The Day My Bully Disappeared

Content Warning: This story includes a detailed description of schoolyard bullying.

“You wanna do something fun?” Katherine, the prettiest, most popular, and meanest girl in my class asked me.

I wanted to scream no, but I knew that wouldn’t do me any good. I’d end up forced to play whatever game she had come up with today anyway. I glanced around the playground. No teachers in sight.

Katherine knocked the book I had been reading out of my hands and spun me around. She pushed me towards the swing set. Her hands on my shoulders hit bruisingly hard as she shoved me face first onto the swing. Then she jumped onto my back and sat down. The rubber seat of the swing bit into my stomach painfully. It pinched against my ribs and my hips. It was hard to breathe.

She told someone to give me the grape and a grubby hand shoved a piece of fruit into my mouth as I gasped for air. I didn’t know the kid who did it. Their hand smelled of sweat and dirt.

Katherine said if I ate it she would get off of me. I knew she was lying but I still hoped, so I bit down. It was a sweet red grape but it had been rolled around in the sand before it was given to me. The grit ground disgustingly between my teeth as I chewed and swallowed.

As expected, Katherine didn’t get off.

She started to swing back and forth. I think someone must have been helping push her but it was too hard to strain my neck and keep my head held up to see. Katherine was laughing. I knew other kids were standing around, but they were silent. I couldn’t really blame them. They were probably just as afraid of being her target as I was.

I tried to lift my legs slightly so the tips of my shoes wouldn’t drag against the dirt. I didn’t want to ruin them. I wondered where my book had ended up and if it had been ruined. I didn’t want to have to explain to my mother why I had lost a library book. I knew my parents didn’t have the spare money to pay the fine.

The heels of Katherine’s shoes hit the backs of my calves as she swung. Why did she hate me so much? Why didn’t the teachers ever stop her? Why did God never answer my prayers? Why did he let her keep doing these things to me?

I don’t know how long this abuse went on. I just concentrated on trying to breathe. The pain in my ribs was growing, my stomach was bruising, my eyes were watering. The ground rolled back and forth dizzily in my face as she swung. The pressure in my head started to build and my eyes watered more. I worried that when she finally let me up she would think I was crying, I wasn’t, the blood was just rushing to my head. The dust she kicked up caked dryly on my face.

I hated Katherine. I wished she had never been born.

***

After recess we sat in class as the teacher gave the 5^th graders their reading assignments. I was in 6^th grade, but there weren’t enough students in my school to fill up an entire class at that level, so we were put together and just given separate work to do. My stomach and chest still hurt from earlier, but I wasn’t going to let Katherine or the other 6^th graders know that, so I sat up straight and refrained from rubbing the bruises.

Our teacher came over and explained that we would be going to the art trailer to practice a play. We would be performing it for the younger kids at the school and it was required as part of our grade.

I worked very hard at going unnoticed. The last thing I wanted to do was be on stage in front of a crowd. The second to last thing I wanted to do was be sent down to the art trailer every day for the next few weeks with my bully and her small army of classmates to practice with.

Of course, when we got there, the art teacher assigned the role of the main character to me. She probably thought she was giving me tough love or something, that she would be the one to ‘bring me out of my shell’ by making me the star of the show. She didn’t consider how much it would anger Katherine that she wasn’t the lead. That even though I clearly didn’t want it, my bully would blame me for getting it.

If that teacher had really wanted to help me, she could have just sat beside me at the playground every day and kept me safe.

As we flipped through the scripts the art teacher gave us I began to feel sicker and sicker. I asked to go to the bathroom. The teacher gave me a little yellow laminated hall pass. I practically ran up the hill from where the art classroom was located along with the other overflow trailers. I barely made it into the privacy of a stall before I got ill.

The play was about a fat cat that was extremely greedy. After eating an old woman’s porridge and not being satisfied by it, the cat proceeds to gobble up everyone in town one by one. I was going to have to be on stage for the entirety of the play. I was going to have to waddle around like a fat cat in a ridiculous costume chasing the other 6^th graders and meowing at them. For an animal, I had a remarkable amount of lines to memorize too. With every person the cat ate, it repeated everything it had eaten up until that point. I had to deliver all those lines without making a mistake.

***

The day of the play I got sick over and over again right up until it was time to go on stage. I’d practiced my lines so many times, both in class and at home, that they were burned into my memory, but I was still terrified I was going to make a mistake. As if the other kids didn’t already have enough things to tease me about, ruining the play would just be another added to their list, and then I’d get a bad grade as well. I wanted to be anywhere but here today. I thought this must be what hell is like.

It was during one of those trips to the bathroom that I heard Katherine and two of my other female classmates come in. I froze in the stall and pulled my feet up off the floor in case they checked to see if anyone else was in here. They must have assumed they were alone because they didn’t look.

I couldn’t see them from where I hid, but Katherine’s laughter was unmistakable. Mirth should never hold that much malice in it. The other two girls giggled nervously as their ring leader told them her plans to pull a prank during the play. Silently, inside my head, I groaned. My bully had somehow found a way to make a horrible day even worse for me.

The girls left the bathroom snickering and shushing each other as they went out the door, unaware that their secret was already known. But it didn’t matter. Who was I going to tell? The teacher wouldn’t believe me and Katherine would just deny it if confronted and then do it anyway. She was immune to punishment. All she had to do was call her wealthy parents in and suddenly all of the adults would agree that everything was just a big misunderstanding and that clearly the other student was just being too sensitive.

