The Rag Doll in Me, by Nina Fillari

        When I was sixteen, I discovered friendship. Nicole and I had been friends for two years
but no one told me that my definition of friendship had been tainted. I was the kind of kid who went with the flow yet still followed her own bedtime. Nicole was the kind who, wherever she went, took me with her and called me a grandpa for even having a bedtime. I was small and scrawny. She wasn’t. High school me liked the taste of Kool-Aid and didn’t know any better.

       Twice a week, during our engineering class, I’d find my seat in the middle of the three rows and eat my pistachios. I’d arrange the dozens of shells scattered on my desk into a block as I took notes in my paperback notebook. Every class period, Nicole would get up to grab her own notebook in a bin on the teacher’s desk and walk through my row. As soon as she passed me, she’d raise the book and I’d brace myself for impact. Whack. The notebook slapped the top of my head. It was almost a coincidence that whenever Nicole pummeled me with her notebook, the teacher had her back to us. I thought nothing of it since most days were filled with her raising her hand, me flinching, and us laughing. When class was over, Nicole and I walked to English. I was about to put my phone away when she reached over and snatched it.
      “Hey!”
      “Now,” she said and lifted the phone to see my screen. “Let’s see what the password is.”
      “Stop. Give it back,” I said. “Come on, it’s not funny.”
      “Let’s try one, one, two, eight.”
      “Nicole, stop.”
      We entered the hallway filled with rusty lockers, smelly teenagers, and stressed teachers.
I walked alongside the lockers while she took up the rest of the hallway.
      “Nope, darn. How about three, four, three, two?”
      My face started to burn. “Give it back,” I snapped.
      She stopped and looked at me. Then a giant smile appeared. After so many years, I should have known that was the warning. The next thing I knew, she hip-bumped me so hard I slammed against the lockers the way a child threw a rag doll at the wall when having a tantrum. A clash echoed throughout the hall and a few students turned to see the commotion. A sharp pain shot down my shoulder. The bell rang and Nicole sighed as she walked into the classroom.
      “Look what you did,” she called. “You made me late.”
     I stood there for a moment, not knowing how to break down. My cheeks were hot and tears waited their turn to fall. I wanted to sink into the depths of an imaginary couch and hide from the world; to go to a place where no hand was raised and where flinching was no longer an automatic reflex. A crevice that evicted humanity for once.

      When I was sixteen, I realized it was not friendship but abuse that I had discovered. Similar to how some confused lust with love, I mixed up friendship with bullying. Younger me thought that that’s what friends did—they roughed you up, called you names, and psychologically tore you down. I had no siblings to compare them to and I hated confrontation. Perhaps that was why I sought people out of loneliness or boredom. I don’t know. All I know is that a person can only take so much before they break.
      One night, I told my mom about what had been going on. She empathized with me on every level and told me about a girl who had bullied her in elementary. The old pain resurfaced and we bonded over the sad truth of how certain people can make someone feel like no one. She told me how some instilled fear into their prey but that the crucial part was the reaction to that fear.
      “Don’t let her throw you around,” she said.
      I nodded. She wanted me to go to the vice principal but I was hesitant. If my own voice could barely do justice to a girl my age, what was the point of speaking to an adult? But the odd thing is that it is much easier to talk to someone who is willing to listen than to someone who isn’t. Certain people have the ability to create safe spaces and from that moment onward, I knew I wanted to be one of those people.

      A few days later, I made a beeline to the VP. He listened to my concerns and frustrations, then immediately had me write down everything that had happened to me.
      “You want me to write down everything?” I asked him.
      “Yes, as much as you can remember.”
      I spent a solid thirty minutes writing down everything I could remember from the
paperback concussions to the WWE locker tournaments. Paragraph after paragraph. When I was done, I handed over the novel of crimes to him. He returned to me a blue piece of paper. I had known about this paper beforehand, it was the same paper Mom had mentioned a few days ago. She was familiar with the system.
      “All you have to do is sign it,” he said, “If that’s what you still want.”
     I nodded. He slid the paper over and I signed for my divorce. I was no longer bound to the psychological bruises that managed to show on my skin. Yet the bruises that had once appeared all over my body became branded into my memory. I couldn’t decide which was worse. But, I had the option to walk away and suddenly I became a professional sprinter.
      By the following week, the normal ETA of ten minutes to school became twenty as I passed by my old high school and stepped into a new one. Being the new kid didn’t bother me as much since most of my childhood consisted of switching schools. I was the new kid in preschool, first, third, fifth, and eighth grade, and now junior year of high school. Whether it was a few cities over or down the block, my parents tried their best to give me a good education. I found it comical at times because, to me, education was education. Books were books. But teachers were not teachers. They were the ones who made the difference and listened. They were my school parents and I thank my parents for raising me to respect them.
      I never found out what happened to Nicole. She may have joined a professional WWE team or attended college. Who knew? That was the last time we ever spoke.

#

      The first mistake I made as a nineteen-year-old at the University of Oregon was registering for a chemistry class as an environmental science major when I despised anything related to science. The computer science course I took the following semester was easier. But for some reason, I never listened to my intuition. My second mistake was sitting in the far left back, near the door. It could have been my aura or just bad luck, but I became very unlucky the day she picked me as her seatmate. On the first day of chem class, I met my new “Nicole”.

