Junior High Cruelty

It’s important as a reader (and as a human being), I think, to step outside of one’s comfort zone, whatever that may be. I think this partly because I resist change, cling to the familiar, and hate strange situations. I’m shy and awkward when I’m out of my element, and I dislike feeling like I’m not in control of a situation. (All those who know me in real life are laughing right now, but it is true! I can be shy!)

I find, however, that being willing to do something I’ve never done before, whether it’s eat Ethiopian food or go to a pro-choice rally, provides me with critical perspective. It’s not hard, I think, I can actually do this.

By contrast, reading a challenging book barely counts as testing the waters of the unfamiliar–which means that many fewer excuses not to do so. That being said, so far I’m not finding Mean Little Deaf Queer especially challenging. It’s engaging, well-written, and fascinating, but I’m not squirming in my seat yet, which is something that the reviews pretty much guaranteed I would do.

There might be a couple reasons for this, though. First, I’m comfortable with stories about alternative sexuality, so Galloway’s budding queerness doesn’t get to me the way it might another reader. Mostly, though, I think it’s because I was a mean kid, too.

Being a fat kid isn’t anything like having a medical disability–as far as I would know, of course–but one thing that my childhood and Galloway’s definitely had in common is the desire to be noticed for anything other than one’s body. She writes: “Since I now felt too ugly to get my bang from beauty and too old to start cramming to be a genius, there seemed to be only one path to supremacy open to me. I had noticed that, ugly or not, idiots or not, boys always had an aura of authority, of primacy.” (38.) Galloway went tried to be a boy; I went the genius route. (I don’t think it worked out for either of us.)

Fat kids try their best to become untouchable, either by fading into the background and hoping to escape notice, or by putting themselves into the spotlight so insistently that no one can avoid them. I was definitely type two–I was one of those annoying, know-it-all kids; I talked back and I talked back loudly; I played class clown when I needed kids instead of teachers to like me. And I was mean as a snake.

I hear stories from other girls, especially from the junior high years, of how they were bullied incessantly by others. Tormented by boys, whispered about by girls, that sort of thing. I never got this kind of abuse (aside from the occasional impersonal cruelty of an evil junior high boy), and after careful thought, I’ve concluded that a large reason for it was that people were, for some reason, afraid to mess with me. It’s hard to say this with any kind of certainty, because, of course, in my own head I was never scary at all. But I can recognize, through the fog of time, that I was often cruel to people I considered friends. So how cruel would I have been to people I considered enemies?

The point of this long personal digression: I understand exactly what Galloway means when she writes: “It was a cruel thing to do, but I remember feeling cool about his tears. The reptilian heart of me was taking a far colder look at the circumstances than my daddy was. Remembering myself as I was then, I can well imagine my reasoning. Something along the lines of, This next part of my life is gonna suck. I bet I can milk it for every tear it’s worth. I was right on both counts.” (33.)