Neighbor Boy

Or: Why I preternaturally hate September

By third grade, I’d nailed pretending

I stepped off the school bus onto the sidewalk as legions of taller children swarmed around me, cutting a hurried swath to the elementary school’s front doors. Ready or not, I was leaping into this new world that everybody had talked about all summer: Kindergarten. For the occasion, my mother bought me a new red and blue plaid dress and gave me a faux alligator change purse for lunch money. My mother also devised a plan the night before to temper the impending overwhelm. Not having any older siblings to look out for me, she called our neighbor – my best friend’s mother – asking her if my friend’s older brother would shepherd me along with his sister to our classroom. She and I were assigned the same teacher (which delighted me) so it would be easy. His mother agreed wholeheartedly with the plan, so I breathed a sigh of relief as we piled off the bus. My relief turned to confusion as he and his sister galloped ahead without me. I caught up with them and decided to trail behind – I could still easily find my classroom that way. When he realized what I was doing, he stopped, shot an icy look my way and sternly declared, ‘No Stacey…you can’t come.”

They disappeared into the crowd as I stood stunned. What about the plan our mothers made? Why would he leave me behind? Why did he speak to me like I’d done something wrong? Neighbor-boy repeated his admonition for the rest of the week until I finally got the message – his contempt for me, while inexplicable, was also unmistakable. It was the first of many shots he fired over the bow in a one-bully war waged on my dignity. It lasted the entirety of my childhood and decimated my self-worth. For reasons that remain unanswered, neighbor-boy was bitter, and wanted somebody to hate. Who better than a soft target with no older siblings to get in the way of his agenda?

Four years my senior, I lived in fear of him, and he always seemed to be lying in wait: the school bus was his favorite turf. With the bus driver preoccupied, he and his gang of lackeys shouted demeaning names at me as I leaned my head against the window next to my seat and pretended not to hear. On the occasions when I was brave enough to enter his house to ‘play Barbies,’ with his sister, he always loomed menacingly and lobbed insults with glee. If I ventured near his property, he’d meet me with a glare and more insults. Neighbor-boy begat a deep soul-satisfaction from calling me fat and all kinds of viciously critical descriptions of my body – and this was before I was fat. What I was, to anyone footed in reality, was an averaged-sized kid who apparently possessed the mortal flaw of not having a protruding clavicle bone. And If I had, neighbor-boy would have ridiculed that. Eventually, I began overeating and sneaking food as a stress response and became the names he called me.  

With as much vitriol as the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, he would routinely list aloud all that he hated about me: the way my shirt accentuated my ‘fat stomach,’ the way I talked, the way I didn’t talk. As a protection reflex, I often went into beetle mode and played dead. Trauma therapists now refer to this as the ‘collapse and submit’ response to abuse. This elicited hissing admonitions from him that I was too quiet and what was wrong with me. Then, when he’d overhear me giggling in his sister’s room indulging in girl chatter, he’d stand in the doorway, and derisively mock me. Neighbor-boy long ago decided I could do no right, which helped him fulfill his tough-guy fetish. My parents didn’t want to hear it. All they wanted of me was to lose weight and stop embarrassing them.

Terrified. Ashamed. Bewildered. That’s what I spent the first portion of my life being. And it’s hardly a unique experience in our failed culture, which has largely looked the other way when its children are in distress.

A few years back, I was reminiscing with a former elementary school classmate. We were both social casualties due to our unacceptable weights and regularly experienced the slings and arrows from self-loathing, weak boys masquerading as macho men. I mean come on: how delusional and pathetic do you have to be to accrue an undeserved reputation as a bad-ass by targeting someone you know is too scared or ashamed to fight back? But I digress - my elementary alum mentioned a boy in our class who was particularly obnoxious, whom, she said, ruined her school years with his ridicule. The kid took his shots at me as well, but the truth was, this smirking, wise-cracking classmate was a walk in the park compared with neighbor-boy, whose aggression and cruelty were obsessive. Sure, there were plenty of micro-bullies in my world, but neighbor-boy was the Big One – a 9 on the Richter scale.

One of my most painful memories was the afternoon he cornered me in the foyer of his home as I waited for his sister to emerge from her room for an outdoor play date. Neighbor-boy knew he only had a few minutes, so he made the most of them, tossing his basketball casually up and down in the air, to underscore what an ultra cool cat he was as he quietly tore me to shreds, reminding me how fat and ugly I was. It took every ounce of strength not to cry. Playing dead was never 100% effective and this encounter humiliated me to the very marrow of my bones. Disgust oozed from every pore as he unloaded on me. I remember looking at him once, but the hate in his eyes was too much, so my focus bounced from the linoleum floor to the lake that lay beyond the living room window, and then back to the floor again. This was my normal. I’d come to accept his abuse as interwoven into my life as the rising sun. No one protected me – his parents and mine knew it was going on and did nothing – which only reinforced my belief that I deserved it. The rationalizations were as sickening as his abuse: his mother laughed it off with an ‘oh well, boys will be boys,’ shrug, and my parents reminded me this wouldn’t be happening if I just would agree to lose weight. i

When he and his family moved away a few years later, it actually made no difference on the tortuous school bus rides. Neighbor-boy had indoctrinated the other boys to ridicule me on sight, so his putrid legacy continued, both on the bus and in my head.

I need everyone reading this to really hear me: emotional abuse is a foundation setter. It bruises internally and informs our ability to trust and bond with others. It also has a corrosive effect on how the victims assess themselves throughout the rest of their lives. Yes, the tides can be turned, but it takes an incredible amount of work, and truthfully, no one’s ever really the same after such prolonged inhumane treatment.

I’ve fantasized many times of confronting him, of telling neighbor-boy face-to-face how he destroyed my sense of self and obliterated the happiness I could have enjoyed during those tender years. Why should he sail through his life as if no crimes were committed? Because he had the advantage of being enabled by a misogynistic society and one that was also fat-phobic.

I continue to ask the questions: don’t I deserve to have my say? Don’t I have the right, after all the shrapnel absorption, to salve my wounds by speaking to my abuser and demanding some accountability? I’m sure many of us have asked similar questions in reference to past grievances; even though, ‘you can’t always get what you want’ is woven inexorably into the human experience. Also true: what we think we want isn’t always what’s best for us.  

I had no plans to ever write about my toxic tango with neighbor-boy; it’s too overwhelming a topic. How overwhelming? To this day I still feel no anger. I’ve cried many times while remembering what he did to me, but the closest I get to anger is shell-shocked numbness. Maybe my impending milestone birthday shifted the tectonic plates just enough, because suddenly, I was seized with the knowing that now is the time to have my say – at least with the pen. It’s time for a little equilibrium after all those years living with the damage of having a 9 on the Richter scale stalking me.

Time to, at long last, TELL. As it’s also time to stop caring so much what others think and whom I may offend, or bore, or whatever – five and a half decades is long enough to be a toxic dumping ground. So here I am, at essay’s end, a little less burdened from carrying something so core-crushing all these years.

And I’m offering no apologies because none are needed – not from me, anyway. Call it a very timely and long overdue 60^th birthday present to myself.