Chain Reaction
Chain Reaction
Adeline Radloff
Tafelberg
To MJ, who first gave me the idea.
And to Wynand, always.
The Decision
You have a pretty boring life. There’s nothing particularly special about you.
You do well at school – you have to, because you attend your better-than-average school on a scholarship. But you are not the top student in your grade. You are not even in second place. (You are third.)
You are on the debating team, but you’re not the team leader. You’re a good chess player, but you did not get chosen to go overseas with the national team. You did well in the Maths Olympiad, but you did not get a gold medal. (You got silver.)
You are not very sporty, but you are not so bad that your name gets called last when teams are chosen. You made the under-16C hockey team, but so far your team has lost most of its games. (Not because of you. You hope.)
You are not pretty and you are not ugly. You are not fat and you are not thin. You are fifteen years old.
On this particular Monday morning you wake up already tired. You do all the boring things you have to do every morning. Bathroom – Kitchen – Bedroom. You see too late that there’s a big yellow stain on your white school shirt. You have no idea how that happened. You look for another shirt but you can’t find one. You wet the corner of a towel, rub some soap into it and scrub at the stain. It works, mostly. But now you’re a bit late, and you have a big wet spot on your shirt.
You kiss your mom goodbye. Your dad has already left for work. Your sister and your brother are arguing about something stupid. You ignore them. Their school is just around the corner and they have lots of time to get ready.
You run all the way to the bus stop, hoping you won’t be too late. You’re not too late. You find a seat, for a change, and you stare out the window for most of the ride. You like to see Table Mountain getting bigger and bigger as you get closer to the city.
You get off at your stop and you walk the last few blocks to school. All around you children are being driven to school by their parents. Most of the cars are new and shiny and German-made. The traffic, as usual, is terrible; you easily outpace the Porsche that’s driving in the street beside you. You wonder if that’s an example of irony.
When you get closer to the school gates you see Stephanie Adolphus leaning against the railing. She and her friends have surrounded someone; they are laughing and screaming and making all kinds of personal comments. You look down and you walk faster.
You don’t like bullies. It’s not a moral thing, not really, nor is it a carefully thought-out position. You simply don’t understand the impulse. You find cruelty repulsive.
Stephanie Adolphus is the biggest bully in the school. It is clear to you that she has some sort of problem. Everybody here is scared of her.
You’re not too sure why people at this school are so afraid of her. She only ever uses words to hurt her victims: embarrassing them in public, spreading nasty rumours, tormenting them on social media, that sort of thing. She also seems to have some strange power to turn people against each other – girls who have been friends for years start to hate each other under her influence. You find the whole thing very odd, but not particularly scary. (In the school your sister and brother go to, a bully once shot another child through the foot. Just for fun. On the school premises.)
You are not scared of her but that’s beside the point really, because she never picks on you. Sometimes you wonder why people like Stephanie never pick on you, but you don’t think about it too much. Mostly you just try keep a low profile, and get on with your life.
You look at your watch. The bus made good time: there are perhaps five more minutes before the bell rings. You walk closer to the gang of bullying girls ahead of you. You have no choice: they are blocking the pedestrian entrance.
Today’s victim, you see, is Krystle Thomas, a grade 11 girl. You know her name because everybody knows her name. Krystle Thomas is the most beautiful girl in the school. No competition. She might even be the most beautiful girl in Cape Town. You’re surprised that the bullies have ganged up on her today. Usually they don’t pick on pretty, thin white girls. You walk past them, keeping your head down. But you catch her eye in spite of yourself.
Her eyes are begging you to help her. She is trapped and scared and desperate.
For a moment you hover, uncertain. You have to make a decision.
Then you realise you’re being ridiculous. This girl is older than you. And she’s rich and beautiful. Why on earth would she need your help? You cast your eyes down and pretend you don’t see what’s going on. You make your way towards your first class.
It’s just another day.
First Link
The click of the security gate makes my stomach clench in fear. Oh no. Why is she back so early? Stephanie usually has swimming after school on a Monday; she hardly ever comes home before six. I look at my watch: 3.45pm. I have no idea why she’s home so early, but I’m willing to bet it means trouble for me.
I hold my breath as I hear her coming up the steps to the front door. She’s humming a cheerful song, obviously in a good mood. My heart begins to race in my chest.
I need to lock my bedroom door.
I get up, very quietly, and tiptoe across the room. I’m taking a big risk – if she hears me locking my door she’ll be very angry. I don’t really have a choice though. Dad only comes home at seven on Mondays, which means I’ll be alone with her for three whole hours. The thought of it makes me shudder.
Perhaps she won’t hear me. Perhaps she won’t even notice I’m here. Sometimes she forgets about me. I’m praying it will be one of those days. I’m praying that she won’t hear a thing.
