I woke from a strange dream last night. In the dream people who saw me try would to disguise their horror, but in their fascination they asked me how I got this way.
Clumps of grass, the people claimed, had grown thick across parts of my neck and face. Mushrooms had taken root across the back of my head. They said two hands had formed on both sides of my mouth, and a wood stick was lodged into my right eye socket.
I looked in a mirror and saw none of these features, but I knew what they were seeing. Since waking from that dream I’ve been thinking about it all day.
In grade school, on a school bus, one of the other kids for some reason had a bag of mushrooms. Not the drug kind, just foodstuff. Another kid had a couple of square pieces of AstroTurf. Someone sitting behind me grabbed both sides of my face and covered my mouth so my screaming couldn’t be heard, while the kid with the mushrooms rubbed them into my hair across the back of my head. A kid in front of me pressed the AstroTurf onto my face and scrubbed it against my skin. They were making fun of my shoes and calling me names when somebody took a broomstick and poked me in the eye with it.
It is the loudest and longest I remember ever crying as a child.
I don’t think I have ever told anyone how badly I was beaten on the school bus in Laos. My mother and I never spoke of it. Period. The subject never came up. It was she who brought the issue to the school principal, who must have implemented some kind of solution because the problem went away, but only after 2 very long weeks. That principal also escorted my mother and me to a medical facility, where an eye doctor checked to see if the broomstick left any splinters.
Being poked in the eye in particular was something I felt especially ashamed to have had happened to me. It was like being violated. But when I say I can still see the broomstick kid’s face I’m not sugar coating it. He came at me with a grin, as if he was about to swing a bat at a piñata and win a bunch of candy. His eyes zeroed in on one of mine, calculating as he took aim at it. Then, POKE. I can still feel the impact of the broomstick on my eyeball. As the stick came out of my eye socket I thought I heard a wet sound, like a suction cup being plucked off a tile surface. As hard as I was already crying I remember feeling panicked helplessness go into overdrive. My screaming and tears increased to a level I had not felt before and which I never would have thought possible. I remember thinking How much of this is in me?
The last time I thought of that school bus was when I signed up for Facebook, about 11 years ago. As one does after signing up for Facebook I looked up alumni groups for schools I attended, including the American School of Vientiane (ASV) in Laos, the school this bus was headed to when these incidents occurred. I looked for their names with the distant fear that they might still be looking for me, too.
I did not find them. I never knew the name of the kid who grabbed my face from behind, but I know the full name of the mushroom man (an American), and the first name of the AstroTurf dude (he was Thai). Broomstick kid’s name is lost on me.
On calmer days the mushroom man and Mr. AstroTurf would sit behind me, openly grousing about what a “faggot” and a “sissy” they had to sit near almost every single day. I don’t think I was hurt by the name calling. What got at me was how they just groaned and moaned for the entire duration of the bus rides about how they didn’t think I had a right to be there and they just could not handle being in a place with me in it. “I really don’t like this guy” was a frequently repeated refrain. One time two of them got up and stood in the aisle next to me. One of them pointed at my shoes and said “You see what I mean?” The other kid agreed. I don’t know what they had been talking about before.
It was like plans were being made for me, plans the horror and anger of which I could not even comprehend.
It’s making me very sad thinking about this again, but that sadness is not for me. It is for a child left behind a long time ago.
