When I was between 6-8, my single mother had a best friend who was also single and she had one daughter the same age as me. We'll call her Jessica. We were forced to hang out a lot together because our moms were always together. Jessica was a vicious bully and she used to slap me and kick me and call me terrible names using curse words that no kid that age should know. At one point she cut all the hair off my dolls and Barbies and then threatened to do the same to me if I didn't stop crying over it. I couldn't and she did as she promised, then went on to tell me if I told our parents it was her that she would kill me with the same scissors. I told my mom that I had cut my own hair and I was grounded for a few days. Then I tried telling my mom the truth, but I was so scared that Jessica would kill me that I retracted it as soon as I said it. My mom was always a firm believer in working out your own problems with other kids and I know she didn't understand that it was so bad because I would sugarcoat it and she thought I was just being a whiny tattletale (I was one a lot of the time normally with other kids). Plus this girl was a pathological liar and she could put on a sweet, innocent front that no parent could see past - even her own.

When I was 8 we went on a vacation together and the four of us shared a hotel room. One night Jessica and I were watching TV while our moms got ready to go out for the night and I had turned it to a show I liked. She wanted to watch something else and I tried to stand up to her by telling her no. My mom walked back into the room right as Jessica punched me in the face and she had to pull her off me because she was yelling horrible things at me and trying to beat the shit out of me. I think it all clicked for my mom in that moment because I have never heard her scream at another person's child in all my life. When my mom's friend confronted my mom about it she told my mom that I was a liar, that Jessica had never done anything wrong, and that my mom needed to make me apologize for everything. My mom cut the vacation short and we went home and she never spoke to that woman again. It took me years to ever make friends my age again and I still have issues with it! My mom must have learned her lesson too because she took every complaint I made about other kids really seriously after that. Even almost 30 years later she still apologizes for not protecting me better.