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Any school has to be better than the one I am leaving behind. The thought entered my mind and I flinched in shame. Schools, I thought dejectedly, plural.
I’d suffered relentless bullying in both primary and secondary school.
For some unknown, cruel reason, I had been the target of every child’s frustrations from the tender age of four.
Most of the girls in my class decided on day one in junior infants that they didn’t like me and I wasn’t to be associated with. And the boys, while not as sadistic in their attacks, weren’t much better.
It didn’t make sense because I got along just fine with the other children on our street and never had any altercations with anyone on the estate we lived in.
But school?
School was like the seventh circle of hell for me. All nine—instead of the regular eight—years of primary had been torture.
Junior infants was so distressing for me that both my mother and teacher decided it would be best to hold me back so I could repeat juniors with a new class. Even though I was just as miserable in my new class, I made a couple of close friends, Claire and Lizzie, whose friendship had made school bearable for me.
When it came time to choose a secondary school in our final year of primary, I had realized I was very different from my friends.
Claire and Lizzie were to attend Tommen College the following September; a lavish elite private school, with massive funding and top-of-the-range facilities—coming from the brown envelopes of wealthy parents who were hell-bent on making sure their children received the best education money could buy.
Meanwhile, I had been enrolled at the local overcrowded public school in the center of town.
I still remembered the horrifying feeling of being separated from my friends.
I’d been so desperate to get away from the bullies that I’d even begged Mam to send me to Beara to live with her sister, Aunty Alice, and her family so I could finish my studies.
There were no words to describe the devastated feeling that had overtaken me when my father put his foot down on moving in with Aunty Alice.
Mam loved me, but she was weak and weary and didn’t put up a fight when Dad insisted I attend Ballylaggin Community School.
After that, it got worse.
More vicious.
More violent.
More physical.
For the first month of first year, I was hounded by several groups of boys all demanding things from me that I was unwilling to give them.
After that, I was labeled a frigit because I wouldn’t get off with the very boys that had made my life a living hell for years.
The meaner ones labeled me crueler slurs, suggesting that the reason I was such a frigit was because I had boy parts under my skirt.
No matter how cruel the boys were, the girls were far more inventive.
And so much worse.
They spread vicious rumors about me, suggesting that I was anorexic and threw my lunch up in the toilets after lunch every day.
I wasn’t anorexic—or bulimic, for that matter.
I was petrified when I was at school and couldn’t bear to eat a thing because when I did vomit—and it was a frequent event—it was a direct response to the unbearable weight of the stress I was under. I was also small for my age—short, undeveloped, and skinny—which didn’t help my cause in warding off the rumors.
When I turned fifteen and still hadn’t gotten my first period, my mother made an appointment with our local GP. Several blood tests and exams later, our family doctor had assured both my mother and me that I was healthy, and that it was common for some girls to develop later than others.
Almost a year had passed since then and, aside from one irregular cycle in the summer that had lasted less than half a day, I was yet to have a proper period.
To be honest, I had given up on my body working like a normal girl’s when mine clearly wasn’t.
