CONFESSIONS
Bumble Date With an Ex-Bully
It felt like it was the whole class; even though writing this now, I can see that it was and it wasn’t.
Back then, I could have excluded three: one was a girl who had lived abroad for the same five years I had, only she’d lived in Japan instead of the Netherlands. She was only a couple of months ahead of me in the coming-back timeline, but her experience was radically different. Her assigned buddy had become an actual buddy, and her crush liked her back, even though it seemed they were not admitting it yet.
She was coming home; I was somewhere else.
When people were mean to me, she would look down and look away and later come over and tell me to give it a little time, that it would be okay. It was unclear if she’d gone through something similar if she meant it’d be okay once they had a new girl to mess with, or if she was just being kind and saying what people say.
Then there were two other girls. Outcasts. Friends to one another, and it seemed to no one else. One of them seemed fine doing her own thing, but the other seemed desperate to get in. One was quiet and ignored all that surrounded us, the other seemed to light up under the glaring attention. They were friendly enough to me, so I pretended not to see her poke them and provoke them. She preferred their meanness to their indifference, and she didn’t mind me getting hit in the process. It seems so obvious now, but I didn’t get it then. The smile she wore when she told me they’d taken a photo of me and were passing it around with mean comments. The way she was horrified when I said I was going to leave. She told me I couldn’t possibly. I did. I can see now that she wasn’t a real friend, but I wouldn’t call her a bully.
Aside from those three classmates though, I lumped them all together.
A few of the others still have faces in my memories: the particularly horrible ones. The rest were just one of the forty or fifty students who jeered and jabbed or simply stood by, doing nothing to help but also nothing to stand out. They were part of the problem but in the way of supporting cast and extras.
After I left, I randomly ran into some of these extras and didn’t always recognize them. Most of the time, they had the sense not to say anything, but every once in a while, they did.
I came across one of them in a writing competition; she kept asking if I remembered her. When I finally did, I still said I didn’t.
I met another at a party. She came to say hi, and when my face became a question mark, she said we’d gone to school together and then looked down, embarrassed.
Another told a friend of mine “Oh yeah, we bullied her, it was really bad,” and then he laughed. Hopefully, the laugh you laugh when you are really uncomfortable and not when you’re a psychopath.
And then I inadvertently swiped right on one. Three harmless-looking photos and a shared favorite book. An unsuspecting swipe, a notification, and a speech bubble.
47 speech bubbles after that. Yes, I counted. We shared 48 messages and half a date before he told me I looked different now. My silence unsettled him. We’d been having such a fluid conversation. He mumbled and stumbled to what I can only describe as a confession. He had recognized my face and swiped right anyway, had swiped right on purpose. He thought I had recognized him too. The match and every speech bubble after that had fit into a story I could have never imagined. For all my years of reading and writing, I never saw this one coming.
I stared at him like a foreign movie with poorly translated subtitles, like I could understand the words but couldn’t believe their meaning was what had been originally intended. My face has no filters: every reaction is projected in HD. I’m sure he had no trouble understanding the motion picture of my features.
I did not remember him.
I did not remember him. But what if I did? I was over that whole experience, wasn’t I? Didn’t that mean that I should be unbothered by this? Could we laugh it off? Shrug it, shake it, sail past it? Could I have a nice dinner with an ex-bully? Because even if I didn’t remember him, specifically, he was that, right? The problem had never been the ten idiots who were really horrid, it was the fact that the whole class laughed and sniggered at their remarks; that the whole class saw me and did nothing. The problem was that none of them could muster a kind word or friendly smile.
He’s still talking, sporting a blush so furious even the restaurant’s romantic lighting can’t hide. He tells me he can’t get over how different I look, and I sift through a myriad of replies, but none seem to rise to the occasion. The occasion, excuse my French, is fucked up.
My mind is a merry-go-round. It was so long ago, and I’ve grown past it, and he’s probably grown too, and he was as young as I was, and aren’t we all idiots when we are young? and… question marks, question marks, question marks. Question marks that seem to multiply, some are adolescent: is this a prank? Why is he here? Is it so he can turn around and tell them and laugh? I’m fifteen again.
Some are a bit better. How does this make me feel? Does it still bother me? Can I really be over it and still feel so turned around when seeing a new one of them? If I were looking back at this moment right now, what would I wish I did?
Fifteen-year-old me would have stood up and walked away.
Thirty-year-old me stood up abruptly and then sat down and stared at him.
In the end, I didn’t leave. I didn’t stay for him, I stayed for me, because leaving felt like finishing a book without reading the last page.
In the end, I didn’t leave, and I listened. I listened to his version. This story about a boy who liked a girl but thought she could never like him. A story where the boy saw the way her shoulders hitched whenever he said hi and assumed she saw them all the same way. He felt like a monster who couldn’t shake the nametag. He said he didn’t know how to help me, he didn’t know how to talk to me. The invisible boy and the girl with a target on her back.
He said he always regretted it, always wondered what if. Until he saw me on Bumble and thought it was a second chance. We matched and we clicked, and he never imagined I hadn’t recognized him.
His story was better than mine. The angst of unrequited love is more alluring than the pain of the outcast.
His story is better than mine, it’s tempting to swap it, to chuck out my own, and replace it with this new version, bound in lavender and golden stitching. What are we but a collection of stories? What is growing up but a finetuning of our anthology? A careful selection of the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we accept from others.
In the end, I didn’t leave, and though my brother rolled his eyes and flexed his hand as if ready for a punch when I told him this, I am glad I didn’t. My anthology is richer for it. As silly as it sounds, the scar looks a little paler, and the girl in the story looks a little less lonely for it.
To write is human, to edit is divine — Stephen King.
This article is solely for informational purposes and represents the writer’s personal opinion. Please seek professional advice if required.
Find your stage on RESONATES. Touch hearts, inspire minds and find comfort that you are not alone. Write with us. Read the submission guidelines here.
