouble for not doing the assignment, and I’d be forced to take a REAL P.E. class during my summer break or something.  

But no one ever noticed.    In fact, no one ever noticed when the 2nd quarter passed, and the 3rd quarter passed, and heck– even the 4th quarter passed. 

And I never turned in a single paper.

My report cards never showed that I was even enrolled in P.E., and not one single person– even the guidance counselor– ever questioned it.   I went through an entire school year without ever setting foot in a P.E. class. 

I transferred to another high school for my sophomore year and stayed there until I graduated.  I took regular P.E. classes after that, but always in the back of my mind I would worry that someday during my college application process, this would come back to seriously bite me in the ass.  

I graduated, and my first semester of college eventually came and went.   No one ever noticed that I was allowed to graduate with only 3 P.E. credits instead of 4.   It was just assumed that me being an average student with an average GPA, I didn’t stick out.  I flew under the radar, and technically should not have been able to graduate.

Maybe this is my reason for being anti-exercise to this day.    I can just fly through life without it, right?

When I was in elementary school, there were times when I was bullied. They were also instances where, looking back, I could have been considered a bully myself.

When I was in 4th and 5th grade, I think that was the first time I realized that any kind of name-brand clothing existed. I was not one of the kids that was able to wear Nike shoes to school. My mom did not buy me Lee jeans, and I never owned a shirt with a tiny alligator on the breast. Since this was before Wal-Mart stores really gained their popularity, most of my clothing came from the K-Mart store. On top of that, I wore glasses, and my mother thought my fine blond hair could be given more oomph if I got a perm.

So, I repeat: K-Mart clothes, big glasses, and hair permed to resemble a poodle.

Needless to say, I was picked on.

In order to cover my incredibly low self-esteem, I turned to focusing the attention on others. It seemed at the time the only way for those cool kids to like me. I picked out two of the kids in my school that happened to place lower on the popularity totem pole than me– Danny and Mark.

There were a couple reasons Danny was considered an easy target for kids to pick on:

1. Danny was fat.
2. Danny’s mom worked in the school cafeteria.

At recess one day, I decided to make my move. Danny was playing all by himself, because he really had no friends. I noticed a group of kids eyeing him and cracking jokes, and I knew I had to act quickly.

I walked over to Danny, bent over to the huge pile of mud he was playing by, and scooped up a mound of it in each hand. I stood there, and I remember him looking right at me.

That’s when I threw the mud right at him, one handful on his coat. The other handful on his face. Then I took off running.

There were two things I distinctly remember hearing as I ran away.

Kids laughing.

And Danny crying.

I became a cool kid.  At least for the rest of that day.

For some reason, it didn’t stop there. A few months later, in my quest to again try and fit in, a new kid in our class became the target.

His name was Mark. Mark Grath.*

From what I can recall, he was actually a nice kid. But that didn’t stop Mark from getting picked on. A LOT. Mark came from a poor family, so he often wore dirty clothes to school. This was probably one of the reasons why he smelled so bad. Because of the smell, no one wanted to sit by him. No one wanted to be his partner in gym class, and no one wanted to be his friend.

I didn’t think what I was doing at the time would be considered bad, because everyone thought it was so funny. One day, a particularly bad day at school for me, I was tired of kids making fun of the new perm I had gotten over the weekend. I saw Mark walk into the classroom, again sporting dirty jeans and the shirt he’d just worn the day before. I heard a couple girls say “I bet he smells REALLY bad today…” and I got an idea.

I pulled out a small bottle of lotion that I had in my desk. I worked furiously at scraping the label off the bottle. Once I had enough of the label taken off both sides of the bottle, I got out a black marker.

I hid what I was doing from my classmates and from the teacher, because I wanted to build some form of suspense. I wrote in very nice neat letters on the bottle of lotion, and I giggled to myself. I just knew my classmates would think it was funny.

Once I was done, I passed the bottle back to the boy sitting in the desk behind me. He was the ringleader of the cool kids, and I knew it would take his attention off of his current task, which was throwing wads of paper at the back of my permed head.

He took the bottle, and immediately started laughing. Hysterically laughing.

The bottle eventually made its way around to some of the other kids, and when they read what the bottle said, they laughed and poured a little lotion on their hands, exaggerating rubbing it in on their hands and arms.

I thought I had finally won.

The bottle eventually made its way around the room, and of course, someone couldn’t resist making sure Mark Grath* himself got to see it.

When he took the bottle from the person sitting behind him, I think he thought he was finally being included in something.

Instead, it was a vision I don’t ever want to see again.

He read the bottle, front and back. And his face fell.

So, what did bottle say? I’m sure you’re wondering.

On the front, in big black letters, it said “GRATH GUARD.”

On the back, were the words “Put this on so you won’t smell him and get his germs.”

This really wasn’t my post was intended to be about. I started out wanting to write something about cyber-cullying, and how some of the kids at my daughter’s school have had their Facebook pages hacked into. By someone they know. I was going to give this long speech about how bullying today has gotten so much worse now that there are so many different avenues to abuse someone.

But really? Once I started writing, the whole point of my post changed. I deleted and rewrote, edited and revised.

I thought of these two boys and I realized that no matter how the bullying happens, someone always gets hurt.

(*While the first names of the boys are real, the last name has been altered a bit.)