c.1992
Generally speaking, 9th Grade was the final year where I was bullied in any significant manner, before my body and my hair both grew. I think of my experience of 5th Grade - 9th Grade as sort of the "hell years," where I wasn't able to focus on anything but survival. I went from being a great student to an anxious wreck who flunked every class, while somehow getting advanced to the following grade by the skin of my teeth. (That would end in 10th Grade where I actually did end up getting flunked before eventually dropping out, but those are different stories).
One day in a 9th Grade math class, we got an odd assignment of sorts from a teacher who was a temporary replacement for our normal teacher. After taking a one-page quiz, she asked us to "Write a message to a 3rd Grade class about the importance of math" on the flip side of the page. I later claimed to think this assignment was for a theoretical group of 3rd Graders, but I think I knew that there were real kids that were going to see it. In my full smart ass mode, I wrote two sentences to the children, the first line was something to the effect of "Haha, you suck, etc," but I was quite proud of the second sentence that I certainly remember which was "Tell your ugly friends to go lick a donkey."
Later that day, my friend Scott who at the time was sort of my rascally partner-in-crime at the time, told me that the teacher read what I wrote and was going to call my mom to tell her. In a sudden panic, I asked Scott what he wrote, assuming it would be something similar. He shrugged and said that he wrote something normal to the kids about how we use math in our daily lives. I felt so betrayed, just as I had felt overall around this period. When had it suddenly become cool to stop getting in trouble and be a lameoid thinking about your future? The other kids had successfully been able to beat the kid who used to get good grades out of me, but now they were mature enough to know that it was important? I had finally arrived for everyone, and now they were abandoning me and changing the rules.
I ended up walking back to the classroom where the teacher still was, and I played dumb and asked her if she thought what I was wrote was funny. She said she did not, and that she had
called my mom to tell her about it. I pretended to be incredulous at this, and verbally protested to no avail. I don't think I realized that my mom was actually going to come to
school because of this, but at the end of the day there she was standing in the front lobby with that familiar sickly pale and enraged look. She asked me what I thought my Church Youth Group
leader would think if she was shown what I had written about "Licking a donkey's genitals," to which I corrected her and said that I had merely written "Lick a donkey," which unbelievably seemed
to diffuse the situation some.
I don't know how else to end this except to say to all the kids out there that if you're going to talk about licking a donkey, don't mention their genitals or you'll really be in trouble.