“Is That Right?”
When I was in middle school, I spent a lot of time with a group of people who had one person as their ringleader. This person was a huge bully but, for whatever reason, everyone acted like she wasn’t. If she made you her target, everyone would turn against you without question and you’d be subjected to horrible bullying.
In one instance of this, she began targeting another girl in the group for seemingly no reason and began a vicious campaign against her. At one point during all this, I was sitting in one of my classes with another person in the group making hopeful plans for all of us to go see some movie that was out or something (knowing good and well my mama never let me out the house – and I’m glad now that she didn’t!). As I excitedly listed all the people that could come with us on this outing, I absentmindedly mentioned this person in the group who had been ousted. However, I quickly realized my error and corrected myself, noting that she wouldn’t be able to come with us on our outing and hinting at the fact that everyone was (at the direction of the group’s ringleader) mad at her.
It took a minute for the person I was talking to realize (or maybe remember) what I was hinting at – I don’t know why I was hinting instead of just outrightly talking about what was going on. It was likely due to fear – I was extremely afraid of the ringleader. But a moment after she did, she stopped and looked at me and said, “But is that right?” questioning whether it was okay for the girl who had been ousted to be treated as she was being treated.
I was so shocked to hear someone actually question the ringleader’s behavior (and scared because I was worried someone else might hear) that I stared at this person dumbfounded for a really long time. So long that she eventually took my shocked expression as a sign that she had said the wrong thing so she changed the subject. No matter how I tried to get her to return to the previous topic of conversation, she wouldn’t.
But that moment has always stayed with me – the fact that this person bravely questioned what was wrongly happening in that group. I wish I had been that way and I want to be that way.
