Once, in Home Economics class, a few of the girls in the seat behind me had 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 on to everyone in our year. The principal had cracked down on it quickly, and suspended who owned the phone, 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 on ending it all. On 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.
It 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, whereas I was quiet and kept to myself.
The biggest contrast between us was that my brother was adored by everyone at Ballylaggin Community School, aka 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 blow out 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 1980's 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 towards his own son was by far the vilest of his traits.
When Darren took a year out 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 blow out 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 youngers boys – who were, in our father's eyes, his normal sons.
When he wasn’t down at the pub or the bookies, 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.
He had no interest in me, and I had no interest in trying to live up to some irrational expectation of his. I would never be a boy, and there was no point in trying to please a man whose mind was back in the fifties.
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 counselling 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 counsellor, but at €80 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 boldface lie, considering I 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.