I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed — a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

Caleb was Ben’s perfect foil, at least in my literature-obsessed brain. Both boys were brilliant, but Caleb was as cruel as Ben was virtuous. In English class, Caleb made frequent and obscene references to the nature of my relationship with our teacher. He criticized me during discussions. And I’d often catch him watching me with a malicious look that seemed to say: You’d better watch out, little girl.

“My prank is called the Plague of ’98,” Caleb continued. “We’re going to buy 10,000 grasshoppers and release them in the school.”

Pathetically, our high school mascot was the grasshopper.

“And how are we supposed to pay for 10,000 grasshoppers?” somebody asked.

“That’s easy,” Caleb said, then looked straight at me. “We’ll use the money from Ben’s memorial fund.”

I don’t remember how I removed myself from the front of the room. But the second I made it to safety, I started sobbing. I couldn’t stop. I cried through my free period, skipped my physics class, and was finally given permission to leave school early.

Before I left, a teacher made Caleb stand face-to-face with me in the school lobby.

“Sorry about what I said.” Caleb’s face was impassive. He might as well have been talking to a wall.

“OK,” I said, and walked away. But it was not OK. I felt furious. I felt bullied.

Of course, it’s not easy to define bullying. Look at the controversy over recent revelations about Mitt Romney’s high school behavior. What might be school-age antics to one person is violent assault to another.

So did Caleb’s treatment toward me constitute actual bullying? Even at the time, I feared I was overreacting. But as an adult, I can see that his aggressive, leering behavior in the classroom was a subtle kind of sexual harassment, and his outrageous comment about a boyfriend I was still mourning – a blow delivered in front of 120 classmates — felt like the culmination of a long, systematic campaign to wound the parts of my identity that mattered most.

Caleb and I didn’t speak after that debacle. Graduation came and went. I left for college, then moved to New York and became a journalist. I began writing a novel inspired by Ben’s death, and as I wrote, I thought about Caleb. Neither he nor I were the social crème de la crème of our school. We were both outcasts of a certain kind. In another world, we would have been united against more popular forces, not against each other. But instead, we were nemeses. Underdog fighting underdog became a central theme in my book.

As it turned out, Caleb had been thinking about me, too. A few years later, I received the following email:

Hi Jenny: This is Caleb — you may remember me, we went to school together for about ten years. I believe we may have played Orpheus and Persephone in Sue Jagger’s fourth grade production of the Orphic Tragedy. I have my own condo in Foggy Bottom and a job in the city, (where) I will be working for the immediate future. I also have my own car. Anyway, I hope everything is going well and look forward to hearing back from you soon! Caleb

The first thing I thought was: Of course I remember you. You made fun of my dead boyfriend in front of the entire senior class. The second thing was: I did not play Persephone in Sue Jagger’s fourth grade.

I read the note over and over, wondering why Caleb’s email sounded like he was proposing marriage in 16th-century Europe. “I have a fantastic job in the mud-pie-makers guild and can offer you five ducks and one cow,” it seemed to say.

But I couldn’t help myself: I wrote back immediately. I had to see what this was all about.

As it turns out, Caleb wanted to take me on a date. This seemed like a practical joke — a long-delayed maraschino cherry of meanness to drop on me, as if his mission hadn’t been completed. But my curiosity was too great. I said yes.

The day before our date, I received a lengthy, apologetic email from Caleb.

Jenny: I am embarrassed to say I was unable to get a prime time table at any of my favorite places — for instance Eric Ripert’s WestEnd Bistro. However, I have made alternative reservations for 8:30 at a few very viable locations.

Caleb proceeded to list restaurants and the qualifications of each, as if he were some Chamber of Commerce lackey: At Sabores, he wrote, “the dishes are scrumptious thanks to the mastery of Executive Chef Daniel Amaya. The atmosphere is hip and vibrant YET subdued and lounge-like.” At Matisse, he told me, “one of Washington’s foremost wine experts has combined the culinary and visual arts to complete an ambiance of dining bliss.” And finally, the email concluded, “A cheesy but perennial default favorite: Benihana. I have gotten a big kick out of the sense of community + belonging I get from dining with others (I come from a broken home).”

Talk about bizarre. The Caleb who was apparently trying to date me was so wildly different than the villain I’d created in my mind. He seemed less mean than awkward. Almost childlike.

My best friend from high school sent me a message: “Jenny, this is way too weird. will you call me before you go and when you get home?”

