I could tell I was being followed; the voices and footfalls kept getting closer. Giggles of thirteen-year-old girls, bigger than me. I was almost a block from home, heading through the new housing development that had once been part of the woods behind my house. The sidewalks were wider and brighter, and the curbs all sloped gently into the fresh, black street. Once one reached the place where the old neighborhood began, the sidewalk became dull and dark and stained again.

I remembered the small mirror in my purse and reached for it. As I opened it like a clam shell, I felt so suave, like a spy, peering back at the two girls who grew closer and closer to me.

Finally they caught up. Someone stepped on the heels of my Keds, so I crossed the street, heading the wrong way, away from home. The girls followed me. I turned to face them, and a simple push knocked me into the grass.

I can’t even remember what they said now. Threats and taunts and insults at me, the little nerdy girl who didn’t get 80s fashion, who took those stupid AP classes like a show-off, who didn’t laugh or talk and hid her metal-covered teeth. That was me. I cried as they walked away, and cried as I finished my walk home.

I don’t remember the girl’s name now, and I don’t remember how I became her target. She had brown hair in a short and fashionable wedge, her eyes were beady like Tatum O’Neal’s, she wore the big baggy sweaters, skinny leggings – it was 1985. She picked on me for sport, like bullies do. Oh how she must have hated her life, maybe even more than I hated mine.

Here is how I made it stop.

Memories from eighteen years ago get watery and lose details, like dates and seasons and names. So I couldn’t tell you the day it happened, if it was cold or warm, who I might have been with. All I remember is that I was starting my usual walk home from another day in seventh grade.

The way to my street was to cut through a stretch of wood – a stretch no doubt bulldozed by now. It was a narrow dirt trail that led downhill past a swamp where I had looked for frogs and salamanders as a child. The trail carried only a short distance, then broke on the new white sidewalk and cookie-cutter houses.

I was halfway down the hill on the trail when she appeared in front of me, and as usual started giving me shit, maybe calling me names, maybe inquiring as to what I was looking at, and whether I was looking at her. The usual rhetoric. I will never know why I did this, but I lost my temper.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted at her face. And furthermore, “Why do you always pick on me? What did I ever do to you?” She didn’t say anything; her eyes were wider than I had ever seen them.

“What did I do to you? What did I ever do to you??” I kept repeating, loudly, insistently, almost tearfully. “I didn’t do anything to you. Leave me alone!” She snorted derisively at me, but let me pass, and I went home.

Nothing ever happened after that. No fights after school, no more teasing (to my face). I remained a social outcast with my dork friends, with only the school albino and the male nerds below us in rank. I read books voraciously, I drew horses, all my crushes remained deeply forever concealed. I waited around for high school, when I was sure things would get better.