In Bed With My Hockey Stepbrother

When it came time to choose a secondary school in our final year of primary, I had realized I was very different from my friends. Claire and Lizzie were to attend Tommen College the following September; a lavish elite private school, with massive funding and top-of-the-range facilities-coming from the brown envelopes of wealthy parents who were hell-bent on making sure their children received the best education money could buy. Meanwhile, I had been enrolled at the local overcrowded public school in the center of town. I still remembered the horrifying feeling of being separated from my friends. I'd been so desperate to get away from the bullies that I'd even begged Mam to send me to Beara to live with her sister, Aunty Alice, and her family so I could finish my studies. There were no words to describe the devastated feeling that had overtaken me when my father put his foot down on moving in with Aunty Alice. Mam loved me, but she was weak and weary and didn't put up a fight when Dad insisted I attend Ballylaggin Community School. After that, it got worse. More vicious. More violent. More physical. For the first month of first year, I was hounded by several groups of boys all demanding things from me that I was unwilling to give them. After that, I was labeled a frigit because I wouldn't get off with the very boys that had made my life a living hell for years. The meaner ones labeled me crueler slurs, suggesting that the reason I was such a frigit was because I had boy parts under my skirt. No matter how cruel the boys were, the girls were far more inventive. And so much worse. They spread vicious rumors about me, suggesting that I was anorexic and threw my lunch up in the toilets after lunch every day. I wasn't anorexic-or bulimic, for that matter. I was petrified when I was at school and couldn't bear to eat a thing because when I did vomit-and it was a frequent event-it was a direct response to the unbearable weight of the stress I was under. I was also small for my age-short, undeveloped, and skinny-which didn't help my cause in warding off the rumors. When I turned fifteen and still hadn't gotten my first period, my mother made an appointment with our local GP. Several blood tests and exams later, our family doctor had assured both my mother and me that I was healthy, and that it was common for some girls to develop later than others. Almost a year had passed since then and, aside from one irregular cycle in the summer that had lasted less than half a day, I was yet to have a proper period. To be honest, I had given up on my body working like a normal girl's when mine clearly wasn't. My doctor had also encouraged my mother to assess my schooling arrangement, suggesting that the stress I was under at school could be a contributing factor to my obvious physical stunt in development. After a heated discussion between my parents where Mam pled my case, I was sent back to school, where I was subjected to unrelenting torment. Their cruelty varied from name-calling and rumor spreading to sticking sanitary pads on my back, then to full on physically assaulting me. Once, in home economics class, a few of the girls sitting behind me 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 to everyone in our year. The principal had cracked down on it quickly and suspended the phone's owner, 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 ending it all. 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. That 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, while I was quiet and kept to myself. The biggest contrast between us was that my brother was adored by everyone at Ballylaggin Community School, a.k.a. 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 blowout 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.