Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite was the most unpopular girl in her school

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issue 17 August 2013

If you are bullied at school, you see, you never stop feeling bullied, no matter how old you are. It is absurd that I am 41 years of age and a group of women can still reduce me to tears. To be fair to the bullies, I was an awkward, argumentative, pedantic nerd of a schoolgirl. I know, shocking isn’t it?

To make things worse, I arrived at secondary school from a convent primary not knowing any swear-words. The way I expressed myself — arguing pompously with the other students, arguing pompously with the teachers, and spending lunchtimes in the piano practice rooms playing Bach two-part inventions — didn’t come into its own until the sixth form when I was suddenly declared achingly cool.

Another girl found me hammering away like Geoffrey Rush in Shine one afternoon and was taken by the idea that being a pedantic nerd was the new black. I was elevated to the status of ‘loveable geek’ and students would come to watch me playing Bach while they ate their sandwiches.

Up until then it had been miserable. I used to lock myself in the girls’ loo rather than go to assembly because there wasn’t a single person in the entire school who would stand next to me.

It was a mixed school but, just as the lioness does the hunting, the girls did the bullying while the lazy-ass boys just enjoyed the show. Shouting my name, then, when I looked round, pretending no one had called me, I seem to remember, was their favourite torment.

Whenever I am pitched into new surroundings involving women now I am a nervous, hyper-vigilant wreck. In this respect, my secondary education might as well have been a tour of duty in the Mekong Delta.

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