In Bed With My Hockey Stepbrother

High Hopes

SHANNON

It was January 10, 2005.

A whole new year, and the first day back to school after Christmas break.

And I was nervous-so nervous, in fact, that I had thrown up no fewer than three times this morning.

My pulse was beating at a concerning rate; my anxiety the culprit of my erratic heartbeat, not to mention the cause of my upchuck reflex abandoning me.

Smoothing down my new school uniform, I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and hardly recognized myself.

Navy jumper with the Tommen College crest on the breast with a white shirt and red tie. Gray skirt that stopped at the knee, revealing two scrawny, underdeveloped legs, and finishing with tan tights, navy socks, and two-inch, black court shoes.

I looked like an implant.

I felt like one, too.

My only consolation was the shoes that Mam bought me brought me up to the five-foot-two mark. I was ridiculously small for my age in every way.

I was thin on the extreme, underdeveloped with fried eggs for breasts, clearly untouched by the puberty boom that had hit every other girl my age.

My long brown hair was loose and flowing down the middle of my back, pushed back from my face with a plain red hair band. My face was free of makeup, making me look every bit as young and small as I felt. My eyes were too big for my face and a shocking shade of blue to boot.

I tried squinting, seeing if that made my eyes look any more human, and made a conscious effort to thin my swollen lips by pulling them into my mouth.

Nope.

The squinting only made me look constipated.

Exhaling a frustrated sigh, I touched my cheeks with my fingertips and exhaled a ragged breath.

What I lacked in the height and breast departments, I liked to think I made up for in maturity. I was levelheaded and an old soul.

Nanny Murphy always said that I was born with an old head on my shoulders.

It was true to an extent.

I had never been one to be fazed by boys or fads.

It just wasn't in me.

I once read somewhere that we mature with damage, not with age.

If that's the case, I was an old-age pensioner in the emotional stakes.

A lot of the time I worried that I didn't work like other girls. I didn't have the same urges or interest in the opposite sex. I didn't have an interest in anyone: boys, girls, famous actors, hot models, clowns, puppies... Well, okay so I had an interest in cute puppies and big fluffy dogs, but the rest of it, I could give or take.

I had no interest in kissing, touching, or fondling of any sort. I couldn't bear the thought of it. I suppose watching the shitstorm that was my parents' relationship unravel had put me off the prospect of teaming up with another human for life. If my parents' relationship was a representation of love, then I wanted no part of it.

I would rather be alone.

Shaking my head to clear my thunderous thoughts before they darkened to the point of no return, I stared at my reflection in the mirror and forced myself to practice something I rarely did these days: smile.

Deep breaths, I told myself. This is your fresh start.

Turning on the tap, I washed my hands and splashed some water on my face, desperate to cool the heated anxiety burning inside of my body, the prospect of my first day at a new school a daunting notion.

Any school has to be better than the one I am leaving behind. The thought entered my mind and I flinched in shame. Schools, I thought dejectedly, plural.

I'd suffered relentless bullying in both primary and secondary school.

For some unknown, cruel reason, I had been the target of every child's frustrations from the tender age of four.

Most of the girls in my class decided on day one in junior infants that they didn't like me and I wasn't to be associated with. And the boys, while not as sadistic in their attacks, weren't much better.

It didn't make sense because I got along just fine with the other children on our street and never had any altercations with anyone on the estate we lived in.

But school?

School was like the seventh circle of hell for me. All nine-instead of the regular eight-years of primary had been torture.

Junior infants was so distressing for me that both my mother and teacher decided it would be best to hold me back so I could repeat juniors with a new class. Even though I was just as miserable in my new class, I made a couple of close friends, Claire and Lizzie, whose friendship had made school bearable for me.

When it came time to choose a secondary school in our final year of primary, I had realized I was very different from my friends.

Claire and Lizzie were to attend Tommen College the following September; a lavish elite private school, with massive funding and top-of-the-range facilities-coming from the brown envelopes of wealthy parents who were hell-bent on making sure their children received the best education money could buy.

Meanwhile, I had been enrolled at the local overcrowded public school in the center of town.

I still remembered the horrifying feeling of being separated from my friends.

I'd been so desperate to get away from the bullies that I'd even begged Mam to send me to Beara to live with her sister, Aunty Alice, and her family so I could finish my studies.

There were no words to describe the devastated feeling that had overtaken me when my father put his foot down on moving in with Aunty Alice.

