Junior high was hell. I entered the eighth grade as the new kid. They’d moved me from Florida to California, and it was a culture shock. I lived in a house in Florida with a swamp in my backyard, where the alligators roamed and ate ducks. I felt like those ducks when I went to school because I was the new kid there, too.

Kids used to tease me because I wasn’t like them. I’d come from Pennsylvania in the fifth grade and wasn’t like those southern folks. The boys wanted to fight me.

One kid punched my face in the bathroom. I saw streaking lights. The kid’s face turned red and he started to cry before he ran away. I was too stunned to cry, at least then.

Florida was the worst. I lasted through the fifth grade, the sixth grade, and the seventh grade before I was moved to California.

Not all the boys acted tough out here. They rode rollerskates and dressed in vibrant colors. They would’ve gotten their asses kicked in Florida, where everyone wanted to fight. But I was still picked on for being the new kid. There was something about the new kid that attracted bullies. And it wasn’t like the bullies were feared by everyone, just the prey they decided upon.

One kid would flick rubber bands at my head in English class. I got fed up, took a rubber band, and flicked it back at him, and it caught him right in the eye. He put his head down on his desk and kept it there. The teacher never saw us. I felt terrible. I thought the kid had gone blind. I asked under my breath if he was okay. He pulled his head up, and it was wet and red.

When the teacher wasn’t looking, he snapped the rubber band at me, and it caught me in the left eye. My self-esteem was low enough that I thought I deserved it for doing it to him, so both of us were temporarily half-blind for the rest of the period. I forgot the kid’s name. One of the few friends of mine called him Wanger. And he looked like a wanger. His nose was big, and his eyes sunk into his skull. He had a big floppy head of hair. He would chase me to my school bus, and I would always escape.

I guessed the bully illness rubbed off on me because I would bully someone as well. A skinny kid would ride our bus back home, and after the bus dropped us off, my friend and I would follow him and push him into the trash cans in front of the girls. He would crash through those cans like a bowling ball and pick himself back up.

“You two are stupid,” he would say, which only provoked us even further.

We continued bullying him through the rest of the eighth grade. I never knew what happened to him, but I’m sure he’s a successful doctor by now—maybe not a brain surgeon but someone like a gastroenterologist. I’m sure if he could see me now, he would believe he had the upper hand. What if I had ended up as his patient? He probably wouldn’t have remembered me.

But anyway, the bullying tapered off by high school, where I became invisible. I never dated any girls. My friend would ask the girls out for me in eighth grade, and the girls wouldn’t respond with an answer, which was as good as no. And high school was out of the question. All the girls I wanted were out of my league. The other ones who could’ve been in my league weren’t up to my standards. It was a rough go.

One girl showed interest by the time I was seventeen. My doubles partner on the tennis team told me, “She likes you.” It was the first girl who ever liked me, and I was stunned enough not to react. I ignored her, in fact. Now I regret ever behaving that way because I’d missed an opportunity.

But oh well. It wasn’t as if I had to face any consequences because of it. So yeah, being the new kid sucked. I still feel like the new kid every day, no matter how long I’ve lived somewhere.