I Befriended My Fifth Grade Bully

Photo by Ilayza Macayan on Unsplash

I befriended the fifth-grade bully. I had no choice. I was short. A shrimp. A shrimp with an unusually small frame. A small frame and a small pretty face. A girly face. My girly face would eventually pay off dividends by the time I got to high school and college. But as a fifth grader my girly face did me no justice and worked against me. The bully was a blobbish blob of a kid. He was twice my height. He was a towering blob of a frame.

I decided to pull a “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” strategy (long before I knew what the “The Art of War” was all about). When my bully would flick my head and call me names, I would just ignore it. Instead, I would respond to every head flick with a smile. Every time he would take my trapper keeper from my desk and throw it to the ground (papers going everywhere) instead of reacting to the annoyance I would ask him if he wanted to ride bikes after school. Even if he would respond with a “why would I want to hang out with a girly girl like you.” I would ignore his rebuff. I took an interest in things the bully liked. I even complimented him on his hand me down Empire Strikes Back lunch box. My response to his constant teasing threw him off. My bully was not sharp enough to pick up on what I was doing. Eventually it worked. My bully eventually stopped picking on me. He even stopped picking on some of the other kids in class. We became friends. We hung out after school. He even invited me over his house. I got to see first-hand how difficult his life was living as a latch key kid raised by a single dad. A single dad who was never home. An eleven year old kid never getting to know his mother. His mother skipped out on his dad when he was a toddler. I even met his older brother. His older brother was autistic and went to a school for kids with special needs. Sometimes his brother would have tantrums while I was over the house playing Atari. It was scary. I felt horrible for my friend, the bully. One time his brother had such a violent tantrum that we had to get help from the neighbor across the street.

The bully saw his noisy thinking. Noisy insecure thinking was his growing edge. Then something clicked inside of him. His inner wisdom broke through the noise of this thinking. Maybe it took someone like me to ignore his obnoxious behavior. Maybe it took someone like me to see his light. To see him as a kid worthy of being liked and cared for. His inner wisdom kicked in and he stopped believing the stories he was telling himself (about himself). Stories his mind was making up. Stories about having to constantly prove himself by picking on kids smaller than him.

The bully and I were good friends through high school. We lost touch soon after our senior year. Years later I bumped into an old classmate of mine who told me that the famous fifth grade bully is happily married with two kids and runs a successful IT consulting firm.