The Tough Kid
Apr. 25th, 2004 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanI originally posted this as a comment in somebody else's LJ, but I just decided to recycle it here.
Cause I'm lazy like that.
When I was in grade school, the school I went to had grades K to 8. The eighth-graders all hung out together in one corner of the schoolyard at lunch and recess - they were all the mean kids. It was like contest to see who could dick with the younger kids the most. Going into class was like undergoing one of those Klingon rites of passage.
One summer a new family moved into one of the houses in my laneway. They had something like 6 or 7 kids, and we used to whisper that the parents were brother and sister because there was something wrong with all of them. A couple were so severely mentally and physically handicapped that they never left the house. The oldest daughter was a dwarf. The middle daughter was around our age, and although she was a bit slow and had some physical problems, she was otherwise average. We did the "make friends with the new kid" thing, introduced her to the other friendly children, warned her away from the means ones, and otherwise took her under our collective wing. We didn't realize it at the time, but our kindness had been noticed by her older sister.
First day of school and we walk to school with our new friend. Her older sister was an eighth-grader that year and so does not deign to walk with the children. We get to the Gauntlet at the same time she does, so we witness what happens from the beginning. The other eighth-graders, the professional assholes, see their new classmate, see her shortened limbs, and en masse they move in for the kill.
She beat the everloving crap out of every last one of them.
It was pure carnage. The group of us and an ever-expanding circle of the other younger kids stood with our mouths open and watched her take down boy after boy who were two to three times her size and leave them literally crying on the grass. The boys would gang up into clusters of three and four and try to grab her and she would punch, bite, kick, and headbutt them into submission. Her younger sister kept looking around mystified at us and our hanging jaws and saying, "What?"
It was a day of a pivotal power shift in the school yard. The mean kids still hung around in clusters and tortured the younger kids. But now they answered to a higher master. When the new Tough Kid in town comanded, they went and did as she bid them. When new Mean Kids came from other schools they were initiated into their proper role and status in the schoolyard the same way the others had been.
And none of them ever raised another finger to us. Not even once.
Cause I'm lazy like that.
When I was in grade school, the school I went to had grades K to 8. The eighth-graders all hung out together in one corner of the schoolyard at lunch and recess - they were all the mean kids. It was like contest to see who could dick with the younger kids the most. Going into class was like undergoing one of those Klingon rites of passage.
One summer a new family moved into one of the houses in my laneway. They had something like 6 or 7 kids, and we used to whisper that the parents were brother and sister because there was something wrong with all of them. A couple were so severely mentally and physically handicapped that they never left the house. The oldest daughter was a dwarf. The middle daughter was around our age, and although she was a bit slow and had some physical problems, she was otherwise average. We did the "make friends with the new kid" thing, introduced her to the other friendly children, warned her away from the means ones, and otherwise took her under our collective wing. We didn't realize it at the time, but our kindness had been noticed by her older sister.
First day of school and we walk to school with our new friend. Her older sister was an eighth-grader that year and so does not deign to walk with the children. We get to the Gauntlet at the same time she does, so we witness what happens from the beginning. The other eighth-graders, the professional assholes, see their new classmate, see her shortened limbs, and en masse they move in for the kill.
She beat the everloving crap out of every last one of them.
It was pure carnage. The group of us and an ever-expanding circle of the other younger kids stood with our mouths open and watched her take down boy after boy who were two to three times her size and leave them literally crying on the grass. The boys would gang up into clusters of three and four and try to grab her and she would punch, bite, kick, and headbutt them into submission. Her younger sister kept looking around mystified at us and our hanging jaws and saying, "What?"
It was a day of a pivotal power shift in the school yard. The mean kids still hung around in clusters and tortured the younger kids. But now they answered to a higher master. When the new Tough Kid in town comanded, they went and did as she bid them. When new Mean Kids came from other schools they were initiated into their proper role and status in the schoolyard the same way the others had been.
And none of them ever raised another finger to us. Not even once.