Mam loved me, but she was weak and weary and didn't put up a fight when Dad insisted I attend Ballylaggin Community School.

After that, it got worse.

More vicious.

More violent.

More physical.

For the first month of first year, I was hounded by several groups of boys all demanding things from me that I was unwilling to give them.

After that, I was labeled a frigit because I wouldn't get off with the very boys that had made my life a living hell for years.

The meaner ones labeled me crueler slurs, suggesting that the reason I was such a frigit was because I had boy parts under my skirt.

No matter how cruel the boys were, the girls were far more inventive.

And so much worse.

They spread vicious rumors about me, suggesting that I was anorexic and threw my lunch up in the toilets after lunch every day.

I wasn't anorexic-or bulimic, for that matter.

I was petrified when I was at school and couldn't bear to eat a thing because when I did vomit-and it was a frequent event-it was a direct response to the unbearable weight of the stress I was under. I was also small for my age-short, undeveloped, and skinny-which didn't help my cause in warding off the rumors.

When I turned fifteen and still hadn't gotten my first period, my mother made an appointment with our local GP. Several blood tests and exams later, our family doctor had assured both my mother and me that I was healthy, and that it was common for some girls to develop later than others.

Almost a year had passed since then and, aside from one irregular cycle in the summer that had lasted less than half a day, I was yet to have a proper period.

To be honest, I had given up on my body working like a normal girl's when mine clearly wasn't.

My doctor had also encouraged my mother to assess my schooling arrangement, suggesting that the stress I was under at school could be a contributing factor to my obvious physical stunt in development.

After a heated discussion between my parents where Mam pled my case, I was sent back to school, where I was subjected to unrelenting torment.

Their cruelty varied from name-calling and rumor spreading to sticking sanitary pads on my back, then to full on physically assaulting me.

Once, in home economics class, a few of the girls sitting behind me hacked off a chunk of my ponytail with kitchen scissors and then waved it around like a trophy.

Everyone had laughed, and I think in that moment I had hated the ones laughing at my pain more than the ones causing it.

Another time, during P.E., the same girls had taken a picture of me in my underwear with one of their camera phones and forwarded it to everyone in our year. The principal had cracked down on it quickly and suspended the phone's owner, but not before half the school had a good laugh at my expense.

I remembered crying so hard that day, not in front of them of course, but in the toilets. I had bolted myself into a cubicle and contemplated ending it all. Just taking a bunch of tablets and being done with the whole damn thing.

Life, for me, was a bitter disappointment, and at the time, I had wanted no further part in it.

I didn't do it because I was too much of a coward.

I was too afraid of it not working and waking up and having to face the consequences.

I was a fucking mess.

My brother Joey said they targeted me because I was good-looking and called my tormenters jealous bitches. He told me that I was gorgeous and instructed me to rise above it.

That was easier said than done-and I wasn't so confident about that gorgeous statement, either.

Many of the girls targeting me were the same ones that had been bullying me since preschool.

I doubted looks had anything to do with it back then.

I was just unlikable.

Besides, as much as he tried to be there for me and defend my honor, Joey didn't understand how school life was for me.

My older brother was the polar opposite of me in every shape of the word.

Where I was short, he was tall. I had blue eyes, he had green ones. I was dark-haired; he was fair. His skin was sun-kissed golden. I was pale. He was outspoken and loud, while I was quiet and kept to myself.

The biggest contrast between us was that my brother was adored by everyone at Ballylaggin Community School, a.k.a. BCS, the local public secondary school we both attended.

Of course, landing a spot on the Cork minor hurling team helped Joey's popularity status along the way, but even without sports, he was a great guy.

And being the great guy that he was, Joey tried to protect me from it all, but it was an impossible task for one guy.

Joey and I had an older brother, Darren, and three younger brothers: Tadhg, Ollie, and Sean, but neither of us had spoken to Darren since he walked out of the house five years previous, following yet another infamous blowout with our father. Tadhg and Ollie, who were eleven and nine, were only in primary school, and Sean, who was three, was barely out of nappies, so I wasn't exactly flush with protectors to call on.

It was days like this that I missed my eldest brother.

At twenty-three, Darren was seven years older than me. Big and fearless, he was the ultimate big brother for every little girl growing up.

From a small child, I had adored the ground he walked on, trailing after him and his friends, tagging along with him wherever he went. He always protected me, taking the blame at home when I did something wrong.

