Apologetics

If you don’t know this kid, let me refresh your memory.
She’s the one who used to trade lunches with her friends, especially on the days she forgot hers. This peckerhead, this turd of a human being, standing in the canteen line, she used to get younger kids to swap their tiny gold coins for her big shiny silver ones. The little wiener, she’d never hesitate to kick anyone out of the group.

Don’t ask me how I know this, but that girl is really, really sorry. She was young and didn’t know what she was doing, and she’s spent every moment since puberty being super nice to everybody.
She promises.

Years after my primary school graduation, people will still come up and tell me stories of their childhood terror. The things I did. At some party, a girl will walk over and say how I would “borrow” her money. How I used to steal her potato chips.
The rest of the night, I can’t go near the snacks table. Instead, I spend the whole time apologising.

At a different gathering, someone tells me about the time I threw their brand new pencil case, contents and all, into the toilet. On another occasion, at another party, I see Lucy-May, and she reminds me how I used to encourage her to throw her lunch in the bin. Or how I’d take one of her recess snacks and wouldn’t give it back until she said a swear word.
She says how more often than not, it started with an ‘F’.
While I’m saying the most genuine sorry I can muster, I wonder how the fuck I get invited to these things.

One time on a bus, a girl called Erina says she remembers me because I hit her for dog-earing a library book. And maybe I’m paranoid but these people, whenever I make a sudden move, they flinch.
Jackie Stephens comes up and tells me I always made her be the prince in our make believe games.
So does Bethany.
So does Madeline.
I say, Sorry sorry sorry.
And also for always spelling your name wrong, Madeleine.
Some of these stories I remember, and others I don’t. According to Christina Connerty, I gave her a best friend charm only to take it back a week later.
I say...Did I?
Sarah Vassalo asks, Didn’t I used to always hide her books in high places?
I say, It’s possible...
Melinda Riley, she says I once kicked her down below for telling me to pick up my rubbish.
I say, Sure. Why not? Add that to the list. Just crucify me. After enough of these refresher courses, you’ll confess to anything. You’ll become the villain in everyone’s story. Even what you don’t remember, or what’s been hammed up by a decade of silent loathing, like Chinese whispers, you’ll let them breathe it into your ear.

Not that I’m making excuses, but years of shitty behaviour is always going to look bad on the one page.
Not that I’m trying to justify anything, but people never tell you about the time you let them copy your homework, or took the blame for something they did. A former best friend doesn’t wave in your face the fact that you changed your handwriting to be exactly the same as hers, so you could write each other’s lines. Lucy-May doesn’t say thanks for showing her to walk down stairs properly so the other kids wouldn’t make fun of her. What Mel Riley doesn’t say, is how when people gave her a hard time, you were always the first to step in a kick them in the vagina.

But maybe it’s because the bad always outweighs the good.
A girl who I still know, a few years back, she tells me when we were little, I called her fat. And neither of us say anything, but we’re both thinking of the time she had an eating disorder.
So maybe I’m okay with not being thanked enough. And all this joking, it’s just so I don’t have to confront anything. It’s easier to pretend it’s a funny story.

- Jana Roose
[Published in Frankie Magazine, July/August 2009, Issue #30, pg 78.]