I met Katie in elementary school. I was in fourth grade, she was in fifth, and we both attended the same after-school program. We invented a role-playing game together based on the tabletop games that our male friends played. We liked Magic: The Gathering and Dungeon & Dragons for the pictures and the aesthetic, but we both wanted more freedom. So Katie and I made up our own game, which I now realize was a live-action role-playing game.

It was no whimsical game of Calvinball, either; we were aged 9 and 10, so we were old enough to impose structure and canon and continuing story-lines.

We were married, in the game. Of course, Katie was role-playing as a man, and I was role-playing as a woman, so later in life, I ret-conned this experience in my head as "straight." But deep down I know that the person I had feelings for was Katie, not her character.

I remember telling one of the other girls at school that I wanted to marry Katie when the two of us grew up. I had never heard of two girls marrying one another before, so I guess I wanted to check around. I'll never forget the abject disgust that crossed over this girl's face when I told her my life plan. No, it wasn't normal for me to want this, she told me. It was gross. That girl never spoke to me again.

One time, Katie and I were watching the movie version of the musical Annie. There's a scene in which Annie consoles one of the other orphan girls. Katie laughed at the two actresses embracing on screen and said, "lezzies!" I remember asking her what that word meant. Her clumsy explanation washed over me like a thunderstorm. I felt uncomfortable and confused and nauseated and I wasn't sure why. As an adult, I know what I was feeling. Heartbreak.

**

Our guy friends decided to join our role-playing game. Once they joined, Katie quietly wrote a new female character for herself and stopped role-playing as my husband. She had already learned a lesson that I wouldn’t learn until middle school. I was just glad that more people wanted to play our game.

Not everyone liked the game, though. Not everyone thought it was cool that we were pretending to be orcs and knights. In fact, a lot of people thought we were creepy weirdos. Or nerds. Or losers. Or whatever word you want to use.

There was a specific group of kids who bullied us for liking this game -- two guys, one girl. We got harmed, physically, for playing the game. I got pushed and smacked around, by both the guys and the girl. I went home with bruises. Some kids went home bleeding.

The type of nerd-bullying that we hear about most often is all about male-on-male violence, and it's usually about a specific performance of masculinity. The jock pushes the nerd into the lockers because the nerd reads comics or plays games, stories about escaping into the identity of a specific type of hero. A jock-y hero. A warrior. A knight. A powerful man who embodies masculinity in a way that this male nerd cannot in meatspace. Masculinity is centered in these narratives.

But sometimes bullying is compounded by other factors. I think a lot of bullying is fundamentally about the idea of "normal." The public school system, at least in my experience, was all about ensuring that kids would end up "acting normal" once they graduated -- or at least that they'd all understand what "normal" looked like, and that if they weren't able to perform it, an uncaring society would destroy them. Teachers enforce this rule, and students self-police it.

Some kids have traits that they can bury and hide for the sake of not sticking out anymore. Others can’t do this. Everyone is pressured to match “normal” regardless -- even when it is impossible and causes irreparable lifelong pain. Square pegs, round holes. Rhombus pegs. Octagonal pegs. Still, round holes.

Our bullies didn't look or act the way you might expect. They weren't jocks, although the jocks did hate us and would lob dodgeballs at our heads. The three kids who stalked our playground LARPs, beat us up, and refused to let us play in peace were not popular or "cool." They were three loners with unhappy lives; none of the three of them were officially signed up for the after-school program, they just hung around the playground because no one cared where they went or what they did. They would all grow up to be "goth" eventually, and one of the three of them would go on to die young of a drug overdose. Even way back in elementary school, they were also seen as "not normal" by our peers, and they took it out on us. They weren't cool, but we were even less cool, so they huddled together and punched down.

My bullies were afforded some social privileges for throwing me and my friends under the proverbial bus. By focusing their attentions on my LARP group, my bullies were able to evade notice -- and also establish themselves as "scary." If you can't be "normal," be "scary." This was a lesson that I learned from my bullies and incorporated into my life later on by dressing in goth clothes and scowling and listening to loud industrial music through my headphones between classes. If everybody thinks you might snap and kill them, then they'll leave you alone. It's a lonely existence, to be sure, but anything's better than being physically assaulted or emotionally abused or both.

Of course, establishing oneself as "scary" is a hop skip and a jump away from becoming a bully.

**

In elementary school, it was pretty common for social rivalries to devolve into violence no matter the genders of the people involved. By middle school, we had all experienced enough socialization to know that physical violence is supposed to be the purview of boys and emotional manipulation is supposed to be the purview of girls. I was not pushed into lockers after I left fifth grade, but the bullying I experienced was far more harmful to me in the long term.

I have two different stories about middle school bullying. One of them is about me bullying the one girl who I perceived as "below" me on the social hierarchy. The other is about the intense bullying that I experienced from a group of girls who were "above" me. I could just tell the second story and make myself seem very sympathetic. But I think it's important for me to acknowledge that both of them happened concurrently.

Research suggests my experience isn’t unusual. UC Davis sociologists Robert Faris and Diane Femlee have studied bullying extensively; in a CNN interview, Faris summarized their findings:

"Kids are caught up in patterns of cruelty and aggression that have to do with jockeying for status ... It’s really not the kids that are psychologically troubled, who are on the margins or the fringes of the school’s social life. It’s the kids right in the middle, at the heart of things … often, typically highly, well-liked popular kids who are engaging in these behaviors. When kids increase in their status, on average, they tend to have a higher risk of victimization as well as a higher risk of becoming aggressive."