I went to meet Caleb, fully prepared to be stood up. I had chosen the “hip and vibrant YET subdued and lounge-like” Sabores, and picked a table in a well-lit part of the restaurant. Caleb arrived and proceeded to order us a ridiculous amount of food and ply me with drinks. I told him I was driving and had one cocktail. We had a stilted conversation over dinner, but I barely had the brain space to listen to him. I just kept wondering: What am I doing here? Does Caleb even remember what he said to me senior year? I didn’t bring it up, and neither did he. Instead, he flattered me incessantly, and I became so uncomfortable that I left early. I arrived home to find the following email:

Jenny: Thank you again for meeting me for dinner tonight. Seeing how as I had a crush on you since like fourth grade, it was sort of a dream come true! You have grown up to be a truly impressive woman and I hope we can stay in touch! Caleb

And there it was. An explanation.

All this time I thought he was a bully, but he was really a misguided kid, with an inability to read social cues.

When I was in the second grade and a boy made fun of me one day, my teacher said he was only doing it because he had a crush. Later, in fourth grade, it was Ben who had a crush on me, one that took me years to reciprocate, a fact about which I still harbored tremendous guilt.

Now, I felt like Caleb was attempting to shove himself into Ben’s role. He offered a hot-air balloon ride, a dinner cruise and, ironically, a pilgrimage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave. But I didn’t want Caleb, a substitute for the boy I’d lost. I thought about all the experiences Ben and I had never shared, and I felt guilty all over again. I’d been so slow to see Ben for who he was, to figure out how good he would be in my life.

In the end, Caleb made a kind of confession — an acknowledgment that we’d been wrong about each other. In an email, he wrote:

With regard to the fourth grade Orphic Tragedy, I realize now that it was Rebecca Marshall — not you — who played Persephone to my Orpheus. I guess the mind (heart?) has a way of rewriting the past as it wishes it were!

I felt for Caleb. I understood his compulsion to strive after something he wanted so badly but would never have, because I felt the same way. But I also knew that the past couldn’t be rewritten or even revised. The last line of “The Great Gatsby” describes the current carrying ships ceaselessly into the past, but I wouldn’t let Caleb drag me back into those old struggles and adolescent longings.

I was forging ahead.

Bullying, unfortunately, was a part of the warp and weave of my childhood. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the ’70s, where my Asian family was the only color in a sea of Scandinavians. When I was in second grade, a crew-cutted boy shoved me against some metal monkey bars, cracking the back of my head open.

But the most difficult time came when I entered junior high. I was underweight, bookish, bespectacled. Gym class was a convergence of all my anxieties. The other girls were tall with pretty hair that feathered and training bras, while I had no breasts and not even an undershirt for camouflage underneath the one-piece uniforms that looked like a baby’s onesie.

Mary was the instigator. She was not particularly popular or athletic. She had that kind of genericism that I would have killed for — she was just like everybody else.

One day in the locker room, Mary leapt out in front of me and started to sing, “ching-ching-a-ling” while doing some kind of interpretive dance that involved pulling the lids of her eyes into slits. Her friend Terry (also not her real name) echoed her taunts. I had a feeling this was not the end of it — and it wasn’t.

My Asian parents valued nonconfrontation over everything. When I vaguely hinted at this assault that waited for me daily (or, at least as it seemed at the time), they suggested I stay quiet and concentrate on my schoolwork. Some people didn’t know how to deal with minorities, they said. One day, this would pass, and I would leave Hibbing behind for an Ivy League school, and everything would be all right. That might have been good advice for the long term, but in the meantime, the ching-ching-a-ling routine continued, my only solace being that it often fell flat.

And then one day, two “tough” girls brought the whole thing to an end. They spoke quietly to Mary and Terry, who then approached me, ashy-faced, and each muttered, “I’m sorry, I won’t ever do it again.”

Now in my 40s, enter the brave new world of Facebook. Like many, I receive requests from classmates I barely knew — including this: Mary the Bully wants to be friends! I deleted the request and didn’t think about it. But after a few months, another request would appear. Then another.

It occurred to me that maybe Mary had read one of my novels, including one, in which a Korean American girl growing up in Minnesota — surprise, surprise — suffers through a “ching-ching-a-ling” song (and in the novel, at least, the protagonist manages to fight back). There was a mention of my novel in People, and classmates were definitely reading it. But while people like my piano teacher wrote tearful letters (“I had no idea this was going on”), the apologies I thought I might receive never arrived. The closest thing to an apology: “I didn’t know why you let it bother you so much, people were just kidding.”

With Mary’s enthusiastic friending — she also went to the trouble to find and join my Facebook author page — I thought, maybe the novel had made her more reflective, and now as adults it would be possible to talk about what happened. I accepted her friend request, only to discover she just liked to write things about Sarah Palin on my wall. But after more time passed, I thought this was a unique opportunity to do something I never had the courage to do when I was younger. I wanted to try one last time to understand my bully.

Mary lives in Oregon now and is married with an assortment of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. She agreed to talk with me, and we had an hour-long conversation on Skype.

