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Nothing stopped.
Until one day, it did.
The week before Christmas break last month—just three weeks after a similar incident with the same group of girls—I had come home in floods of tears, with my school jumper ripped down the front and my nose stuffed with tissue paper to stem the bleeding from the hiding I’d taken at the hands of a group of fifth-year girls, who’d vehemently suggested that I had tried to get with one of their boyfriends.
It was a bold-faced lie, considering I’d never laid eyes on the boy they accused me of trying to seduce, and another in a long line of pathetic excuses to beat me up.
That was the day I stopped.
I stopped lying.
I stopped pretending.
I just stopped.
That day wasn’t just my breaking point; it was Joey’s, too. He’d followed me into the house with a week’s suspension under his belt for beating the living daylights out of the brother of Ciara Maloney, my main tormentor.
Our mother had taken one look at me and pulled me out of the school.
Going against wishes of my father, who thought I needed to toughen up, Mam went to the local credit union and took out a loan to pay the admission fees for Tommen College, the private, fee-paying secondary school fifteen miles north of Ballylaggin.
While I worried for my mother, I knew that if I had to walk through the doors of that public school one more time, I would not be walking back out.
I had hit my limit.
The prospect of a better life, a happier life, was dangled in front of my face and I had grabbed it with both hands.
And even though I feared the backlash from the kids on my council estate for attending a private school, I knew it couldn’t be worse than the shit I had endured in the school I was leaving behind.
Besides, Claire Biggs and Lizzie Young, the two the girls I’d been friends with at primary school, would be in my class at Tommen College. The principal, Mr. Twomey, had assured me of that when my mother and I had met with him during the Christmas holidays to enroll.
Both Mam and Joey encouraged me with relentless support, with Mam taking extra cleaning shifts at the hospital to pay for my books and new uniform which included a blazer.
Before Tommen College, the only blazers I’d ever seen were the ones men wore at mass on a Sunday, never on teenagers, and now it would be part of my daily wardrobe.
Leaving the local secondary school in the middle of my junior cert year—an important exam year—had caused a huge rift in our family, with my father furious to be spending thousands of euros on an education that was free in the public school just down the road.
When I tried to explain to my father that school wasn’t as easy for me as it was for his precious GAA-star son, he shut me down, refusing to hear me out and letting me know in no uncertain terms that he would not support me attending a glorified rugby prep school with a bunch of stuck-up, privileged clowns.
I could still recall the words “Get off your high horse, girl,” and “’Tis far from rugby and prep schools you were reared,” not to mention my favorite, “You’ll never fit in with those cunts,” coming out of my father’s mouth.
I wanted to scream at him, You won’t be paying for it! since Dad hadn’t worked a day since I was seven—fending for the family was left to my mother—but I valued my ability to walk too much.
My father didn’t get it, but then again, I had a feeling the man had never been subjected to bullying a day in his whole life. If there was bullying to be done, Teddy Lynch was the one doing it.
God knows he bullied Mam around enough.
Because of my father’s outrage at my schooling, I had spent most of my winter break holed up in my bedroom and trying to stay out of his way.
Being the only girl in a family with five brothers, I had my own room. Joey had his own room, too, though his was much bigger than mine, having shared it with Darren until he moved out. Tadhg and Ollie shared another larger bedroom, with Sean and my parents residing in the largest of the bedrooms.
Even though it was only the box room at the front of the house, with barely any room to swing a cat, I appreciated the privacy that my own bedroom door—with a lock—gave me.
Contrary to the four bedrooms upstairs, our house was tiny, with a sitting room, kitchen, and one bathroom for the entire family. It was a semi-d, and situated at the edge of Elk’s Terrace, the largest council estate in Ballylaggin.
The area was rough and riddled with crime, and I avoided it all by hiding in my room.
My tiny bedroom was my sanctuary in a house—and street—full of bustle and madness, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever.
