5th grade, we're playing soccer during recess, a girl tries to steal the ball from me but ends up kicking my shin with her shin. She falls and starts crying, I ask if she's okay help her up and she goes to the person watching us and rats me out for kicking her.
I got after-school detention. What makes it worse is that this was close to the end of the school year, and for some reason they stopped the detention bus in May for some reason. The principal hadn't notified me, or my parents...so when detention ended I asked where the bus was, not there. I try to call home... no answer.. Fuck. I got a ride home from the principal. If you have any idea how much I hated this woman. I sat in the back seat and didn't even pretend to want to talk to that piece of shit.
I got detention for being bullied, the bullies did not. I got detention for not going to recess because I didn't want to get in a fight. I got detention for making sure I never got bullied again, worth it. I got detention for winning back MY OWN FUCKING POGS ("you're taking advantage of someone younger than you." He was my age, he was just a year behind because he was dumb).
I was given lunch-time detention once. I asked the autistic kid a question and he freaked the fuck out and I got in shit. I didn't know what autism was, I didn't understand it and didn't mean to do anything to offend him... I just asked why he liked Super Mario so much. He would spend his recesses and lunch periods with this toy jumping around and saying he was Mario. My idea was that if he stopped his Super Mario thing, the other kids would stop making fun of him. But turns out, his natural reaction was to assume I was being mean to him. So for 2 weeks, as some sort of lesson in tolerance, I spent every lunch hour with the special needs kids.....and the super fucking hot teacher. Since I wasn't autistic, she actually had someone to talk to, and when I explained to her what happened, she realized I didn't do anything malicious and spent our hours chatting with me (I guess talking to a normal 5th grader for one hour is heaven when you're dealing with special needs kids 8+ hours a day). By the end of it, I was sad to go. I actually got to know the kid and enjoyed his idea of funny (I can't explain it, but imagine the kid from Mercury Rising making a joke and laughing at it), I didn't have to eat in a crowded lunchroom full of loud kids who try to steal your food, I got to hang out and have fun talks with the hot teacher, she was definitely good at her job because in the 2 weeks I spent with her, she actually fucking listened to the problems, and was asking questions to keep me talking about how I'm feeling. Now if you ask a kid who's been betrayed by every teacher he's asked for help and sent back out to face his tormentors about his feelings you're going to get a tough answer... but she somehow got past the facade I had up and just allowed me to have my defenses down and actually talk to her, not scared of judgement.
I told her how sick I was of getting detention because 5 kids would gang up on me every time the recess supervisor wasn't looking. I can't just take a beating, I defended myself conservatively to get away from them and often tried to get the supervisor's attention, which resulted in him seeing me 'fight' the other kids, the other 5 kids' story was that I was attacking them, 1 vs 5, obviously the lone kid is lying! So I got detention after detention for being bullied. I told her how I was going to beat the shit out of all of them in a couple weeks (close to end of year, I don't care if I get expelled). She brought up some reasons why I shouldn't, but I told her that after all they put me through, all the detentions I got, the last 2 weeks were the best lunch hours I'd had all year because I hadn't been bullied. There was no way to talk me out of it. In the end it was the best detention I've ever had.
I beat the shit out of them 2 days after I was allowed back out during lunch when they started their usual routine. I jumped them once they got close enough, the leader of the pack got the first 3 punches and ran aside to let the others fight for him. I remember a blur of kids all around me trying to fight me, I remember there were 4 of them (aside from the leader who just talked shit about how I was done for). I made one kid bleed with the first punch I landed on him, dead on the nose, instant nose bleed, he's out, 3 left. The biggest of the bunch has my undivided attention, the smallest of the bunch jumps on my back, I flip him forward before he can fully grab on, he smashes onto the asphalt, I throw a blind kick and hit him square in the fucking face, he's out. There was just the big guy and a normal kid left, so we get into a brawl and a teacher comes around to end it. I was fucking exhausted and very emotional, and there were maybe 20 other kids watching the whole thing by the end, so I think it took 5 minutes for a teacher to realize what the commotion was about, but it felt like an hour. I definitely won the fight, and spent the rest of the year and the entire following school year bully-free. I wish the leader didn't bitch out, I really, really hoped to beat him a lesson. He never really did leave me alone, he didn't have a posse the following year, just a friend or two. He didn't learn his lesson, but he wasn't putting his hands on me, so until he did I wasn't going to risk getting detention for nothing.