When I asked her why she had tormented me for so long in junior high, she said she didn’t remember the specific incident nor its duration. In a rush, she told me she had “blacked out” most memories of junior high because her parents had gotten divorced and she was having a hard time; therefore, she didn’t have any memories of me, specifically. In fact, she went on, she was bullied: Right before entering junior high, she’d moved among the town’s three elementary schools where “people were mean” to her, particularly at her last elementary school, where “the bitches” made her life miserable.  She added that she had older brothers who beat her up all the time. At one point, I almost wanted to say plaintively, “But what about my being bullied?”

The more I tried to pin her down about the “ching-ching-a-ling” routine, though, the more she sought cover.

“I’m a good person, I’m compassionate,” she said. She never came out and said, “I didn’t do it,” or “You’re crazy.” Instead, she said, “I’m not a racist.” And, “I don’t see color.” She went on to postulate that if she did do that routine, it wasn’t an expression of racism, it was more out of a desperate need to get laughs. “And it was at your expense,” she admitted. “I tried to be nice to all these other girls and they weren’t nice back to me. All I wanted to do was fit in.” She started crying. She apologized. I suggested she didn’t need to apologize for something she can’t remember doing.  We said goodbye. Cordially, I thought.

There is a quote attributed to Plato and/or Philo of Alexandria — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” — that is probably anachronistic to both, but still useful. Hearing about what was going on in Mary’s life at the time made me open to the possibility that she wasn’t motivated by racism, or, at least, that wasn’t the primary motivation. I believed her: She was desperate to get laughs from our peers, and my being Asian conveniently sat right in front of her, and my 85-pound weakling demeanor made it all the more attractive.

But that’s certainly not how the seventh-grade me perceived it. It has been disturbing to read that a government study found that Asian Americans endure the most bullying in school of all ethnic groups: 54 percent of Asian American teens compared with 38 percent of blacks, 34 percent of Latinos, 31 percent of whites. This study was released last October, the same month U.S. Army Pvt. Danny Chen was dragged from his bed on a base in Afghanistan and forced to crawl on the ground while his fellow soldiers threw rocks at him while yelling ethnic slurs.

Hours later, Danny Chen shot himself. His journal read, “Everyone here jokingly makes fun of me for being Asian.”

One lingering effect of this bullying was that for years afterward, I disavowed all things Asian that could in any way be connected to me; I even turned away from the Seoul Olympics, refusing to watch any non-event footage, puzzling my college boyfriend who thought I might at least want to watch a cultural spectacle with him. Living in New York and meeting other Korean and Asian American friends who did not deny or avoid their ethnicity helped me get over my self-loathing, as did a year I spent living in Asia.

But even now, as a fairly composed adult, when I read about bullying, particularly racial bullying, I am back in seventh grade with Mary, while she pleads amnesia, telling me: “Honestly, my first memories of you aren’t until high school.”

The day after we spoke, Mary further muddied the water by sending me a long email that was at once apologetic, evasive, ambiguous, contradictory, ashamed, conciliatory:

Again, I can only say that if I did do those things you say I did, I am truly sorry. I was a dumb, insecure preteen who was trying to fit in and in doing so I hurt you, and I am very sorry. I cannot change the past, or your memory of what may or may not have happened.

Followed by,

What I am equally ashamed about is that during the course of that call, my 26 year old daughter was in the other room listening to the entire conversation. Imagine the shame of having your child hear these terrible accusations, of which, she does not believe. Thank goodness.

Then she closed with this:

Its’ [sic] not always about you being Asian. You need to understand that the world is not against you because your [sic] Asian…I will continue to be the woman I am, I am kind, considerate, caring, compassionate & loving. I am a good mother and grandmother. I raised my children to be compassionate, caring and good stewards of our environment.

It occurred to me that she could indeed be a good steward of the environment and still be the girl who made my life a living hell in junior high. Don’t we all recast our memories to bolster the stories we tell ourselves, about who we are? My friend who also grew up Asian in the Midwest had an unforgettable experience of having her face slammed into a brick wall, breaking a bunch of her teeth, but the perpetrator now tells people, oh, no, she was trying to help by putting a hand on her back to stop her face from hitting the wall. Perhaps she honestly believes it. Mary told me many times she is not a racist but that Terry, well, she never liked minorities too much; what was her point revealing that? I could whine that what I hoped would be a spiritual exercise ended up an unproductive mobius-loop meditation on the fungibility of memory.

Another possibility, however, is that while that experience colored my life, it wasn’t a big deal to her, maybe it even fell in the category of affectionate “teasing” and was thus unworthy of remembering; it has been 30 years. Another friend says she receives Facebook friend requests all the time from mean girls who singled her out; clearly, to them, their behavior was not a big deal. That’s the insidious underside to this: What may be unremarkable, forgettable, deniable (“I was just joking!”) for one person can cause wounds that never fully heal in another.

