The Ko-Written Story

My throat pounds as panic overwhelms me. 

“What’re you gonna do? Do you know kung fu or something?” he jeers as he pretends to be Bruce Li. 

I feel my face flush, my eyes darting back and forth between Sam and this nincompoop. 

“Yeah!” I yell. 

I don’t. I know taekwondo, so this is technically a lie. Even in this millisecond, I’m measuring the sin of a lie against my obligation to protect. My panic builds. I have a profound need to be good and I don’t know if this lie works in my favor.

“He wouldn’t know the difference between taekwondo and kung fu anyway,” I justify and refocus my attention on my main task: protection.

I would have liked, no, loved to go home in peace given everything I was going through, but my feet were already storming down the bus aisle before I knew it. Sam is in first grade and I’m in fourth. This white boy in front of me with his two arms and one knee raised idiotically is in third grade. I can do this. Plus, how dare he pick on a kid as small and scrawny as Sam? Does he not see me and my size?

“Yeah!” I say again, with more confidence this time. “I know kung fu, and I also know where you live!” I glare with my finger pointing at the air in front of him. I would have liked to put my finger on his chest like I’ve seen in the movies, but the internal analytics of whether that was a justifiable choice would likely put me over the edge. 

It’s the boy’s turn to flush red. I stand taller, knowing that my second statement is fully true. We have ridden the same bus all school year, so I DO know where he lives. Sam and I know that I would never hunt this kid down or lay a finger on him, but he doesn’t need to know this. The boy blubbers and stammers and I am just so, so relieved that we are at his bus stop. He grabs his bag and runs off the bus. 

I sigh with relief and turn to Sam. I can’t read his facial expression. It’s a mix of fear and pride maybe..? He thinks I’m literally stronger than dad, so I guess that came to be a positive thing this time around. As an adult looking back, I feel bad that Sam had this image of me quite far into his childhood. The amount of policing and abuse of power it likely took to get him to see me this way makes me cringe. From my point of view, my mom was way too squishy with Sam, bending over backwards for him, spoiling him, and making him weak. My dad was always busy with work, coming home for dinner far past 10pm and out the door before we woke for school the next morning. So that left me to be the parent I thought my mom should be, raising Sam to be strong and independent like I felt like I had to be at school.

You see, I was being bullied at school at this point in my life. At first, I thought I had made some really great friends at my new school. I even got elected as class president of the month during our class elections, but that made one of my new best friends jealous I suppose. She called me one day and said that no one wanted to be my friend anymore except for her and offered to be my friend in secret. Then, when I would go to school, the girls would run to where I was sitting alone at recess, stand in a line and successively say one word of a sentence they had all rehearsed “We. Don’t. Want. To. Be. Your. Friend.” Then they’d laugh and run away. Fourth grade girls are literally the worst. At the end of the school year when that one friend left school early to go on a family trip to Paris, the other girls later approached me and apologized saying that they wanted to be my friend but the other girl wouldn’t let them. Do we wonder why I have trust issues?

Anyway, it was something like this every single day. Even when I thought I was safe at home, they would call me up during a slumber party I was not invited to, ask my mom to speak to me, laugh amongst themselves, and hang up. They just wanted to let me know that they were having fun and that I was neither welcome nor invited. It was day after day of not knowing what I would have to face that day. Every day of dreading recess. Every day of nonstop anxiety. 

I never told anyone this was happening. I didn’t know it then, but the anxiety led to some serious psychosomatic symptoms. I experienced shortness of breath, nausea, and constant headaches. I was either throwing up or making myself throw up 3-4 times a week so I could go home. Even through the MRIs and CT scans and acupuncture treatments, my answer to “How are you? How was your day at school?” was always “Good” followed by the scarfing down two bowls of rice to prove it. But how could I not be good when my mom was always sick and in pain? When she had so much to take care of? When I knew she was doing her best? 

So yeah, I had to be strong. I had to be independent. And in some ways, I guess I was resentful that I had to be so strong when Sam got to be so soft and could throw tantrums over not getting holographic Pokemon cards. Even still, no bully was going to make Sammy’s life anywhere close to as miserable as mine was. 

Yeah I know kung fu, and I know where you live.