She had always considered herself the normal sort of kid- what child didn't?  Running around each recess, having spats with the other kids... Yes, showing off with her unusual vocabulary occasionally, but she never thought of them as out of the ordinary words.

Then in fourth grade, her entire class found themselves joining a larger one, in a new building, a new school.  She found herself suffering from what could be considered normal shyness.

Suddenly everything changed.

---

They had gathered around her, fifteen or twenty of them at the least.  Her back was to the wall.

Nowhere to go.

Nobody willing to help her.

<Not again.....

Pain.  Humilation-- the things they called her... Things thrown.  Then--

Now they were clawing at her.  Trying to take--

What?  Whatever.

Something tore from her neck.  The scarf.  Her dad's.  Her grandad's.  It was something like that.  The pretty blue scarf, the one her mother had lovingly shown how to tie around her neck so that it actually kept her warm.  It was her responsibility.

Someone-- one of the smaller guys, smaller than her-- tore from the crowd, her scarf trailing behind him.  The crowd parted to let him through.

Stupid.

She followed before they could close in again, scream like no other tearing from her lips.  She pounded after him, her heartbeat drumming in her ears.  She wanted to catch him, to hurt him...

No.

No.  The only important thing was getting back what was hers.  He ran to the jungle gym, hastily buried the scarf under the wood chips beneath it, ran back towards the school just as the bell rang.

At least she didn't have to fight too hard to get her scarf back.

---

Her mother had asked her about the bruises.  There wasn't anything to say-- the teachers' aides never seemed to notice or be curious about an overlarge crowd of students gathered at the fence-- there wasn't anything her mother could do.  The only people who seemed willing to protect her were the two janitors-- one of whom knew her father.

Although her mom had offered to follow her around the playground with a baseball bat.  The principal took action after that.

Still, the whispers persisted... the catcalls, whatever.  She was removed from the morning lines several times for confrontation and made to stand on the porch.  They threw tic tacs at her.

When they had to go upstairs from lunch, people tried to shove her off the side of the stairwell and into the hard steps three floors below.  There had been times she was sure she'd be killed.

It was even harder when she had to start wearing a brassiere in fifth grade.  Why did Katie Moonie CARE if she was wearing a sports bra?  Why was she LOOKING?  And then acne in sixth...

Junior High was a little better in some ways.  She certainly didn't miss recess.  But sometimes in the halls...  A size D battery would come flying out of a nearby clump of students, cracking her in the head... or being taken advantage of because she hadn't been able to adjust to their society and was now out of touch with it.  

But she was getting tired.  She didn't want to cower into the wall anymore.  And with that anger, that sense of injustice, something exploded inside her.

---

"Keep walking," she murmured at him in a low, dangerous voice.  This boy had been the face of her pain for a long time.  She'd had it with him.  He had learned pretty fast in the past few minutes that she knew very well how to kick- and where.  "Just turn and... Keep walking."

He kept backing away, hands up, fear in his eyes-- this was the same boy who had slammed her repeatedly in a locker several weeks ago for hitting him in the face with a lunchbox?  She'd hit him for catcalling-- literal, meowing cat-calling.  It was a long, bitter story, as was everything else.

"Keep walking... We're going to the same class..."

Something-- Someone-- slammed into her, and her head cracked into the wall, sending shattering pain through her skull.  She collapsed and held her head in her hands, the breath suddenly gone from her lungs.

That stern woman-- the Language Arts teacher-- demanding her name.  She whimpered it out in a broken sob.  The woman sighed in relief.

She didn't have a concussion-- but she did end up serving three detentions for the incident.  She later found out her tormentor's "rescuer" never served his.

---

The start of High School was supposed to signal something new, and it did-- New people, new teasing.  She found out that she had needed glasses for maybe a year already.  She had simply squirmed her way out of getting them-- by fooling her mother.

A part of her was ashamed of herself.  A part of her was rather proud.

She had begun, sometime way back in the beginning, to bury herself in her own fantasies.  It got even worse.  In her mind, there was someone within her who was who she really was-- brave, strong, pretty, smart.  But somehow, they just couldn't see.  And perhaps she didn't really see it herself.

There was that gym class- the last gym class she ever was forced into taking.  There was one particular girl... she'd been new, and they were assigned to be bowling partners because they were the ones picked last.

On the way back from pool on Fridays-- that girl took gumdrops she'd bought at the pool hall, wettening them with her own saliva, then threw them into her partner's long blonde hair.  Then she would deny doing it, as if there was another student who had bought gumdrops at the pool hall.

There never was.

It hurt, and sometimes she'd even cry.  She hated to cry by now, especially hated to cry in front of the people who hurt her.  The other girl seemed to take this as an advantage... or maybe she really was sorry on some level-- but she didn't seem to be.

"You're not going to KILL yourself, are you?"

Somehow, she managed a proud toss of the head, hurting eyes glaring over her shoulder.  "You're not worth dying over."  She had suffered before.

Somehow, that knowlege didn't prevent her breaking down one of the last days and running to sob in the girls' locker room.  The other girls gathered around her, but they mostly seemed to think she was having a pity party.  "...And she HATES me..." came the hiccuping accusation.  Everyone turned to look at her bowling partner.

"Honey, if I hated you, you would KNOW."  So what were the gumdrops about?  She went home hating herself for not asking, imagining what her adversary's response would be... another summer went by.

---

Then something intruded on her fantasies-- someone who was a hero, who wasn't real but somehow seemed so close to her--  It was his eyes.

She looked into his large, sweet eyes, and she knew.  He had been through the exact kind of thing she had been, and yet there he was, beaten but unbeaten, and he stood up, presented himself as the person he really was... and people had to accept him-- because he had accepted himself.

She didn't need to become brave, strong, pretty or smart to be the hero of her story.

She already was all those things.  But even though she'd always told herself that, she'd never really accepted it.  Never really knew it to be the truth.

But suddenly, she knew.  Knew it in her soul, where it couldn't be taken away.

And there were no tears left to cry.