When I was 11 and in the sixth grade, I had a best friend, Megan. She was my first real elementary school best friend. We did everything together: We had sleepovers. We hung out after school. We talked on the phone all the time. We played at recess. I always had someone to sit with at lunch.
Until the day she wasn't my friend anymore.
And that's when sixth grade became Hell on Earth.
Crank calls. Name-calling. Mean notes passed. Rumors spread. Others turned against. Overnight it felt like my best friend had turned me into a social pariah. A series of lies even landed me my first trip to detention. It was her word against mine. I had nothing.
How do you tame a bully? Judging by the news we see every day about school shootings striking at younger and younger ages, no one knows. Nearly 20 years ago, they didn't know. My mom worked at my school, and she was at a loss. The teacher put all the girls in a circle, and we went around sharing our feelings about our "classroom tension."
Being in front of a firing squad. That's how it felt. I sat helpless while each girl took turns sharing what she didn't like about me. And there was Megan, across the circle, smiling smugly. She had won.
Somehow, I made it through sixth grade. And then middle school, where a new circle of friends ( the "popular girls") realized I lacked social purchase and turned me out of the group. I discovered the weird kids: The goth kids, the band geeks, the theater nerds. The newspaper and yearbook people. I went extremist weird because I knew I'd never be "popular." And I survived it.
It was a lifetime ago now. That awkward, insecure, desperate-to-be-accepted little girl has given way to who I am today: Still awkward, still a little insecure. But confident, too. And strong. Powerful. And now I have someone on my side that I didn't fully understand in the sixth grade: Jesus.
The God of the outcast. The God of the unwanted. The God of the prostitute, the tax collector, the fisherman, the possessed. The destroyed. My God.
Thank God.
This month, I heard from Megan. A cry across the Internet for forgiveness. Sparked, she says, by her own children, and the consuming fear that someone might treat her child the way she treated me. "You did nothing to deserve any of it," she said. An innocent bystander in the trainwreck of adolesence.
