Bully

For a year after we moved to our new house, I watched the yellow school bus roll down Old Farm Road and I longed to be on it. The bus was going to a magical place that seemed so much more exciting than Westminster Presbyterian Kindergarten, and I knew in my heart I belonged with the big kids. I recognized that I was far wiser than my five years. When it came time to enroll in elementary school, I made my first adult decision. I was no longer going to be called Suzie. From now on I’d be Suzanne. It was a much more mature name and I was clearly too grown up for nicknames.

  On the first day of school, I lined up with all the neighborhood kids on the Kenney’s driveway by the grey cedar fencepost that marked the border of our yards. Neighborhood boys were hanging off the rails like monkeys when the bus pulled up to the stop. My heart pounded as I climbed the stairs and found a window seat in the middle of the bus on the right side so I could maturely smile down at my mother and little brother. I was finally going to the big house.

  Dressed in my navy-blue jumper with white tights, black Mary Jane shoes from Buster Brown and my hair in braids, I carried my red, white and blue metal mailbox-shaped lunch box with pride. I chose it instead of the Scooby Doo, Holly Hobbie or Partridge Family boxes in the Back-to-School aisle at Roses, because I loved the unique shape. All the others were rectangles and this one had curves.

  After stocking up on crayons, construction paper and rubber cement, mom took me to the Hostess Bakery outlet on Hillsboro Street, where we stood in the parking lot taking deep whiffs of the yeasty, buttery aromas as our stomachs rumbled with desire. Mom let me pick my favorite Hostess mini pie – blueberry – plus we got a lemon pie to share in the car.

  On the first day of school, she made me a liverwurst sandwich with mayonnaise on the discount day-old Wonder Bread that was still “perfectly soft.” My thermos was filled with Pine State milk and she put cut up pieces of apples in tin foil because two of my teeth were loose and I couldn’t bite into a whole piece of fruit.

  That lunch box held some of the keys to my happiness. I didn’t know what to expect when I got to school, but I knew that, come lunchtime, I’d have some of my favorite treats. When we pulled up to Henry Adams Elementary, I was excited to get off the bus and start my first day as a big girl named Suzanne. But as I walked down the aisle, I was looking out the windows at the metal slide, the teeter totter and the tower of tires that I’d finally get to play on and I didn’t notice the foot that jutted out across the rubberized floor.

  The foot belonged to the neighborhood bully, Ritchie Brown. And the foot sent me sprawling, as my brand-new lunch box sailed through the air and crashed to the floor, opening up. My blueberry pie and liverwurst sandwich were inadvertently squished under classmates back-to-school Stride Rites and Keds, my red-capped thermos rolled under a seat, and my shiny, perfect lunch box was forever dented, but completely functional, my mother assured me, which meant I used it for the remainder of Elementary school with the increasingly rusty reminder of my humiliation. We did, however, get a new and utterly uncoordinated yellow thermos because the glass liner in the brand new one that matched my mailbox had shattered on impact.

  So, I entered first grade with tears on my face, blood on my lip from a lost loose tooth, no lunch and a hole in my tights. It was not the auspicious start to my academic career that I had hoped.

  But I rebounded. I was a “goody-goody” and a teacher’s pet. I prided myself on my perfect Cs for “commendable” on every elementary school report card, and that segued to all As in Junior High. And I spent seven years mostly avoiding my nemesis, Ritchie Brown.

  Yet he was always there, lurking in the background like a shadow, a specter stalking my self-confidence.

  And I remember the moment it happened. The moment I let him seep into my psyche and I went from being assured in my intelligence to questioning its value. The moment I decided to remake my image and changed the trajectory of who I became.

  We were on Bus 4 heading home from East Cary Jr. High. I was sitting in the first seat watching the skeletal winter trees flash by the window and admiring the wreaths on doors while dreaming of sugarplums in the form of cool clothes from Santa. My report card was peeking out from behind the cover of my Algebra book, when I felt something brush my shoulder and I saw a flash of white in the corner of my eye. Ritchie had grabbed my report card and stood in front of the bus, declaring loudly, “Look at what little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes got on her report card! Straight A’s again. Nothing but A’s every single time. No fun here!”

  And instead of being proud of myself, as I’d felt mere moments before, I was embarrassed. I shrunk in my seat as the kids laughed and threw wads of paper at me from the back of the bus. And the thought crept into my head, “Is it normal to always do your very best? Does that make me weird?”

  If I had it to do over again, I’d have held my head up and kept my winning streak going, but instead I dumbed myself down as I headed into High School. The report cards from those three years were, let’s say, a celebration of more letters of the alphabet. But I always knew I was capable of more.

  I have no idea whatever happened to Ritchie Brown. There’s a dude with that name on Facebook whose most recent post reads, “The extreme leftist only gives true Americans 2 choices. We allow them to force us to accept their mental illness as correct behavior or we have a Civil War. As an American Veteran I choose WAR.” Could be him. It kinda tracks.

  Stealing my report card was the bully’s way of trying to drag me down to his level. And the bullies abound, trying to drag us all down these days. I know that by letting Ritchie influence my determination, I temporarily let him win. But the ultimate victory is stepping off our proverbial buses, reclaiming our ambition, our hope, our sense of compassion or safety or whatever else is that they’ve tried to take. Make our own adult decisions, shun the nicknames, aim for the As.

As shared at Story Salon on August 19, 2026.