Settle down for story time. So there was this girl in my school named Ana. She had FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) and was adopted from Russia. She came to my school when I was in third grade; she was in my class. We were best friends all year. I will never understand why, but the summer between third and fourth grade something changed. Ana became a target for bullying at our school. This went way beyond the normal 'odd man out' situation, and every single student participated in the bullying. If you accidentally bumped into Ana, you contracted her cooties and had to brush them off and give them to another person. You couldn't sit next to her. You couldn't talk to her. You couldn't interact with her at all without getting made fun of for it. It was the worst form of bullying I have ever witnessed. Every single kid in that school picked on Ana with no exception. I wouldn't be friends with her anymore because I wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be associated with the negative image that surrounded her. So my first day of fourth grade, when Ana comes running up to me all excited to share her stories of what happened over the summer, I pushed her down and screamed at her to stay away from me. I will never stop feeling ashamed for what I did.
Ana never lived down this bullying. It followed her from fourth grade through high school. As a result of it she did develop some pretty fucked up problems. She became a pathological liar and did a lot of really messed up stuff that doesn't need to be repeated. Kids eventually stopped isolating her so severely, but she never had friends. She was still targeted and ostracized. She considered my sister and I to be her best friends, but even we were cruel to her and ignored her. All this poor girl wanted was some goddamn comfort and a companion.
Fast forward to the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Ana was going in for heart surgery for her FAS. Things got complicated and on June 13, my birthday, Ana passed away. I heard about it through a friend and her first concern was, "But, I mean, we are like still gonna party for your birthday, right? It's not a big deal or anything..." I was disgusted. It felt like someone had sucked the air out of my chest. I couldn't stop thinking of how I rejected her plee for friendship and how I had contributed to the suffering of this innocent person.
My senior year of high school starts. Keep in mind, here, that my high school had 172 total. The death of a student in my high school rocked the community violently. We had a student commit suicide the previous year and the entire community shut down for a whole week. Anyway, after summer, we came back to school and nothing happened. No memorial for Ana (there was a memorial for the suicide victim), no mention of her name, just an empty locker collecting dust where Ana's name used to hang. This absolutely enraged me. Even after her death, nobody could stop and spare a thought for Ana?! Her name was still poison to some people?! I was outraged. So my sister, a mutual friend, and myself decided to raise money and buy a memorial for her by ourselves. We had bake sales every week all school year, sold t-shirts, advertised for donations, and all this cumulated in a big show we put on at the end of the year. Thousands of people showed up to support us in raising money for Ana's memorial. We made over $5,000 and turned it over to Ana's parents with the understanding that they would put $2,500 down for a memorial bench to be erected at the school and $2,500 towards a scholarship in Ana's name. Her parents squandered the money on a new car instead. I just. I don't know. Recounting this for the first time since high school. I'm in tears.
Yet I digress. Long story short: Why did I contribute to the bullying? I was pathetic.