I would argue that even the kids who are “on the fringes” can’t help but get caught up in status-jockeying from time to time. Avoiding that hierarchy entirely is a very lonely path -- one that I did have to navigate, on and off, throughout my school days.

During fifth grade, Katie moved away. My guy friends stopped talking to me because of "cooties." I realized that no one else liked me, although I wasn't sure why. I decided that middle school would be a new beginning for me -- an opportunity to start over.

In sixth grade, I managed to get in the good graces of some of the "popular" girls from other schools for the first month or so. It didn't last. How is it that popular people from every elementary school manage to find one another and become some sort of high-powered Borg as soon as middle school starts? How do they figure out which people are "losers" and which people are their own kind? I assume the answer is "social skills," which I didn't have, although at the time I didn't understand the problem. Was it my budding acne, or the fact that I didn't understand how to apply makeup or fix my hair, or my clothes, or my attitude, or my interests? All of the above -- and then some.

Other nerdy girls recognized me as one of their own, just as the popular girls seemed able to recognize one another. There was one girl in particular who wanted to be my friend, but I could hardly stand her. I was relentlessly cruel to her, hoping that she would leave me alone so that no one would associate me with her. It didn't work. I can only assume that she had already borne unkindness from everyone she had ever met, because she forgave me, over and over, no matter what I said or did. We had nothing in common other than the fact that other people perceived us both as "weird," which made it difficult for me to imagine a friendship with her. That doesn't excuse my cruelty, which I enacted because I wanted to be friends with "better" people, "normal" people.

I couldn’t find anyone at my new school who understood me like Katie had, and although I could visit Katie from time to time, my parents kept pressuring me to find friends at my own school. But I didn't know how. Somehow, I got hung up on the idea of “being popular” as opposed to finding true friendship, because I thought that popularity would insulate me from ever feeling lonely or being bullied. I also understood that gaining popularity meant I had to become a bully myself. I was willing to do it if it meant that I could escape harm. But I couldn't seem to shake my own "weirdness."

I ended up with no friends at all, in the end. The popular girls to whom I had once ingratiated myself stole my private diary from my backpack and passed it all around the school, filling it with insults. I'd included paragraphs about how badly I wanted to be liked, paragraphs which reams of anonymous responses mocked in return.

This was around when I started wearing black and acting "scary."

**

I fell in love with a popular girl. I had crushes on boys at school, boys who didn't even notice me. But when I stared at girls, people noticed. We learned about homosexuality and bisexuality in sex education that year, and I began to worry. This was another part of myself that I’d have to learn how to hide, another part of my life that I’d do my best to ret-con after the fact.

I had begun to wear a lot of monochromatic gray and black clothes, and my concerned mother bought me a shirt with a rainbow on it in response. The '90s had seen a return to "disco" fashions in contrast to the rising grunge fad. I don't know why I wore the rainbow shirt -- probably to appease my mother's anxiety about my lack of friends, and her insistence that I needed to "wear more colors" -- but I only ever wore it once. The hateful reaction from the other girls at school came down on me like an avalanche.

I don't remember everything, not all of the insults hurled in hallways. I do remember the popular girl that I liked sneaking up behind me while I was eating lunch in the cafeteria to whisper in my ear that she thought I looked sexy in the rainbow shirt. She then ran away to peals of laughter from the other popular girls. I kept thinking the insults and laughter would die down the next day, once I was back in my normal clothes. They didn't. It got worse.

The following Friday night, some popular girls got together and prank-called my house dozens and dozens of times. I was sleeping over at Katie's house that night, so my mother had to field all of the calls. Eventually, she had to let them go to voicemail, and the girls left message after message calling me and my sister and my mother "fucking dykes." I could recognize some of their voices on the machine, and we had Caller ID, which was a relatively recent invention, so I could identify the perpetrators.

My mother intervened and called my school's guidance counselor. The only girls who got sent to the counselor were the girls whose voices I recognized, and the girl whose number was listed on the Caller ID.

One of the three denied it, refusing to apologize. The counselor couldn't force her to admit anything, so eventually he let her go; it was only my word against hers, even though I had a recording of her voice.

The second girl, the girl who I’d fallen for, shrugged and apologized without making eye contact. She never spoke to me or looked at me again, nor I her.

The third girl refused to back down. It had been her house, her number on the Caller ID, and probably her idea, since she would continue to prank call me for years after the fact. She told the counselor that she would only apologize to me if I apologized first. She said I was "creepy," and that I "stared at people" just to make them uncomfortable. In other words, I deserved it. She didn't say outright that she thought I was gay, but she implied it. The counselor told me that I had to apologize to her.

I have mixed feelings about this forced apology, to this day. I know I didn't mean to stare at anyone for too long, but I did nonetheless act "creepy" -- a behavior that I condemn in others all the time. Was I "creepy" because I seemed gay, or because I dressed in dark colors, or both? I had genuinely frightened these girls, no matter my intent, but no one deserves slurs or harassment or abject terror. Regardless, I was made to apologize to a girl who would continue to terrorize me for years afterward. I meant my apology; I stopped looking at anyone else at school, ever. But the bullying didn't stop.

These three girls, and many of their friends, led miserable lives. Perhaps even more miserable than my own. Through the grapevine of middle school, I learned various pieces of information about their personal lives: their unhappy childhoods, their neglectful parents, their struggles with eating disorders. They were overcompensating, too. They hoped that no one would notice what was “wrong” about them, so long as they kept the spotlight on me.