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My doctor had also encouraged my mother to assess my schooling arrangement, suggesting that the stress I was under at school could be a contributing factor to my obvious physical stunt in development.
After a heated discussion between my parents where Mam pled my case, I was sent back to school, where I was subjected to unrelenting torment.
Their cruelty varied from name-calling and rumor spreading to sticking sanitary pads on my back, then to full on physically assaulting me.
Once, in home economics class, a few of the girls sitting behind me hacked off a chunk of my ponytail with kitchen scissors and then waved it around like a trophy.
Everyone had laughed, and I think in that moment I had hated the ones laughing at my pain more than the ones causing it.
Another time, during P.E., the same girls had taken a picture of me in my underwear with one of their camera phones and forwarded it to everyone in our year. The principal had cracked down on it quickly and suspended the phone’s owner, but not before half the school had a good laugh at my expense.
I remembered crying so hard that day, not in front of them of course, but in the toilets. I had bolted myself into a cubicle and contemplated ending it all. Just taking a bunch of tablets and being done with the whole damn thing.
Life, for me, was a bitter disappointment, and at the time, I had wanted no further part in it.
I didn’t do it because I was too much of a coward.
I was too afraid of it not working and waking up and having to face the consequences.
I was a fucking mess.
My brother Joey said they targeted me because I was good-looking and called my tormenters jealous bitches. He told me that I was gorgeous and instructed me to rise above it.
That was easier said than done—and I wasn’t so confident about that gorgeous statement, either.
Many of the girls targeting me were the same ones that had been bullying me since preschool.
I doubted looks had anything to do with it back then.
I was just unlikable.
Besides, as much as he tried to be there for me and defend my honor, Joey didn’t understand how school life was for me.
My older brother was the polar opposite of me in every shape of the word.
Where I was short, he was tall. I had blue eyes, he had green ones. I was dark-haired; he was fair. His skin was sun-kissed golden. I was pale. He was outspoken and loud, while I was quiet and kept to myself.
The biggest contrast between us was that my brother was adored by everyone at Ballylaggin Community School, a.k.a. BCS, the local public secondary school we both attended.
Of course, landing a spot on the Cork minor hurling team helped Joey’s popularity status along the way, but even without sports, he was a great guy.
And being the great guy that he was, Joey tried to protect me from it all, but it was an impossible task for one guy.
Joey and I had an older brother, Darren, and three younger brothers: Tadhg, Ollie, and Sean, but neither of us had spoken to Darren since he walked out of the house five years previous, following yet another infamous blowout with our father. Tadhg and Ollie, who were eleven and nine, were only in primary school, and Sean, who was three, was barely out of nappies, so I wasn’t exactly flush with protectors to call on.
It was days like this that I missed my eldest brother.
At twenty-three, Darren was seven years older than me. Big and fearless, he was the ultimate big brother for every little girl growing up.
From a small child, I had adored the ground he walked on, trailing after him and his friends, tagging along with him wherever he went. He always protected me, taking the blame at home when I did something wrong.
It wasn’t easy for him, and being so much younger than him, I hadn’t understood the full extent of his struggle. Mam and Dad had only been seeing each other a couple of months when she fell pregnant with Darren at fifteen.
Labeled a bastard baby because he was born out of wedlock in 1980s Catholic Ireland, life had always been a challenge for my brother. After he turned eleven, everything got so much worse for him.
Like Joey, Darren was a phenomenal hurler and, like me, our father despised him. He was always finding something wrong with Darren, be it his hair or his handwriting, his performance on the field or his choice of partner.
Darren was gay and our father couldn’t cope with it.