There was a girl, let’s call her Heather, who came to our high school senior year. She, like me, was bookish and the subject of unkind remarks about her looks, and, as we were all graduating in a few months, no one bothered to befriend her. At least she was brilliant in physics class, and I presumed in a few short months she’d be out and on to some great career as a rocket scientist.

She came to a book signing I had in Minneapolis, and at first I didn’t recognize her. She was disheveled, with at least three equally disheveled children in tow. We had a short, uncomfortable chat where she informed me she was a single mother on welfare (and possibly drugs?). Right before she left, she asked, in a voice full of pain: “How did you do it? How did you get past it?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was lucky?  The most damaging part of being bullied is the awful feeling of being alone. Maybe what saved me was that I wasn’t alone. In seventh grade I had the tough girls who stood up for me. By high school, I had teachers, friends and writing to carry me through. Writing nonfiction helped me figure out the world, fiction allowed me to revisit these memories, examine them as an outside observer, and to alchemize them into art, something I was proud to own. My earliest novels were young adult and middle grade novels, set in junior high and high school, and perhaps they were a message-in-a-bottle to the next generation of kids: You are not alone.

Ironically, while I was reading Mary’s long, conflicted, seemingly heartfelt note to me, she was composing a different kind of screed on Facebook — one that I was blocked from, but calling out an “Asian” from school, prompting a few helpful classmates to forward it to me. Her blacked-out memories of me apparently had been miraculously revived:

I’m tired and weary of people making everything about their race. Guess what, if you perceive people as mean to you solely due to your race, maybe they just don’t like you as a person? Perhaps they don’t give a rats [sic] ass what your race is…maybe your [sic] just a bitch, with a giant chip on your shoulder!!

At least, I don’t have to worry about defriending her on Facebook again. Maybe Judy was right. This was a can of worms I might have been better to leave alone.

Each morning of seventh grade I took the bus to school, and each morning I was bullied by a girl I’ll call Jane.

“Ew — don’t you wash your hair?” Jane shouted at me from two rows back as her sidekick Kim laughed. I did wash my hair, but apparently once a week was not enough. And I wasn’t exactly the most fashion-conscious kid. In fact, I was pretty much fashion unconscious — to the point where I could have used some smelling salts and a personal shopper. I thought sitting behind the bus driver would protect me. Instead, he just turned up the volume on the Eagles. (Years before Noriega was tortured by rock ‘n’ roll music, so was I.) This went on all through seventh grade. That year, I pretended to be sick so often that I’m surprised my parents didn’t whisk me to the local hospital.

But eighth grade would be different! I waited for the bus on the first day of school wearing a maroon skirt and polyester beige shirt printed with cowboy hats and horses. I looked great! But as soon as I boarded the bus, Jane and Kim started to neigh. It was clear that eighth grade was going to be just like seventh — only with bigger breasts.

Even though it’s been more than three decades since I rode that bus to middle school, I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. My daughter, Lizzie, recently started seventh grade and I see my old social awkwardness reflected in her. Although she’s met her share of bullies in previous years, middle schools girls are different. They take bullying to new highs (and lows). There’s overt cruelty, shunning someone like an excommunicated Amish, and the kind of mind games that would make Machiavelli cringe. Toss technology in with their newfound freedom and independence and it’s a wicked brew. It makes the kindergarten threat of “You can’t come to my birthday party!” seem charming.

But there’s an added challenge with Lizzie in middle school. I’ve brought my past to her school experience. I have to constantly remind myself that she’s not me and that she handles mean girls differently than I did — which was basically to sink into myself. She attends a school with a no-bullying policy that has teachers who help kids work though social dynamics. (At my school, they practically taught classes in bullying.) Lizzie feels safe telling someone they made her feel bad. And she also feels comfortable — for now, anyway — talking to her dad and me about being excluded. But when a girl rips Lizzie’s poetry out of her notebook or sends a vicious email, uninviting her from a much anticipated group outing, I’m right back on that school bus.

One day, my husband gently suggested I try to find Jane. Maybe it would help ease my own pain and prevent me from imposing my own past on my daughter’s. Actually, I did talk to Jane about it one time — in eleventh grade. I had bumped into her at a Catholic school I briefly attended. As we shared a cigarette behind a bus during recess, away from the nuns’ prying eyes, I inquired why. She studied the ground and flicked an ash. She didn’t answer, but looked embarrassed. A bell rang and we went back to class, matter dropped.

Thirty-five years later, I have a family and a profession that I love. I’m happy, healthy and (most of the time, anyway) well-adjusted. I have wonderful friends. Still, when I looked Jane up on Facebook and sent her a note, I reverted back to my old teenage self, shyly suggesting that I was sure she wouldn’t remember me, but could I ask her a few questions.