I turn the key. Carefully. There is almost no sound.
I breathe out, softly. I lean my ear against the door. I listen.
Her footsteps are coming closer. I know the door is locked, but a part of me still wants to run. I can escape through the window: she hardly ever bothers to go outside to look for me. But I’m worried that the floorboards will creak. If she knows I’m running away, the punishment will be worse later on.
I remain standing, frozen.
Her footsteps come closer, the sound of her shoes against the wooden floors almost as loud as the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. Closer.
She passes my room without even pausing, going straight to the kitchen. She opens the fridge. She is now singing loudly.
I take a trembling breath.
Maybe it’ll be okay today. Maybe she’ll leave me alone.
Maybe.
* * *
Nobody knows what it’s like to live my life. To live with Stephanie as my sister, every single day. Nobody knows, and what’s worse, nobody wants to know.
Like at school, right, we had this whole week where the focus was on bullying. There was a special session after assembly, and posters all over the school, and we had experts coming in to talk to us in LO. . . You get the idea.
Well, what they basically told us was this: that deep down, bullies are just normal kids who need help. That children who like to hurt others are usually just “insecure” and “looking for positive attention”. That they need to “learn better interpersonal skills”. That “communication is important”.
That’s the kind of thing they told us.
And you know, to be fair to those experts, maybe there are bullies like that. Maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a whole bunch of good kids who are destroying other children’s lives by accident, because they are “misunderstood”, or because their “interpersonal skills” aren’t quite up to scratch.
But my sister is not that kind of bully.
My sister is the
kind of bully grown-ups don’t like to talk about. The kind who’s not misunderstood, or insecure, or lacking any of those all-important “communication skills” that teachers are always going on about.
Oh no. Not at all.
In fact, Stephanie has fantastic communication skills –that’s what makes her so effective. She knows exactly what to say, what to do, how to hurt you the most. She’s not misunderstood either. Or maybe she is, but the only thing people don’t understand about her is how much she likes it.
Stephanie likes hurting people. She likes to see the fear in other kids’ eyes. She likes the power it gives her. She likes causing pain.
She loves it.
But that’s the one thing grown-ups don’t want to know. They won’t accept it. I don’t know why, but for some reason adults feel better imagining that all children are really sweet and innocent inside. They need to believe it for some reason, and they keep on believing it, no matter what happens.
I was four years old when Stephanie forced me into the tumble dryer. I had touched one of her ornaments and I had to be punished. I remember the panic of being locked up in such a small space. The fear. And then there was the noise, and the heat, and the terrible sense of being slammed against those narrow walls.
My dad came back early that day, and that probably saved my life. The doctor at the hospital told him I couldn’t have been in the machine for more than a minute. And maybe that’s true. I can’t remember too much about it.
But in spite of what my dad saw with his own eyes – in spite of the burns and the bruises, in spite of my screams and all my tears – he just couldn’t believe that his daughter would do something so evil on purpose. He said it must have been an accident. A game that went too far. He didn’t want to believe me. Nobody has ever believed me.
Stephanie was nine years old then, and if you look at the pictures my dad took of her that year, you would see a round-faced, shiny-eyed child with lots of curly brown hair tied back in a ribbon. A cute little girl. Too sweet for words.
But that’s not what I saw.
When you’re a four-year-old boy, small for your age, and you look up at an older sister like Stephanie, you see something very different. Something grown-ups can’t see.
You see someone who is a lot bigger than you.
You see someone who is mean and powerful, and stronger and smarter than you will ever be. You see the person who turned on that machine, laughing. You see your sister the way she really is. You see her.
Dad refuses to see her. He always has.
And yet he must have seen the tiny black bruises that so often appeared on my back when I was little. He must have seen the skin that was torn from my feet, the finger broken in two places, the bite marks on my arms, the patches of hair missing from my head.
But he believed her stories every time. That we were playing. That it was an accident. That I slipped. That I was clumsy.
He believed every single lie she ever told him.
Later on, when I got older and finally had the right words to explain things to people, she changed her tactics. Of course. Stephanie isn’t stupid. Once I could really start telling on her, she stopped doing the things that made visible marks. She avoided leaving evidence.
In some ways things got a lot worse after that. She started hurting me in cleverer, sneakier ways – sometimes physically, but more often by messing with my mind.
I don’t know how she does it, but somehow Stephanie knows exactly what my deepest fears and weaknesses are. And once she gets hold of those she never lets up, spitting her poison into my brain until I’m completely powerless against her. Her words make me feel dull and heavy and stupid. As if my whole body is full of dirt.
Her words make me feel that I’m pathetic and somehow . . . wrong.
