Because my bully was smart, funny, charismatic, and gorgeous, she quickly made friends with a few of her classmates. She was a year younger than me, so we didn’t have any classes together. For a few weeks, it seemed like our social lives would be separate. I was on guard, vigilant, ready to defend myself against any social attack she might launch. If we’d been in a bigger school, we probably could have avoided each other, but our high school had one hallway and ten classrooms. So we were constantly in each other’s sight lines. I found myself cast in a weird-ass John Hughes movie where two Indians were the leads.
I don’t know what my bully was thinking during those few weeks. I imagine she was afraid. I imagine she felt lost. I imagine she felt powerless. She was the new kid, and that’s always stressful. And, of course, she must have been puzzled by my popularity. How had I, the rez peon, become a white-high-school superstar? How could Junior Alexie, the omega dog, now be Sherman Alexie, the young man who was loved and respected? Hell, I started the drama club in that farm town and got thirty people to join.
I wonder if she ever considered befriending me. I wonder if I would have accepted and trusted her friendship.
Those questions are hypothetical, of course, because my bully could not help herself. She could not be happy in a world where she was not allowed to belittle me.
So, one morning, as I walked past her in the hallway, as she huddled with a group of her new friends, she turned my name into an insult: “Hey, Spermin’! Hey, Spermin’!”
She laughed. I stopped and stared at her. She smiled at me, as if she had won something. In Wellpinit, that behavior would have been acceptable. In Reardan, it was not.
My sister told me later that she’d seen all of that happen.
“She did that to you,” my sister said. “And I knew it was over for her.”
Over the next few hours, I whispered a few things to a few friends. Those whispered things were whispered to others. And those whispers continued to be whispered.
Within a few days, my sister ran up to me in the hallway and told me she had just seen my bully eating all by herself at a big table in the lunchroom.
“She looked so sad,” my sister said.
A few days after that, my bully had transferred back to the school on the reservation.
It was a decisive victory.
I had saved myself.
Do I feel good about how I exiled my bully?
Yes, I feel great.
Do I also feel bad about how I exiled my bully?
More than three decades later, I still feel guilty. But I know it was necessary. I know it was self-defense. I know it was justifiable. But it also revealed to me how willing I was to socially torture another person.
You can call me vindictive, and I will not disagree.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
I called my sister and asked her what else she remembered about my battle with my bully.
“I want to know if you remember something I don’t,” I said.
“She was mad at me for years,” my sister said. “And I had nothing to do with it. I was an innocent bystander.”
“You’ve never been innocent.”
My sister laughed. But she was laughing too hard for that small joke.
“What? What?” I asked.
“I bet if you stayed on the rez you would’ve married her.”
“Fuck that!” I said, and laughed.
But it’s not an inconceivable thought. My bully ended up leaving the rez school again and graduated from a different but mostly white high school. She graduated from college. She’s always been ambitious, talented, and highly opinionated. She hasn’t lived on the reservation for years but remains connected through family, friends, culture, and business. She also has plenty of enemies on the rez. My bully and I are the same kind of Spokane Indians.
I am laughing as I write this because I realize now, after all of these years, that my bully had followed me to Reardan. She had attempted to use my escape route. She had emulated me.
And I laugh even harder because I am quite sure she would absolutely deny that.
And now I am laughing at the thought that maybe she and I would have gone to the prom together. Or, heck, since it was a farm town, maybe she and I would have gone to the harvest ball.
Two Spokane Indians slow-dancing while surrounded by white kids. And hay bales festooned with blue ribbons. While Hank Williams, Jr., or Spandau Ballet played a love ballad.
That’s the happy ending of the John Hughes movie about Indians, enit?
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
But I have to keep asking: If I had stayed on the reservation, then whom do I think I would have married?
I bet I would have fallen in love with a white schoolteacher—one of those crusading liberals who come to the rez hoping to save Indians. Most of those teachers last for only a year or two. Saving Indians is a tough job with long hours and terrible pay. But some of those white teachers stay for their entire lives.
During my travels to many reservations over the last twenty-five years, I have met a few white teachers who fell in love with and married Indian people.
I once met a TV news reporter, a white woman, who fell in love with an Indian man as she was interviewing him.
“On the rez, we were standing in a wild grass field overlooking the river valley,” the woman said to me. “I was filing a report about environmental efforts on the reservation. And I just kept being distracted by the beauty of the landscape. And I looked at this Indian man. And he was so beautiful, too. And he and that landscape belonged together, you know? And I thought, ‘Hey, I want some of that action!’ And I have been getting that action for twenty years.”
During high school and college, I fell deeply in love with two women. Both white. Marriage was discussed.
They both broke up with me.
And shortly after breaking up with me, they each met the white man they would marry. They are both still married.
I have always wished them well.
I remember them with affection and respect.
I suppose, in many ways, one never stops loving the people they loved during their youth.
Or hating the people they hated.
My bully reentered my life in 2005 or 2006. Maybe it was 2007. Or 2003. I was giving a reading at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane. As always, I had reserved a section of seats for my mother, siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.
My siblings and mother took their seats early in the bookstore. But I was still in my hotel room getting ready. So my sister had to tell me what happened before I arrived.
“So we’re sitting there,” my sister said. “And she [the bully] and two other Spokane Indian women [who had never liked me either] come striding in and just took seats in the reserved section.”
“Maybe they thought the reserved section was reserved for reservation Indians who had made a reservation,” I said.
“Oh,” my sister said. “That’s a dumb joke. Anyways, they sat in our section and wouldn’t even look at us. They looked all mad in the face.”