An hour later, I heard back. I was right. She didn’t remember me, but said she would love to hear more. I responded that I’d hated middle school and now that my daughter was that age, I was sifting through memories and trying to sort the then versus now and see how it all fit together. I asked if she remembered the bus ride to junior high school. I was honestly curious if she had any recollection of it. Middle schoolers assume they’re living under a giant klieg light and that everyone is watching their every move. But while she didn’t remember me — she definitely recalled being cruel.

“Oh yes, I was the mean girl,” she wrote. “No doubt. When we shared the cigarette (I can’t believe you remember that!), I’m hoping I was embarrassed and was on my way to changing. But I did change — when I went to college and met really mean girls.”

When I asked Jane why she’d been like that, she said she thought it came down to three reasons. She’d felt an enormous sense of entitlement. “My mom put me up on a pedestal and I was told I was special, so I acted special and better than others.” She’d come from a family of huge personalities and, as she put it, “I was an attention whore — positive or negative.” And it turned out she’d been bullied herself in fifth grade. “My bully was brutal and the police had to get involved. That kid took a lot from me emotionally, physically and materially. He actually ended up much later going to prison for murder. And I know what you’re thinking — if I was bullied, why would I become one? Because if I was mean first then others would be afraid of me, not the other way around.”

“I just wish I’d known back in middle school what I know now, but we both know that’s not how life works. I’m sorry I made fun of you and your hair and made the bus ride a nightmare. I’m sure today we’d both enjoy each other’s company — well, I hope you’d like me!”

So what about me — why hadn’t I stood up to Jane in junior high? I didn’t have a “Bully me!” sign taped to the back of my polyester horse-printed shirt, but I might as well have. Because we’d moved so many times, I was shy and quiet. And shyness was a social liability like corrective shoes, headgear or a love of fantasy in a school that seemed to reward the extroverts and popular kids who liked things like football and cheerleading. I became a passive victim, guzzling a bully-me cocktail: mix together equal parts low self-esteem and social awkwardness with a dash of desperation and stir.

With Lizzie, it’s different. We talk about many things that I never did with my parents as a kid. I may have passed my shyness on to Lizzie, like a family heirloom, but she seems to feel more comfortable in her skin than I did as a middle schooler, even with her slightly dyslexic reading of social cues. I know I can’t buffer her from every mean girl and from every disappointment, as much as I’d love to do so, but I’ve found discussing with her about how I was bullied seems to help keep the dialogue going. When I told her I contacted Jane, she seemed surprised. “The bus bully?” she asked. I told Lizzie I wished I’d said something to her a long time ago. Lizzie nodded.

Jane now has a 15-year-old daughter and so she is extremely cognizant of bullying and its effects. “I’m working very hard at teaching her to not be critical and to be accepting of others who are different but she gets frustrated with me.” In fact, she later shared our conversation with her daughter, admitting to her own daughter that she’d been a mean girl all those years ago. She wrote that the revelation left her daughter speechless.

And, just like that, more than 30 years after Jane had made me last cry, she did it again.

Manipulation formed the heart of our relationship. Recently, I found an entry in my middle school diary: “Dear Journal, Guess what! Valerie Jones, the biggest nerd in school, has an uncle who owns a dance/dinner club. For her birthday, he’s letting her rent it and invite 100 friends! Since she has no friends, I get to make the invitation list! This is gonna be great!” (The party never took place.)

Valerie was naive and mild-mannered, more comfortable around adults than those her own age, and I enjoyed mocking her innocence. I invited her to join the “Pen 15 Club,” which involved writing the word “PENIS” on her hand in permanent marker. She was the only person who fell for it. Later, Valerie’s teacher pulled me into the hall. “How would you feel if I wrote ‘penis’ on your hand?” she asked me. Frankly, I’d be confused. Why would a grown woman write “penis” on my hand?

But Valerie wasn’t my only victim. Julia Ryan was pretty, blond and flirtatious; the boys loved her. Her house was across the street from mine, so we were close, but our relationship ran hot and cold. One big fight and, poof — we hated each other for the entire school year. But while she simply ignored me, I schemed up ways to humiliate her and bring others onto my side. I spread rumors. I kicked the back of her chair during band practice. I slammed her head against a locker in the hallway. One afternoon, on the bus home from school, I passed an empty plastic jar around and asked everyone to spit in it. Then, as the bus flew over bumps, I crept up behind Julia and poured the contents over her head.

Stories about bullying in grade school almost always appear from the perspective of the persecuted, and with good reason: It’s hard to admit you were once a total jerk. But what these pieces rarely talk about is how bullying someone else can haunt you, the persecutor. Eighteen years after it took place, I still wanted to know: How much damage did I inflict? And why did I do it in the first place?