Stephanie knows what’s important to me, which is how she’s managed to destroy almost everything that I have ever really loved. She dropped my grandfather’s watch into the toilet “by accident”. She put soap in my fish tank so that all my fish died. She slipped and “fell” on the volcano I built for my science project. She even spilt a bowl of soup over Mom’s last letter, the one she wrote to me while she was pregnant, before I was born. I still have that letter. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, although you can’t read the words any more because the paper is all scrunched up and the writing is blurry.
I have tried to talk to my dad about all of this, of course, many, many times. But all he ever says is that I should stand up for myself. He says that I should expect some teasing from an older sibling. He says that I am a big boy now, and that I need to be stronger than this. He thinks I’m exaggerating. He thinks that I am weak.
I am twelve years old, and I am not weak.
Dad has no idea what it feels like to grow up with so much fear. He has no idea what it feels like to be hated, so intensely hated, in your own home, every day of your life.
I later found out that I wasn’t her only victim and in some ways that made it a bit better. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s true. It makes me feel like less of a loser to know that I’m not the only one she hates so much and treats so badly.
Once, after some of the other parents at Stephanie’s school complained about her bullying, the principal forced us to go to family therapy sessions. It didn’t help though. Stephanie knows exactly how to handle grown-ups. It’s ridiculous – they fall for it every single time. All she has to do is to start crying, or to tell them how hard it is to grow up without a mother, and they all begin to crumble. The therapist even got tears in his eyes!
Stephanie laughed about it later, so hard. She loves tricking people into believing her lies; it makes her feel clever and powerful when they’re being so gullible. Sometimes she tells the most outrageous lies just for fun, simply so that she can sit back and laugh at people’s reactions.
Dad did not want to go back to those therapy sessions. I think hearing all those things about how Stephanie was “acting out” made him feel guilty. He thought it meant he was a bad father.
But that’s not what makes him a bad father.
My dad tries very hard: he works two jobs to support us, he cooks for us every night, he sends us to good schools, he helps us with our homework, he never yells, he is kind.
What makes him a bad father is that he won’t see Stephanie for what she is.
He won’t see her. He won’t see.
* * *
Stephanie stays in her room for almost an hour. I listen to her laughing and talking to her friends on her phone. She sounds happy, as if she’s had a really good day. I know what that means. It means that someone else must have had a really bad day.
But to be honest, I don’t care. I’m just glad it wasn’t me.
As the minutes tick by, I begin to relax a little. I sit on my bed and I try to concentrate on my schoolwork. But I’m too tense to really focus and my whole body is sore from trying so hard to be quiet.
And then, after a while, I hear her bedroom door opening and her footsteps coming down the hall. She stops outside my room, just like I knew she would. She tries to open the door. When the door won’t open she starts rattling the handle. I feel sick.
“Dillan!”
I don’t answer and I don’t move from the bed. Instead I bite down on the one side of my cheek. The inside of my mouth is always raw. Biting your cheek is better than biting your nails because nobody can see the blood.
“Dillan.” Her voice sounds entirely reasonable. “I know you’re in there. Open up.”
I curl myself up into a ball. I pull a pillow over my head.
“I said open this door.”
The pillow doesn’t really work. I can still hear her perfectly. A few seconds pass.
“ Dillan”. She’s using one of her fake voices. The concerned one. Like she’s just a normal, worried older sister. “Why are you doing this? Open up.”
There are two more hours before dad comes home. That’s too long. I close my eyes. I
try to think of a song. Sometimes if I sing a song in my head, I can block her out.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone
I pull the pillow tighter over my ears, and sing the same words over and over in my head.
What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter
Doesn’t mean I’m over cause you’re gone
Time slows down, the whole world becoming smaller and smaller. And then it becomes smaller still, until it’s only me. In my head, where I’m safe.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone
A part of me still hears her voice outside my door, but the sound is far away.
What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter
Doesn’t mean I’m over cause you’re gone
I sing the song over and over. Over and over.
But then I lose my concentration and suddenly the world is back.
I have no idea how much time has passed. Stephanie is hammering on the door now, and she’s angry, because she’s using her real voice. The hatred in it makes me shrivel up inside.
“Okay then, you little piece of SNOT! I am counting to TEN. And if the door isn’t open by then, you will be PUNISHED!”
A wave of blood goes up to my head.
“Do you hear me? I am talking about a real Code RED Punishment.”
My whole body flushes in fear, and disgust, and terror. Stephanie’s punishments are graded, in the same colours as a traffic light. Code Green means it’s bad. Code Yellow means it’s worse. Code Red means the worst of the worst.
“One.”
She sounds calmer now. Almost reasonable.
“Two.”
But I know this isn’t really a good sign.
“Three.”
All it means is that she’s starting to enjoy herself.