It wasn't easy for him, and being so much younger than him, I hadn't understood the full extent of his struggle. Mam and Dad had only been seeing each other a couple of months when she fell pregnant with Darren at fifteen.

Labeled a bastard baby because he was born out of wedlock in 1980s Catholic Ireland, life had always been a challenge for my brother. After he turned eleven, everything got so much worse for him.

Like Joey, Darren was a phenomenal hurler and, like me, our father despised him. He was always finding something wrong with Darren, be it his hair or his handwriting, his performance on the field or his choice of partner.

Darren was gay and our father couldn't cope with it.

He blamed my brother's sexual orientation on an incident in the past, and nothing anyone said could get it through to our father that being gay wasn't a choice.

Darren was born gay, the same way Joey was born straight and I was born empty.

He was who he was, and it broke my heart that he wasn't accepted in his own home.

Living with a homophobic father was torture for my brother.

I hated Dad for that, more than I hated him for all the other terrible things he had done through the years.

My father's intolerance and blatant discriminating behavior toward his own son was by far the vilest of his traits.

When Darren took a year off from hurling to concentrate on his leaving cert, our father had hit the roof. Months of heated arguments and physical altercations had resulted in a huge blowout where Darren packed his bags, walked out the door, and never came back.

Five years had passed since that night, and aside from the annual Christmas card in the post, none of us had seen or heard from him.

We didn't even have a phone number or address for him.

He as good as vanished.

After that, all of the pressure our father had put on Darren was switched onto the younger boys-who were, in our father's eyes, his normal sons.

When he wasn't down at the pub or the bookie's, our father was dragging the boys off to training and matches.

He focused all of his attention on them.

I was of no use to him, what with being a girl and all that.

I wasn't good at sports and I didn't excel at school or any club activity.

In my father's eyes, I was just a mouth to feed until eighteen.

That wasn't something I had come up with, either. Dad told me this on countless occasions.

After the fifth or sixth time, I grew immune to the words.

I'd long since grown tired of begging for love from a man who, in his own words, never wanted me.

The pressure he put on Joey concerned me though, and it was the reason I felt so much guilt every time he had to come to my aid.

He was in sixth year, his final year of secondary school, and had his own stuff going on, with GAA, his part-time job at the petrol station, the leaving cert, and his girlfriend, Aoife.

I knew that when I hurt, Joey hurt too. I didn't want to be a burden around his neck, someone he was constantly having to look out for, but it had been that way since as far back as I could remember.

To be honest, I couldn't stand to look at the disappointment in my brother's eyes another minute in that school. Passing him in the hallways, knowing that when he looked at me, his expression caved.

To be fair, the teachers at BCS had tried to protect me from the lynch mob, and the guidance teacher at BCS, Mrs. Falvy, even organized fortnightly counseling sessions with a school psychologist throughout second year until funding was cut.

Mam had managed to scrape together the money for me to see a private counselor, but at eighty euros per session, and having to censor my thoughts at my mother's request, I'd only seen her five times before lying to my mother and telling her that I felt better.

I didn't feel better.

I never felt better.

I just couldn't bear to watch my mother struggle.

I despised being a financial burden on her, so I sucked it up, slapped on a smile, and continued to walk into hell every day.

But the bullying never stopped.

Nothing stopped.

Until one day, it did.

The week before Christmas break last month-just three weeks after a similar incident with the same group of girls-I had come home in floods of tears, with my school jumper ripped down the front and my nose stuffed with tissue paper to stem the bleeding from the hiding I'd taken at the hands of a group of fifth-year girls, who'd vehemently suggested that I had tried to get with one of their boyfriends.

It was a bold-faced lie, considering I'd never laid eyes on the boy they accused me of trying to seduce, and another in a long line of pathetic excuses to beat me up.

That was the day I stopped.

I stopped lying.

I stopped pretending.

I just stopped.

That day wasn't just my breaking point; it was Joey's, too. He'd followed me into the house with a week's suspension under his belt for beating the living daylights out of the brother of Ciara Maloney, my main tormentor.

Our mother had taken one look at me and pulled me out of the school.

Going against wishes of my father, who thought I needed to toughen up, Mam went to the local credit union and took out a loan to pay the admission fees for Tommen College, the private, fee-paying secondary school fifteen miles north of Ballylaggin.

While I worried for my mother, I knew that if I had to walk through the doors of that public school one more time, I would not be walking back out.

I had hit my limit.