Kids bully for many reasons. Sometimes they’re mirroring the aggressive behavior they see in their parents. And sometimes they’re going through problems at home, like divorce or financial issues. But I grew up in a traditional, “Leave It to Beaver”-style family, unmarred by domestic drama. Instead, my motivation derived from something just as ordinary: tremendous insecurity.

At 12 years old, I was tall and loud, with braces, acne and thin hair. Once, at a sleepover in seventh grade, I stumbled upon a notebook in which the host and others had graded every girl in our class on personality and attractiveness. I got a seven in personality — and a three in looks.

Another excerpt from my diary, just weeks after the entry about Valerie, read, “I’m constantly worrying about homework and looks and popularity and guys and grades and teachers and abilities and everything imaginable. I get so depressed sometimes. I feel like no one cares about me. They all just care about themselves.”

I thought I was the only person in the world who felt this way. It never occurred to me that the people I was picking on were probably thinking the same thing about themselves — as a result of my bullying. In fact, I never considered my victims’ feelings or private lives at all. They could’ve been stabbing voodoo dolls of my likeness nightly, for all I knew or cared. My experience was all that mattered.

In an effort to understand what could’ve possibly made me so self-absorbed as a kid, I called up Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.”

“Middle schoolers have epic empathy fail,” she explained. “It’s not because they’re bad people. There are plenty of bullies who grow up and realize the errors of their ways, but they need a level of self-reflection and accountability that not everyone has.”

At some point, around eighth or ninth grade, I stopped bullying. Instead, I fell in with a crowd of thespians who delighted in my brazenness. Now, at 30, the pain and confusion of middle school seem lifetimes away. But still, I couldn’t shake the guilt. So I set out to do something most bullies never do, especially not 18 years after the fact: apologize.

I reached out to Julia and Valerie on Facebook, keeping in mind how touchy this subject could be. No one likes to open old wounds, and I didn’t know these girls anymore or have any idea how they’d respond. The thought of them fearing or hating me all over again almost made me slam my laptop shut and scrap the whole thing.

Julia and I had made up in seventh grade and were already Facebook friends, so I kept my email casual: “I remember giving you a really hard time in sixth grade. I think it’s safe to say I bullied you. Do you have any memories of this?” I recalled the incident with the jar of spit on the bus. “I’d like to officially apologize. I’m really glad we were able to reconcile in seventh grade.”

It took Julia six days to respond, during which my mind ran amok: What if I touched a nerve, and she hates me now? What if she was so traumatized, she can’t bear to recall those memories? Am I still a horrible person?

As it turns out she was just busy and found my email hilarious: “I laughed out loud when I read this message!” she wrote. “So funny to think about childhood memories but, yes, we were really mean to one another at times.”

We? That was generous. I’m pretty sure I was the instigator 99 percent of the time. Julia offered up a different memory on the bus that involved me pressuring another kid into shoving her. “I’m sure my mom remembers that moment too because [when I got home] I was ready to go nuts,” she wrote. But she didn’t show a hint of bitterness or resentment in her words, and our exchange quickly evolved into did-you-hear-that-so-and-so-got-married pleasantry.

My interaction with Valerie, on the other hand, was more formal. We’d never become friends and I hadn’t seen her since high school. “I want to apologize for being so mean to you during our school days,” I wrote. “It’s only been through looking back as an adult that I realize I was a bully. I remember saying things to you and doing things that were cruel, and I wish I could take them all back. You never did a single thing to deserve being treated that way.”

She responded to my message immediately, with a friend request and written reply that read a bit like a form letter. “I hold no ill will towards you, or anyone else, for the things that were said or done to me during our school years,” she wrote. “All is forgiven.”

I asked to apologize verbally, so we set up a time to talk on the phone a week later — her in Des Moines, where she works as a daycare teacher, and me in Minneapolis, where I’m a magazine editor at a regional publishing company. My heart thudded as I dialed her number. I imagined her breaking down and sobbing, saying that I’d made her life hell and she’d needed years of reparative therapy. Or maybe she’d been waiting for this moment and was finally going to let me have it, barraging me with a string of curse words. Or, as one of my friends had joked, I was on the top of her “To Kill” list and this was my last chance to lift the death sentence.

She answered the phone, and we chatted amicably for a few minutes about our jobs and the schoolmates we’d kept in touch with over the years. Eventually, we ran out of things to say and there was an awkward pause as we both waited for me to bring up the reason for the phone call. I took a breath. “Valerie, do you remember me bullying you in middle school?”

“I really don’t,” she replied, her voice confident and mature. “I remember that things happened. I remember that things were probably said. But, however many years later, you just have to come to a point where you let it go.”

Valerie couldn’t (or perhaps chose not to) recall any interactions with me in school, but apparently I wasn’t her worst persecutor. She told me that a guy named Andy used to berate her daily during 10th grade choir class, whispering things like, “You suck” and “I hate you” across his music stand.

