Bus Stop Butchery

I was the fat kid in school. Not in high school, but in elementary school. By the time I made it to high school I had learned that being a fat kid was not conducive to having either friends or a girlfriend. I started playing basketball in the 7th grade and played until the 10th grade in high school where I became the very last person that Coach Webb cut from the team. I played baseball for two years and soccer for one year. So by the time I reached secondary schooling, I had lost all the weight because of sports and from playing outside because video games were not prevalent yet.

Various media always have horrible stories about bullies and their chubby victims, and those stories always seem to be derived from a high school experience. I witnessed some in third person, but I never personally experienced fat shaming in high school. There probably could be just as many malicious narratives about fat hate that took place in elementary school though. I do have personal experience from there.

My parents moved the family back and forth between two Southern states and they experimented with putting me in a private Catholic school for a while. Somewhere during all that, I started kindergarten late, and I had to repeat 1st Grade. So I was always at least one full year older than the other students. I had to ride the bus to school until I was about 17, but I started riding it in 6th grade. At that time, I was probably 12 years old but closer to 13. Either way, I was still in elementary school. I started riding the bus to school in the 6th grade because that is when my parents took me out of the Catholic school.

My bus stop was at the corner of a four-way stop and it was only a one-block walk from my house. I always left home in the morning at least 20 minutes earlier than I had to so I could be the first kid at the bus stop. Arriving early was not about me making sure I caught my ride to school. If the other kids were there before me, some of them would see me walking up the street and ridicule me. “Here comes Jabba the Hutt!” and “There’s Blubber Butt!” are examples I easily remember, but I avoided that by arriving first.

We called our bus the Big Banana Boat. I have no idea why, although I assume it’s because our bus was the same yellow color as a banana. Banana Boat was once a pejorative term used with immigrants because the boats that were used to transport the fruit were also used illegally to transport immigrants. The bus was as long as those kinds of boats and I can see a resemblance, but I doubt the 12 year olds knew this other use of the name. Big Banana Boat was not sneering when they used it. They probably were saying it because it sounded funny to them the first time they heard it from someone at the bus stop. Comical creativity coming from the mouth of a 12 year old can be cute some times. Other times when prepubescents get together in a group, they can devise some senseless ideas.

There were 3 ringleaders in the bus-stop group: Bruce, Frank, and Cody. No one at the bus stop ever made fun of me unless one of these kids was present, and their ridicule almost always occurred in the morning while I waited for the bus. They were bored, I guess, and needed something simple to pass the wait-time. I almost never got derided at the bus stop at the end of the day. The only reasons I can fathom for that is the kids were in an excited hurry to get home after being dropped off; they all went their separate ways at the end of the day and did not hang around in a group. Furthermore, the parents of Bruce and Frank often picked them up directly from school to bring them home, so the ring leaders were not always available to instigate the hate.

There are 180 school days in the year, though. So I guess the odds had to be high that eventually on one of those days all 3 of the gang leaders would be present on the Big Banana Boat ride back home. On this day, most of the kids who were let off the bus split down the separate roads of the four-way stop. After the bus drove off a good enough distance, Bruce, Frank, Cody, and another boy named Sean formed a circle around me.

I had no idea what they were doing. They were walking with me down my usual path home but they moved in an almost perfect circle concurrently with me. Cody and Frank should have been going the other direction to get to their house. I remember asking them what they were doing. No one answered. I was smiling at first because it looked funny and I thought they were just being funny. Then I noticed Bruce and Frank had small rocks in their hands. Soon I learned they all had rocks. I don’t remember who started first, but all 4 of these kids started pegging me with rocks and calling me “fat” slurs while they did it.

The bus stop was about 1 block from my house, but I remember feeling it was taking me forever to get home. Even recounting this story now, it feels like it took hours for me to get back to the indoor safety of my home. The pegging was relentless on the road home.

Because they were doing it in a circle, there was an endless supply of rocks to be thrown. I was moving in one direction trying to get home, so the kids behind me picked up the rocks the kids in front of me had just thrown. The kids in front of me would pick up loose pebbles from the road as they moved down it. I tried picking some up to throw back. That did nothing to deter them from thumping me with more resentment rocks. Plus, I took a couple of rocks to the face when I bent over to get my own ammunition. The rocks to the face stung most. So I stopped my return fire rather quickly.

I tried chasing them to get closer so I could hit them, but I could not catch them. I was so fat at this time that I could come nowhere near catching these guys. They were so athletic that they could run away from me backwards and still throw their rocks of animosity while retreating. The rocks kept stinging; the fat slurs kept ringing.

I could see the front yard of my house. I was almost there. Safety soon. I knew these malevolent minions would not follow me into the yard. They still were young enough to fear the parental presence at my home. Now I could see the little dirt patches formed at the edge of my grassy yard where my sister usually parks her car. I was almost there. Almost safe.

I had to get home before I started to cry. I could not let the monsters see me cry; that would amplify the monstrosity. The crying, if it happened, would not be from physical pain. Their rocks were not hard enough to cause me physical pain. None of the impacts left bruises. I was holding back tears from the fact that I was getting stoned by a group of kids. I did not even know what “stoning” was and of course that is not what was happening literally. I was not going to die from this, but I was almost about to cry from this. Almost safe. Almost home.

As expected, the pebble pitching stopped as I stepped onto my front yard. The circle broke. I did not look back. They would have seen a tear starting to form had I looked back. I definitely was not going to cry. I was too embarrassed to tell my parents about this, and they would want to know everything if they heard me crying. My parents were not home. My brother and sister were not either. That was fortuitous, because I think I needed some solitary space.

Other than entering a house that was missing my family, the only matter left I remember from the bus-stop butchery is me staring into the mirror at myself. I had gone into my bedroom, closed the door, taken my shirt off, and stood in front of the full-body mirror just staring. Not seeing. Not looking. Just staring. I remember my bottom lip quivering, at first. Then I became impassive. I never did cry. I don’t remember how long I stood there watching myself breathe so heavily that a bit of the mirror almost fogged. I just remember I never cried. I don’t remember the faces of the boys. I don’t remember if I ever saw them again. I only want to remember they did not make me cry.