"I'll be fine, mom."
The words had become a ritual. Each morning, when Tamara was about to walk out the door, her mom would hand her lunch credits to her and say, "Are you sure you'll be okay? You can stay home if you want to."
And every morning Tamara would square her shoulders bravely and say, "I'll be fine, mom." Then she would take the creds and march out the door and down to the bus stop, a resolute smile plastered on her face.
They were just kids; what could they do to her?
The first day of school, Tamara took Poogly with her. The bigger girls teased her and the bigger boys took him and tossed him back and forth as she desperately tried to get him back. Something awful might have happened, but eventually a teacher saw and intervened. She made the boys stop and give Poogly back, but Tamara never brought him back again. She kissed his forehead each morning and left him sleeping on her pillow.
They hadn't let her have Poogly either.
Tamara didn't make friends easily. The bigger kids thought she was shy and either teased her or bullied her when they didn't ignore her. The smaller kids thought she was scary, with her solemn grey eyes and quiet intensity. It was easier to pretend she didn't exist. Sometimes, Tamara went to the bathroom just so she could look in the mirror. She always saw her reflection, but it didn't help. She was still invisible.
She had survived Them. She could survive them, too.
At first, she would come home and cry while her mom stroked her hair and told her it would all be alright. But then her mom would cry too and there would be low conversations late at night when her parent's thought that she was sleeping. In the mornings, her mom would squeeze her hand so tight it turned white and tell her over and over that she didn't have to go. Sometimes Tamara gave in, and then her mom called the school and pretended she was sick, and they would bake cookies and read stories together and pretend that tomorrow there would be no such thing as school. It never worked.
It was the good things that melted away like cotton candy in the rain. Bad things stayed, like old gum stuck to the bottom of a sneaker.
The last night conversations got longer and louder. In the morning, when Tamara went down the stairs, her mom's eyes would be red. Things couldn't go like this. You couldn't shut out the world; it always snuck back into through the chinks. You had to face it.
She stopped crying, at least where anyone could see.
She smiled each morning to let her mom know she was alright when she walked through the door. But by the time she got to the bus stop, her smile was gone. Serious grey eyes looked resolutely ahead, at the stop, on the bus, in class. No one tried to talk to her anymore. The teachers didn't know what to do with her; she was too quiet, too serious, too adult for a little girl. They collected her homework, gave her stickers for attendance, and called on her when she raised her hand.
At recess, she went straight for the swings. She would rock back and forth, gently pumping her legs. It almost felt like flying. She would sit there forever, or until a bigger kid shoved her off. Then she would go sit by the edge of the playground and trace familiar shapes in the dust.
Once, the recess monitor asked her why she had such a fixation with bats. Tamara just stared at her with her solemn grey eyes until the woman threw up her hands in exasperation and walked away.
Batman was not something she had to share, not with them.
When she was older, Tamara would understand what unsettling meant. For now, she only knew that if she stared at them long and hard enough, she wouldn't have to answer their questions. Now, she had a weapon. Sometimes, she wished she didn't. But they had their snickers and their taunts and their pointing and their feet sticking out to trip her and their cold eyes and their looks that went right through her like she wasn't even there.
If they dropped their weapons, she'd drop hers.
She came home each day with a smile on her face. Only Poogly ever saw her cry, late at night when she hugged him so tight he would have suffocated if he was really-real and not just real-to-her and her hot, wet tears soaked into his worn purple plush. Only Poogly ever knew the nightmares that woke her, silently screaming into the pillows, clutching his soft, shabby self to her chest as it heaved, up and down, up and down.
Tamara took the credits from her mom and smiled. "I'll be fine, mom."
Some days, she didn't know who she was trying to convince.