I imagined myself leaving the bathroom and just walking down the hallway and out the doors at the end. Just leaving the school behind, crossing the sports fields, heading into the woods. The image momentarily calmed me, but my feet carried me to the room backstage where the other 6^th graders were getting ready. I started to get into costume as well. I could feel my classmates eyeing me, smirking at me. Not just the girls who had followed Katherine into the bathroom either. Apparently her brilliant plan was already making the rounds.

***

Somehow I managed to make it all the way through gobbling up the entire town without actually messing up any of my lines. Now I lay curled up on the stage, facing away from the crowd of children watching. I liked this part of the play the best. The greedy cat was asleep with all of the villagers inside of its belly, so I got to just lay on the floor and I didn’t have to deliver any more lines.

A large sheet painted like a sleeping cat was stretched out in front of me and my classmates were hiding behind it. The spotlight moved off of me and onto it. Everything fell silent for a few seconds, to give the younger children in the audience time to see that the sheet cat was supposed to be me now and then the fabric was rolled up to show the villagers trapped inside my belly.

With the light off of me, it was nice and dark and I could try to pretend I was somewhere else. The floor felt safe, cool, and solid. It smelled like aged wood and floor polish. I stared at the tiny cracks between the wood planks and the grit that had gotten trapped there. It reminded me of being forced to eat the sandy grape. At least the library book had been recoverable that day. I frowned as my classmates carefully delivered their lines. The ‘townsfolk’ were discussing how best to escape the cat’s belly.

If only a monstrous cat really would come along and eat Katherine. Then I’d never have to see her again.

One by one they made their suggestions and one by one another would explain why their proposed plan would not work, until they got to the woodcutter. He suggested lighting a fire with the wood he had been carrying to make the sleeping cat yawn. Then, he reasoned, they could all just hop right out the cat’s open mouth. Everyone praised him for his wonderful idea and he set to work laying out the firewood.

The story was based on a Danish folktale. I had looked it up. The original story was much more grim. The people trapped inside didn’t just wait for the cat to fall asleep. The woodcutter didn’t light a fire to make the cat yawn. He just used his ax to chop his way out of the cat’s belly to free all the townsfolk. I guess whoever had ‘adapted’ the play for elementary school children had thought that was too gruesome, but lighting a fire inside a household pet was apparently just fine.

The sheet with the sleeping cat painted on it fell down once again, concealing my classmates behind it right before the woodcutter would have ‘lit’ the fire. During all the previous practices I had thought it kind of dumb considering what came next. Shouldn’t there be a new sheet that showed the cat yawning? Maybe the school hadn’t wanted to pay for two props.

A loud mewing sound played over the speakers along with an exaggerated yawn. At least they hadn’t made me do that part. Then one by one the townsfolk jumped out from behind the curtain as though they were coming out of the cat’s mouth. Each of my classmates paused momentarily on the other side, pretending to be stunned by the sudden sunlight and shielding their eyes with exaggerated movements.

A few seconds later and all of my classmates, except for Katherine, were accounted for. I held my breath. Any minute now my bully would be pulling her big prank. She was planning to come out from behind the sheet the wrong way. Via the cat’s butt instead of it’s mouth.

She was going to emerge slowly like she was trying to squeeze out the tight hole and then hold her nose and loudly complain about the smell. The little kids in the audience were going to love it. And they would all laugh at me. And every time I passed any of them in the hallway for the rest of the year I would be the target of poop jokes.

Any minute now...

But she never appeared. There was a long pause from the other students as they didn’t know what to do without Katherine showing up to deliver the next line. One of the boys leaned back and looked behind the curtain, then shrugged at the others. They all just stood in their places on stage waiting and I just continued to lay where I was. The little kids in the audience began to get restless. I saw movement in the wings. The art teacher was signaling to the other students to keep going.

My classmates began hugging each other and patting the woodcutter on his back, congratulating him on such a good plan. All the characters were so relieved to be out of the cat’s stomach and safe in the world again. The spot light moved back onto me and I sat up, like I was supposed to do. I looked around, feigning confusion, then got up and wandered off stage as the art teacher, acting as the narrator, wrapped up the play with a line about the greedy cat waking up very hungry.

The lights came on and the younger children began to file out led by their respective teachers. The janitors came in to clean up and we were sent back to class. Shortly after arriving a substitute came in and our normal teacher rushed out. The sub told us all to read in our seats. I pulled a new library book out from my desk and started reading. No one said anything to me.

The other kids mostly did what they always did. They ignored the directions and talked loudly among themselves. The sub didn’t stop them.

They wondered where Katherine could have gone. They wondered why she hadn’t stuck around to play her prank. No one bothered to try to hide the big secret from me now of what she had planned to do. No one even looked at me as they talked about me, right in front of me. That was OK. Wherever Katherine was, she wasn’t here right now, and that made me happy. Also, the book I was reading was really good.

After a while the other kids stopped wondering about Katherine and started talking about other stuff. It wasn’t all that interesting so I just tuned them out. I did note, with some amusement though, how quickly they had forgotten about her.

I heard later that the teacher and the principal searched the entire school for Katherine. At some point they got other teachers involved and school security. An announcement was made over the intercoms that we were on lock down. The police came. They questioned all of us, but it was pretty brief. We were all on stage in front of 200 little kids and their teachers at the time of her disappearance after all.

A few days later I saw her tearful parents on the news pleading for her safe return. The newscaster said a whole bunch of nice things about her. She was a good student, active in her church youth group, and she had a lot of friends who missed her. He obviously didn’t actually know her.

They never found Katherine.

She had just disappeared into thin air. Or maybe a giant Danish cat ate her.