“Choir was my favorite part of the day, and it started affecting my love for music,” she said. “The choir director finally noticed and talked to the assistant principal, and Andy stopped for a little bit, but then he started back up again during junior year.”

Andy was an exception — the bulk of her bullying came from other girls, like me. “I was that kid that people picked on, for whatever reason,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you why specifically. In that environment, you’ve got the kids who are the mean ones or the bullies, and then you’ve got the ones who are easy targets. And I guess I was an easy target.”

Adults had told her to ignore her bullies and they’d go away, so she never stood up for herself. This tactic didn’t help. “Those words and the things that people said were very hurtful, you know?” she said. “As much as people can say, ‘Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ well, I don’t really find that to be true. Now that years have passed, and I’ve gotten over it, I think that those kinds of things can have an effect on a person, even years later. I think it probably made me a stronger person.

As we neared the end of our phone call, I apologized again and told her, half-jokingly, that I was glad to hear I hadn’t ruined her life.

“No, you did not ruin my life. Not at all,” she said. “I totally forgive you. It’s in the past. I don’t think it’s healthy for either of us to hold on to that kind of stuff. Move forward and move on.”

We hung up, and I sat in silence for a while, letting her words reverberate.

Both of my victims seemed unfazed by my emails and phone call, yet here I was, still punishing myself. What was I holding on to? I’m 30 years old and my life is everything I’ve ever wanted it to be: I love my job. I have an amazing boyfriend and tons of friends (many of whom would be surprised to learn that I was once a bully). The acne that plagued me in middle school has since disappeared. My hair became thick and wavy in my 20s. And at 5-foot-10, I love being tall and wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s become clear to me that confronting my victims has rattled my normally strong self-esteem. I’ve been forced to face the darkest part of my past — the insecure, spiteful little girl capable of hurting another person without thinking twice, the child who hates being tall and fears that she’s ugly — and only through talking it out and writing it down have I realized just how far I’ve come. That time in my life is ancient history, a brief, but potent chapter that’ll serve as a lesson for future offspring.

Valerie and Julia didn’t need my apology after all — they’d put the past to bed long ago. All I’d really needed to do, as it turns out, is forgive myself.

I tried contacting Stacy, but she ignored my emails. I moved on to Delia, leader of the mean girls in my elementary school. Delia sometimes called me names, but generally stuck to catty mind games. One day in sixth grade, she walked up to my desk, looked deep into my eyes, and said I had “such a pretty face.” Then she shook her head sadly. She and her eighth grade boyfriend tried to convince me his friend had a crush on me. I weighed 250 pounds, so it was unlikely. I saw her at our 20th high school reunion this summer. She teaches grade school now and commended me on an essay I’d written about bullying for Salon.

“I used it as a reference when we were planning our anti-bulling strategy,” she told me, utterly without irony. A few weeks later, I asked her to discuss her role as one of my bullies, and she declined, saying she was sorry she couldn’t help. I tried other former bullies. None of them would talk. Finally, I posted a request on Facebook — and one person came forward.

Ryan is the younger brother of Brad, who originally coined my nickname, “Moose.” Ryan remembered how his brother led a group of boys shouting that name on the school bus every day. He offered to discuss his role in the bullying. When I finally spoke to him, for the first time in more than 20 years, the deep timbre of his voice came as a surprise.

“You sound like a grown-up now,” I said. He laughed, and said he thought the same thing about me.

As kids, Ryan and I alternated between playing together on our street with our neighbor, a younger boy named Ed, and enmity, as he joined his brother in calling me names on the school bus.

“Brad was my older brother, and that’s who sort of modeled for me,” Ryan explained. Their father, whom I remember as a cheerful presence at backyard barbecues, left the family when Ryan was 8 and Brad was 10. Ryan blamed his brother’s actions on their parents’ divorce and his father’s abandonment.

“I handled the divorce in different ways. Brad handled it with anger,” Ryan told me. I spoke to him via cellphone, sitting in my parked car in the rain. Ryan, who moved to Florida with his mother after high school, spent time working in a coal mine in Alabama before launching a career in interior design in Nashville. He left design for Baptist seminary, citing the torturous economy and the “rock ‘n’ roll” atmosphere of working for people in the music industry. I asked him about Brad. Brad was one of the bullies I reached out to, who had refused to speak to me, and I wanted to know why.

