Bullied, But not Broken

5. Eye-Opening

Garrett

Since the day he had seen Sasha’s artwork, he had started paying a little more attention to what was happening around him and he was shocked by everything he had missed. Sasha Panders was literally bullied every day at school by several different groups.

He never saw her at social events; she always wore too large, faded and old clothes. She looked pale and her cheeks slightly sunken, her eyes seemed too large for her small face. And yet, whenever she was being bullied, she would just get up off the ground, dust herself off and pick up whatever had been thrown out of her hands.

She never raised her eyes from the ground when she walked in the corridors and whenever she was in class she always sat alone. It was like she had no friends. He had started letting his eyes travel whenever he was in any part of the school and he realized that she wasn’t the only bullied kid, but she did get the worst.

He also noticed that she was never in the cafeteria and she also never smiled. Never! He had had a surprise when he had noticed that she worked at the diner. How had he never noticed that before?

Then he’d heard her friendly banter and seen her smile at her other customers and he could only stare when he saw the instant change in her features when she did. He’d seen her playful side when she’d matched up the two old people to have dinner together. And then he’d learned another crappy thing about the people he hung around with.

No one tipped her for her work and some even made her pay for their bills. How selfish and hateful people were in school. She obviously worked to save up money; why would they take what little she made from her as well? How had he missed all that before?

No wonder she wanted nothing to do with anyone from school. And who could blame her? In the last three days, he had seen nothing positive happening to her at school. And then, to make him feel even more crap about what they were all doing to her, he noticed her walking beside the road one morning when they came around the corner and he saw her hand the homeless man sitting on that corner a muffin, while she ate one herself.

Despite the cruelty being dealt to her by everyone at school, she wasn’t cruel or nasty to anyone else. In fact, she helped a homeless man that she passed in the morning. And it seemed the man knew her.

That realization convinced him that he needed to do a little more research about the girl everyone bullied and degraded. Something was very wrong in their society and he wanted no part of it. But how had he missed it all this time? This wasn’t something that had suddenly happened; this had been happening for a long time.

So one day he decided to play detective. He bought some food and secretly stopped by the homeless man that was sitting exactly where he had last seen him and asked him about the girl that gave him food in the mornings. Man, was that guy a treasure trove of information!

He told him that Sasha walked past him every morning and always had the same thing for him to eat that she ate. But most times it was something small like an apple or a granola bar, sometimes a muffin. It turned out she lived nearby and according to the homeless man, Pete, she didn’t do much better than him, since he’d noticed her once or twice picking up things people threw out, the most recent being a pair of boots that she now wore every day.

Did that mean that she was homeless, too? Maybe he had to do some more research. Garrett couldn’t seem to focus on his homework tonight; his mind kept wandering to Sasha Panders. What was her story?

“Are you done with your homework?” His father asked when he found him at the kitchen counter, staring into space with his books open in front of him.

“Nearly…” He answered absently.

“I hope you don’t have a girl stuck in your brain at this moment. You need your wits about you to keep your grades up for college.” His Dad warned him when he took a bottle of water out of the fridge and watched the young man that looked so much like him.

“Not in the way you think, Dad.” He muttered and wiped his hands over his face, while his Dad leaned his hip against the counter across from him, sensing that there was something important on his son’s mind.

“So what is it about?”

“I started noticing something that I'd never seen before and it was disturbing…”

His father raised his eyebrows in question. He was a prominent lawyer in the town and, though he was feared by many, he faced; he had a good relationship with his son, one of the reasons they stayed in this small town, so he could have time for conversations like that with his eldest child and play time with his little girl.

“There’s this girl at school that Mrs Middleton paired me with for a group project and at first I was annoyed to be paired with her, but then I saw the last project she did and got full marks for it.” Garrett called up the picture he had taken of her art work on his phone, because he couldn’t get his mind off it. Finding the picture, he passed his phone to his father. “The name of the project was Alone.”

His dad stared at the photo of her artwork intently, his expression reading much the same as he’d seen in Mrs. Middleton’s eyes. “ These are some intense emotions,” Arthur answered in a gruff tone, which indicated that he had felt the artwork too.

“I know why now. She’s being constantly bullied and degraded at school and I don’t know how to change things when I only just noticed it. She’s always wearing faded, old clothes and yet she feeds the homeless man near the school every day. He told me he saw her take shoes out of someone’s trash and she’s wearing them every day. She works as a waitress at the diner and I found out the other day that the others from school never leave her a tip and some had even left her to pay their bill. Now she refuses to work with me on the project and told me that she’d do it like she does whenever she’s paired with anyone.”

His father was looking at him sadly. “Do you know her name?”

“Yeah, it’s Sasha Panders.” He answered and he saw his father wince.

“You know about her?”

“Yeah. I’ve been in a few court cases against her father. But since they haven’t caught her mother at anything; they can’t take her away. It’s been years.” His father answered sadly.

“So what do we do?” Garrett asked worriedly.

“Legally, there’s nothing I can do at the moment. But you can change things in your school and how you treat her. She really needs someone, I think. Having a father addicted to narcotics can’t be easy on her.”

“But how do I stop her from being bullied?”

“You’ll find a way to change things; you’ve always been a great leader. Now you have a cause to lead to.” His father smiled kindly at him and patted his shoulder before he walked away, leaving him deep in thought, once more.

What could he do to change things around him? He was just one person; what could he possibly do? But he had to do something. He was determined to do something to change what he saw.