We both ran…

I’m a lot older than most of my peers, I graduated from school almost 15 years ago. Time blurs memories, faces and events from my childhood blur together but some moments still stick in my mind, and stand out amongst the faded memories.

I’ve always been bigger than my classmates and was lucky throughout my childhood to avoid the attention of most bullies. Aside from some teasing and being called “big guy” I can say my childhood was fairly uneventful in the schoolyard. While my size and disposition afforded me safety amongst my peers, the most traumatic event of my childhood was a direct result of my height.

I walked home from elementary school and my path intersected a Junior and Senior high on my journey home. One time while in the fourth grade a good friend and I walked the usual path in front of the junior high. I was a comparable height to an average 7th or 8th grader at the time, and I like to think that my attackers assumed I was that old, I hope they wouldn’t chase two elementary kids across fields and down residential streets.

A car pulled up beside us with a group of boys from the high school and they started shouting and laughing and they tossed eggs at my friend and I. We both ran, as the car chased us up and down the neighborhood streets, my friend was bleeding from a shot to the head, I was crying. My friend and I split up and I ducked in a backyard huddled behind a thorny bush.

I could hear the older boys laughing, and I hid behind the bush what seemed like hours. I came home in tears, traumatized, I never walked past those schools again, I still have dreams of those kids chasing me pelting me with eggs. Several years later when I was in high school, in a different town, my little brother came home in tears, covered in eggs from a similar experience. It’s not your traditional experience of bullying but it still hurts.

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