“Brad said he doesn’t really get it. He said, ‘I don’t really have to justify the actions of a 10-year-old.’” Ryan paused. We were both silent for a minute. “I know he has a repentant heart. I know he’s sensitive to it,” Ryan said. I felt resentment and anger at this. Not at Ryan, who had no obligation to me at all. He was a bully by default, a collaborator like so many other people I’d grown up with and mistaken for friends. No, I resented his brother. I felt like he owed me a conversation, that it’s the least he — and Delia, and Stacy — could do. I joked about this when I emailed them. “You owe me one,” I wrote. But no one owes anyone anything, and I doubt that any apology, no matter how sincere, would make me feel any better. There’s no undoing the past. They can’t take it back. But I had hoped some of them would regret the terrible impact their actions had on me.

The essay Delia mentioned came on the heels of the “It Gets Better” movement, columnist Dan Savage’s campaign to help prevent suicide among bullied teens. In that piece, I mentioned that the bullying made me consider suicide almost daily for about five years, starting when I was 12. And yet, Delia smiled at me at the reunion as she talked about the importance of anti-bullying campaigns. (We shared a moment later, when a drunken classmate told us that “sometimes racism is a good idea.” I said no, it really is not, and Delia nodded. “I have to agree with Rebecca on this one,” she said.)

Ryan didn’t apologize for his brother, but he did try to explain his behavior. He told me Brad used “that stupid name we used to call you” to look cool in front of the guys.

“Did it work?” I asked. I don’t know what made me ask Ryan that. Humor, equal parts defense mechanism and natural personality, always comes out when I’m tense or afraid. Ryan considered the question for a moment before answering.

“I think it did, in a sick, mean-kid kind of a way,” he said. “Kids idolize bullies. He’d celebrate that sometimes.” I asked Ryan if he remembered any adults doing anything to correct his or Brad’s behavior. He pondered this.

“There was Dottie, the curly-haired bus driver,” he recalled. “I don’t remember her doing anything, and a lot of the bullying happened on the bus.”

I don’t remember her intervening either. Ryan remembered his mother telling him and Brad not to tease me, but never punishing them for it. “I vividly remember you coming to our back door one day and knocking. I remember you telling my mom ‘The boys are making fun of me again,’ and my mom reacting in totally the wrong way. She said, ‘Not right now, Becky,’ and slammed the door in your face.” He wanted me to understand that his mother was a good person, a gentle woman despite that story. “She would sob in reaction to this,” he told me. He blamed the divorce again, telling me that his mother struggled to raise two boys alone and to keep the house. He also wondered why my mother didn’t “come after” him and his brother. I couldn’t answer that question.

My mother spoke to countless parents about their children bullying me. She worked three jobs to keep us in the suburb where other children tormented me and teachers did virtually nothing to stop it. The mistreatment came as a huge slap in the face to her — she and my father worked so hard so to live in a good neighborhood where her children would be safe, and the good suburban neighbors and teachers snatched that dream away from us without a second thought.

I asked Ryan if these experiences he seemed to remember as vividly as I do myself had any impact on how he approached bullying with the children in his life. He told me he mentored a 12-year-old boy at church who was teased for being effeminate. “If I had to diagnose it, I’d say it’s because he never had that male role model to teach him to stand up for himself,” Ryan explained. I thought about letting that go, but Dan Savage is the angel (and S/M devil) on my shoulder.

“Isn’t it wrong to put the onus on the kid?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he have a right to go to school and have an education and not be teased, no matter how different he might be?”

“He does have a right,” Ryan admitted. “No matter who you are, or how you act, no one has a right to pick on you,” he added.
Ryan asked me to forgive him. It was such a strange request. I accepted it as badly as I do compliments. I wanted to laugh it off, or make a self-deprecating remark, but Ryan’s earnestness prevented that. I never really harbored any great resentment toward Ryan. I knew he felt pressure to fit in, and that he idolized his brother. Nevertheless, I told Ryan I forgave him. Forgiveness is old-fashioned and strange to me, a remnant of the old days when couples courted and a cup of coffee cost a dime. I don’t know if my cynicism spoiled the concept for me, or if I simply lack the capacity to feel anything good about an ugly and damaging time in my life, but I came away from the conversation largely unchanged, though freshly reminded of old hurts.

Ryan said that our talk would give him a lot to think about. He also said that he recalled good things about our friendship, like the time we rode our bikes with Ed for curly fries one summer afternoon. I thought about that day — the wind on my face as I rode my old single-speed Huffy along a busy street, with my friends behind me. It was the highlight of my summer vacation. I felt a little sad at this memory, too. More of my childhood days should have been like that. Innocent, happy, full of friendship, good exercise and fried food.

I wanted to stop feeling so angry about things that happened such a long time ago. I wanted forgiveness to have the same restorative power for me that it did for Ryan. I wanted it to get better. My life today is full of good friendships and meaningful work. I know that it will continue to get better, because it’s already so much better than I ever imagined it could be when I rode the bus and faced mobs of bullies every day. But I wanted to stop feeling so angry all the time. Maybe, one day, I will.