When the kicking stops, you lie there for a while, then drag your bruised, shamed body to the opaque glass doors of those in charge. They pretend to be upset and ask questions. They write things down.

After a while they come to believe you are somehow to blame for your own victimization.

You go home.

People you love act as though it were your fault, too.

You withdraw your heart from public circulation, like a library book no one can read without damaging.

Then, a week later, it happens again.

This time, others join in; it’s the only way they can make sure it never happens to them.

You can’t go to the police because your colleagues are, for some reason, immune to prosecution. And they know this. They can do anything they want to you.

You can’t leave the office or get another job because you’re not allowed to. The people in charge and the people you love are criminally obtuse. You simply must find a way to live with monumental shame and suffering, to let part of yourself die so that other parts may go on living.

This is what it means to be bullied.

When I opened my eyes, I was still on the ground. I couldn’t see much because of wetness and swelling. But then something happened, the deus ex machina that makes this book possible. As the rock-hand was pounding the rubbery mass of my bloodied nose, from the sky came divine intervention in the form of a pink tennis racquet with rabbit stickers on the handle. It struck the boy only once, but with such force that in the following days, kids at school would say his cheek looked like fleshy graph paper.

I lay there for what seemed like all day but was probably one minute.

I was waiting for her to go away.

But she wouldn’t go away.

She sat down, cross-legged, and pretended to pet the rabbit stickers on the frame of her pink tennis racquet, supposedly to make me laugh.

When I didn’t move, she opened her lunch box and put a small package of very expensive cookies next to my cheek. But I just lay there on the grass, mesmerized by pain and the very expensive cookies, hoping she would think I was dead and bugger off.

But she didn’t bugger off. She tried to help me up, which was intensely irritating. Then she trailed me to the school gates, and all the way into class where, thank god, she went to the place she usually sat, as I went to mine.