In the upcoming book I’m writing with Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981), Kelly recalls some childhood trauma:
Sitting in the middle row of my Grade Two classroom, trying to be invisible. The cool kids sat in the back and the keeners in the front, and I was neither of those. For the thousandth time I stared blankly at the alphabet row above the blackboard, 26 squares, each with a capital and lower case letter, and a picture of something that started with that letter. Apple to zebra, except the ‘P’ was missing because Brian Castel stole it and drew a penis on the other side and the teacher caught him trying to sneak it back into place. School was torture for several reasons. I was the new kid, and on welfare, and the other kids never let me forget it. I had blotchy skin and stringy hair. It didn’t help that Dawne, a year behind me in school, was pretty while I was ugly, smart while I struggled. The fact that Dawne was also new and on welfare didn’t seem to register with anyone. The kids chose me as the weaker sister and aimed all their teasing and abuse my way, progressively worse each day.
I had mixed emotions as the recess bell rang. I liked to play tetherball, depending on who played that day. The game could take a nasty turn in a flash. By the time I got to the tetherball pole at the back of the playground, I could see most of my usual tormentors, including my sister, already assembled. I turned on my heel to escape, but too late; I’d been spotted. Uh-oh.
“Hey, Smelly Kelly, where’re you going?, said one of the girls from Grade Three. Most of the girls called me Smelly Kelly because I have a brown birthmark the size of a nickel on my ankle; the kids decided it looked like a plop of poo. “Don’t you want to play with us?”
The situation looked grim, but it would be worse to refuse. “Uh, yeah.” I shuffled up to the group and hoped they’d forget I was there.
Tetherball at my school was based on the pyramid system. There was one kid at the top, then two kids at the next level, then three at the next. No matter how many levels there were, I was predictably on the bottom. When it was my turn to play, I always had to battle the girl at the top of the pyramid, Marcie McCormack. She was two grades ahead of me, bulky and mean. Marcie bullied me the most, and tetherball afforded her another opportunity to humiliate me. She pounded that ball so it swung on its rope so fast it was impossible to hit back. All I could see was a white blur as I pathetically stabbed everywhere the ball wasn’t. Marcie was setting me up for her standard move, one I fell for every time. With her most vicious and powerful blow, she smashed the ball so it swung directly at my temple, knocking me to the ground.
I lay with one side of my face in the dirt, pebbles pressing into my cheek.
One of Marcie’s henchwomen bent over and poked me in the ribs to see if I was dead.
“That was a big mistake, Karen,” said a girl out of my view. “You just touched Smelly Kelly. Now you have fleas!”
“No way! Look!” Karen rolled up her sleeve and I knew what was there without looking. She had ‘SFP’ written in blue ink on her forearm, a practice that had spread thorough the school like wildfire. Super Flea Protection. With this indelible safeguard, Karen could touch me without receiving a flea infestation.
As the girls erupted in laughter, I saw Dawne with my one available eye, pointing at where my t-shirt had risen slightly.
“I’m telling Mum, I’m telling Mum, you’re not wearing an undershirt!”, said Dawne.
“Shut your face, Dawne,” I screamed.
“An undershirt?”, said Marcie. “Only little kids, and poor people wear undershirts!” The girls howled.
“I’m telling M…” Before Dawne could finish her threat, I lunged at her, grabbed her hair, and pulled her to the dirt. We wrestled and punched and scratched, making non-human screeches like racoons. The crowd egged us on, but I rolled off of Dawne when she started crying. I rose slowly, hoping the bell would ring. Someone pushed Marcie into me but I didn’t fall.
“You pushed me, Smelly Kelly,” said Marcie.
“No I didn’t. You pushed me.” I knew that was a mistake, but either way I was doomed. Marcie said nothing, a thin smile on her lips. With one hand she grabbed my hair, and with the other, the collar of my jacket. She swung me around in a circle a couple of times like the Olympic hammer throw and let go. I flew through the air, bounced in the dirt and rolled twice. The bell rang and the girls, including Dawne, giggled as they walked past me.
I thought my ordeal for the day was over. When I entered the school, covered in dirt and dust, Marcie jumped from behind a pillar and punched me with all her might in the shoulder. Just a regular recess.
I watched the hands of the wall clock slowly inch ahead the rest of the afternoon while Miss Lawson droned on about times tables and division. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn’t planning on multiplying or dividing anything when I was older; I turned my brain off so it wouldn’t get full of stuff I’d never need. I awoke from this dreamlike state when the bell rang and the floor squealed from 30 chairs sliding away from desks. Everyone talked at once, well, 29 children talked at once, chattering about their plans after school. Children grouped in twos and threes to walk home together, to hang out at each other’s houses until dinnertime, where moms made them hot chocolate and peanut butter cookies. There weren’t any moms making hot chocolate at my house. I held my spiral binder close to my chest and walked alone, hoping the kids would forget about picking on me for the rest of the day.
On the way home, I usually stayed off the main streets as much as possible, even though this made the walk longer. I thought no one knew I used a long alley past the school, but something whizzed close past my head. Did someone just throw a rock at me? A rock ambush wouldn’t be unusual. The next missile hit my cheek and rebounded to my feet. It wasn’t a rock, but a dog biscuit. A Milk Bone dog biscuit because I was a dog. A dog with fleas, if recess was any indication. As I examined the biscuit, a volley of ten or twenty biscuits bombarded me from behind a peeling wooden fence. And another volley. Not as painful as the rocks I often endured, but those biscuits were still hard enough to sting. The real sting, however, came from the barks and muffled laughter of several girls behind the fence. Dawne’s pink scrunchie, the one Mum bought her at Value Village but told her was new, bobbed above the fence’s top.
