Mean people suck. Nice people learn to deal.

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There are different opinions as to when exactly it is that our childhoods die. Some people believe it's when you lose your virginity. Some others believe it's when someone close to you dies. I have a different thought in the matter. When I was 9, my family moved from a rental home to the first house that my parents bought. It wasn't far, just a move from one part of the city to another, but I had spent 3 years adjusting to one neighborhood and was now going to have to make friends and learn to live in a new one. I was enrolled in G.A.T.E (Gifted & Talented Education) classes at the time and needed to take a bus across town to the only school that had them at the time. My mom had just had my first little sister the year before and I was learning to live with the fact that I was no longer the center of attention in our home anymore. When I started the fourth grade I had a really crappy teacher. Not that she was bad at her job, but (to make a long story short) she had a bad habit of playing favorites and I wasn't one of them. After doing well in classes over the previous 3 years, it was a jarring experience all around. The fact that I had to take a bus to a school outside of my neighborhood and the fact that my bus stop was only a half block up from where the local school was didn't help matters. Every day I would walk up to the corner to wait to be picked up. The kids that attended to local school would walk past me and the 2 other kids waiting and make snide remarks. You never want to be known as the kid who was too smart. Seeing that I got to be bussed out of the neighborhood made me a target. While I could handle the taunts and the dirty looks, it wasn't until Priscilla came along that I started hating standing out. One afternoon when I got off the bus, I noticed that a rather tall and developed girl and a couple of her friends were standing on the opposite corner from my stop. I only needed to walk up a few streets to the one that my house was on, but the distance seemed to grow as the days went by. Priscilla was the name of the big girl, although I hadn't yet figured that out. The bullying started slowly. For the first week, they simply followed me and cursed me out in Spanish. Perhaps they thought I didn't know what they were saying (I did. Pinche is not a hard word to learn.) but I was good at ignoring them even when they transitioned into English over the course of the following week. I had been instructed as a child that if someone is bugging you to just ignore them. That after time they will bore of the bullying if they get no response. "They WANT you to get upset," my mother warned me. "So don't give them that satisfaction." I felt as if I held up that part rather will. I walked faster, kept my gaze straight ahead and clutched my books tightly to my chest. I knew not to look down. I knew to keep my head high and just pretend as if I was walking home without my dreadful company. By the third week, Priscilla decided to escalate the situation. She'd not bored of taunting me as had others I had known in the past. Instead I think she bored of my not responding and decided to take it up a notch. The first day included pushing me hard, both palms flat against my back, trying to knock me down. I have good balance. It didn't work. The second day upgraded to having one of the other girls in the group push me while she threw rocks at my head. She wasn't a great aim, so most of them didn't land. The best shot was a rock that grazed my ear. It stung, but it just prodded me to break out of a fast walk and into a faster trot. To be continue.