what’s worse, nobody wants to know.
Like at school, right, we had this whole week where the focus was on bullying. There was a special session after assembly, and posters all over the school, and we had experts coming in to talk to us in LO. . . You get the idea.
Well, what they basically told us was this: that deep down, bullies are just normal kids who need help. That children who like to hurt others are usually just “insecure” and “looking for positive attention”. That they need to “learn better interpersonal skills”. That “communication is important”.
That’s the kind of thing they told us.
And you know, to be fair to those experts, maybe there are bullies like that. Maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a whole bunch of good kids who are destroying other children’s lives by accident, because they are “misunderstood”, or because their “interpersonal skills” aren’t quite up to scratch.
But my sister is not that kind of bully.
My sister is the kind of bully grown-ups don’t like to talk about. The kind who’s not misunderstood, or insecure, or lacking any of those all-important “communication skills” that teachers are always going on about.
Oh no. Not at all.
In fact, Stephanie has fantastic communication skills –that’s what makes her so effective. She knows exactly what to say, what to do, how to hurt you the most. She’s not misunderstood either. Or maybe she is, but the only thing people don’t understand about her is how much she likes it.
Stephanie likes hurting people. She likes to see the fear in other kids’ eyes. She likes the power it gives her. She likes causing pain.
She loves it.
But that’s the one thing grown-ups don’t want to know. They won’t accept it. I don’t know why, but for some reason adults feel better imagining that all children are really sweet and innocent inside. They need to believe it for some reason, and they keep on believing it, no matter what happens.
I was four years old when Stephanie forced me into the tumble dryer. I had touched one of her ornaments and I had to be punished. I remember the panic of being locked up in such a small space. The fear. And then there was the noise, and the heat, and the terrible sense of being slammed against those narrow walls.
My dad came back early that day, and that probably saved my life. The doctor at the hospital told him I couldn’t have been in the machine for more than a minute. And maybe that’s true. I can’t remember too much about it.
But in spite of what my dad saw with his own eyes – in spite of the burns and the bruises, in spite of my screams and all my tears – he just couldn’t believe that his daughter would do something so evil on purpose. He said it must have been an accident. A game that went too far. He didn’t want to believe me. Nobody has ever believed me.
Stephanie was nine years old then, and if you look at the pictures my dad took of her that year, you would see a round-faced, shiny-eyed child with lots of curly brown hair tied back in a ribbon. A cute little girl. Too sweet for words.
But that’s not what I saw.
When you’re a four-year-old boy, small for your age, and you look up at an older sister like Stephanie, you see something very different. Something grown-ups can’t see.
You see someone who is a lot bigger than you.
You see someone who is mean and powerful, and stronger and smarter than you will ever be. You see the person who turned on that machine, laughing. You see your sister the way she really is. You see her.
Dad refuses to see her. He always has.
And yet he must have seen the tiny black bruises that so often appeared on my back when I was little. He must have seen the skin that was torn from my feet, the finger broken in two places, the bite marks on my arms, the patches of hair missing from my head.
But he believed her stories every time. That we were playing. That it was an accident. That I slipped. That I was clumsy.
He believed every single lie she ever told him.
Later on, when I got older and finally had the right words to explain things to people, she changed her tactics. Of course. Stephanie isn’t stupid. Once I could really start telling on her, she stopped doing the things that made visible marks. She avoided leaving evidence.
In some ways things got a lot worse after that. She started hurting me in cleverer, sneakier ways – sometimes physically, but more often by messing with my mind.
I don’t know how she does it, but somehow Stephanie knows exactly what my deepest fears and weaknesses are. And once she gets hold of those she never lets up, spitting her poison into my brain until I’m completely powerless against her. Her words make me feel dull and heavy and stupid. As if my whole body is full of dirt.
Her words make me feel that I’m pathetic and somehow . . . wrong.
Stephanie knows what’s important to me, which is how she’s managed to destroy almost everything that I have ever really loved. She dropped my grandfather’s watch into the toilet “by accident”. She put soap in my fish tank so that all my fish died. She slipped and “fell” on the volcano I built for my science project. She even spilt a bowl of soup over Mom’s last letter, the one she wrote to me while she was pregnant, before I was born. I still have that letter. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, although you can’t read the words any more because the paper is all scrunched up and the writing is blurry.
I have tried to talk to my dad about all of this, of course, many, many times. But all he ever says is that I should stand up for myself. He says that I should expect some teasing from an older sibling. He says that I am a big boy now, and that I need to be stronger than this. He thinks I’m exaggerating. He thinks that I am weak.
I am twelve years old, and I am not weak.
Dad has no idea what it feels like to grow up with so much fear. He has no idea what it feels like to be hated, so intensely hated, in your own home, every day of your life.
I later found out that I wasn’t her only victim and in some ways that made it a bit better. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s true. It makes me feel like less of a loser to know that I’m not the only one she hates so much and treats so badly.
Once, after some of the other parents at Stephanie’s school complained about her bullying, the principal forced us to go to family therapy sessions. It didn’t help though. Stephanie knows exactly how to handle grown-ups. It’s ridiculous – they fall for it every single time. All she has to do is to start crying, or to tell them how hard it is to grow up without a mother, and they all begin to crumble. The therapist even got tears in his eyes!
Stephanie laughed about it later, so hard. She loves tricking people into believing her lies; it makes her feel clever and powerful when they’re being so gullible. Sometimes she tells the most outrageous lies just for fun, simply so that she can sit back and laugh at people’s reactions.
Dad did not want to go back to those therapy sessions. I think hearing all those things about how Stephanie was “acting out” made him feel guilty. He thought it meant he was a bad father.
But that’s not what makes him