      Ashkah, the alcoholic chem major who had mommy issues and berated you by the minute. It was a wonderful way to spice up my first semester at college. Not to be mean, but rather realistic, she resembled a rat. She had beady eyes, a nose that looked more like a snout and was constantly scrunching her face. All she was missing were a few whiskers. At one point, I thought she pulled out a block of cheese from her backpack but it was just her scientific calculator. The third mistake I made was that I told her practically everything about my life because I had not learned my lesson from oversharing.
      “Are you retarded or something? It’s Lithium,” she said after I had asked her a question about Alkali metals.
       I slumped into my seat. “Oh right,” I said and shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
     “Yeah no duh. No wonder you got broken up with, you can’t even read a periodic table. I wouldn’t want to date someone with an IQ of 3. ”
      I tried to laugh it off but it was no use, there seemed to be an infinite amount of ammunition.
     “How did they let you into this school? Oh, wait—their acceptance rate is like 85%,” she snorted. Then she switched it up.
     “Anyways, do you want to come to a party with me tonight? None of my friends want to be around me when I’m drunk and I don’t want to go alone. Come with, it’s not like you’re doing anything.”
     At this point, I had given up on lying and my efforts of trying to do so flew out the window altogether.
      “Oh uh. I have some homework,” I said. “So I can’t.”
      “What? Aren’t you a business major? You guys don’t have homework. Just skip it and come hang out with me.”
      “I don’t drink,” I said.
      She scoffed, “God you’re lame. No wonder you don’t have any friends. Is that why you always sit alone in class?” She threw her hands up. “And you wonder why you’re failing. Thank God I’m here to save you.”
      I said nothing. Around this point, any ability to use my voice just disappeared. It was almost as if I felt too tired to fight back or maybe too weak to stand up for myself. It was debilitating. But this time, I did not run to Mom or the Vice Principal. I was tired of running away from people that hurt me and even more tired of hiding behind people to protect me. So I ran to my roommate instead.
      “Meagan,” I said as I barged into our room.
      “What’s up?”
      “I don’t want to say I’m being bullied but—”
      She instantly went into Mama Bear mode. “Who is she? What dorm does she live in?”
      I smiled, “No no, it’s okay. I just don’t know how to confront her.” I went on to tell her
the microscopic stories that had accumulated throughout the semester.
      “What about talking to her during the next class?” she suggested.
      “Well, the good thing is that the next class is the final exam so we won’t be near each
other and we’re going to be seated across the room from each other. Plus, I don’t want to do in-person contact right now.”
      She nodded, “Got it. How about text?”
      “What would I say?”
      She coached me through the confrontation and as soon as I expressed my feelings to
Ashkah, a long apology followed.
      “What do you think?” Meagan asked me.
      “I don’t know. I don’t think I can be friends with someone who disrespected me like that.
It was mean, she attacked my intelligence.”
      “Nina. You need to understand that she was never your friend and that that is not an
example of what a friend is. You and I are friends. Friends are kind and have each other’s backs, not stab them. You shouldn’t be friends with her anyway, she looks like a rat.”
      I smiled as reassurance filled the room. Yet doubt stood in the hallway.
      “What if she comes up to me and asks about it? What if—”
      “You don’t have to answer her. You can do whatever you want—walk away, ignore her, or just tell her straight up that you don’t want to talk to her.”
      Never in my life did I think that any of those options were available nor did I believe in myself enough to try those tactics. But this time, I was just ever so slightly stronger inside. So, in the next class, I showed up and saw Ashkah. I had decided to mind my business and luckily, she did too. The last words that were exchanged were from last night’s texts, which included the apology left on read. That was the last time we ever spoke.

#

      I still don’t fully understand why I’ve attracted those kinds of people—the kind that had
no issue disrespecting me as if their unfiltered mouths gave mine flavor. What did meanness taste like? Well, sometimes it was bitter but other days it tasted like high school locker paint and chemical reactions.
    I wondered if I had a magnetic field that attracted bullies. Or maybe they sensed I had no backbone. Perhaps I was spineless and was filled with nothing but stuffing. It frustrated me when I told myself that I was going to find my voice that year yet it remained at the same volume: mute. Sometimes I envisioned myself as if I were a rag doll—small enough to be picked up and thrown at the wall but observant nonetheless. I came to understand that it wasn’t my job to carry their bags of insecurity. Yet why did my hands hurt and why was my heart heavy? I think that’s why I distanced myself a lot of the time—for protection. But I’ve realized that no matter where I go, Northern California or Oregon, I’ll always be a rag doll until I change the definition.
      Rag dolls are one of the oldest children’s toys in existence and are made from spare scraps of material. In ancient times, the doll connected the living with the dead due to the spirit of the ancestors. They didn’t have names or faces so that evil spirits could not enter or disturb them. I don’t know what’s better—to have a name that means something but stay unprotected in the real world or to have no identity at all and feel safe. I may be a rag doll but I am not the kind that gets thrown at the wall. I’m the kind little kids hold onto while on their way to the grocery store or when they can’t sleep. I attend every vacation and sleepover and am never forgotten. I am a rag doll that gets buckled into her own seat in the car. Perhaps I’m not my protector but at least I’m someone else’s.
     When I was sixteen, I left Nicole. When I was nineteen, I confronted Ashkah. Now I am twenty-one and standing in front of my bathroom mirror. I had found the remote that had been buried in the depths of my imaginary couch and held it out in front of me. I angled it towards my reflection’s mouth and pressed the unmute button. Now the rag doll in me could speak.

Nina Fillari is an amateur writer and photographer. Former collegiate track and field athlete, she spends her time writing, hiking, coffee shop hopping, and going to the cinema (the trailers are her favorite part). ​