Michael Chapman

Turning Point

In sixth grade I started attending McClure Middle School. McClure is a public middle school located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle where I grew up. It is made up of an old red brick main building and old decaying portable classrooms scattered across the edges of the school. When I started school there I had friends from the previous elementary school I had attended that was also located in Queen Anne. The kids that I was friends with from that school had pretty much the same family background as me. They were upper middle class kids from stable two parent families that also lived in the neighborhood. McClure was different in the fact that it drew kids from all over the city. When I went there in the early to mid 2000’s it was very ethnically diverse for a school in a ninety percent white neighborhood (though recently they have stopped busing in students from South Seattle, so the racial makeup of the school has changed to more represent the neighborhood). Like other schools, McClure had honors classes for the perceived smart kids and what were termed “regular” classes for everyone else. This was tracking at its finest. Academics were never my strong suit even then and I was placed in the regular classes. The thing was, that the honors classes were filled with all of the upper middle class kids from the neighborhood that I had been friends with, while the regular classes were filled with kids from all over the city. When I went to class on the first day of sixth grade I realized I had been separated from all of my elementary school friends, who for the most part all ended up in the same homeroom class.  I remember at first that this was kind of devastating for me. I had thought that I would be in class with my friends but I quickly learned that we would be separated for the majority of the day. I remember feeling shocked, saddened and embarrassed over the fact that I was not in the honors classes. I remember going home that week and being mad at my parents asking why I wasn’t in honors?. But I got over it and over the course of that first year I made friends with the boys (because we would have been only twelve years old when we first met) who would become my best friends for the next 5 years. There names were Will, Andrew , Keiran and Zolton ( who for the record is the only one of any of these people that I have kept in touch with and I still consider one of my closest friends)  and we were all in Mr. Fielder’s home room class.

Mr. Fielder was a great teacher and just a fascinating human being. He loved music and would devote a lot of class time to teaching subjects that interested both him and his students. He was an older fellow I think he turned 62 the year that I had him. He also had tenure and was approaching retirement, so he really just taught us whatever he wanted, whether it was how to bet on horse racing to teach algebra or rock n’ roll history. That was a great year and how I met all of these guys that I would end up spending a considerable amount of time with. This was the first time that I was a part of a real adolescent male friendship group. The years between 12-18 are a particularly interesting time in that during these years the most important people in your life are your friends. For me the world stopped and ended with my group of friends. What they thought of me was how I based my identity during this time period. Shortly after this group emerged, Will found his place as the leader of the group. Will was a bully, probably the worst bully I have ever known in my whole life. He mercilessly bullied his friends and other classmates alike. He also controlled our group of friends like a fascist. If he was mad at you he would literally excommunicate you from the group for months or weeks. He had so much power that for the most part (excluding Zolton, who was too good hearted to ever follow any of Will’s malicious acts) the whole group would follow his lead and not talk to you (except talking shit of course).  It was weird because when I first met him in sixth grade he was nice enough. We really bonded over music and that we were both learning how to play guitar. Will progressed steadily over the next couple years into a really hateful mean person. By high school his actions had become totally out of control. But before high school another person that I need to mention is Maddie M.T. Maddie M.T. has two last names but I am going to leave them out because it doesn’t really matter and she always went by Maddie M.T. Madeline must have been extremely popular name to give your daughter in 1992 because there was like 5 or 6 Maddies in my grade and they all went by Maddie this and Maddie that. Will and I both met Maddie M.T. at the end of seventh grade and we both quickly became somewhat infatuated with her. She was a really cool, smart, beautiful girl who could hang out with the guys and she quickly became part of our group of friends. We had a lot of good times with Maddie M.T. stretching into freshman year of high school. I will say that I was totally in love with her as much as 13/14-year-old boy can be in love with a girl. Will, even in middle school was pretty aggressive towards girls and by high school he had gotten even worse. He was very charismatic and was always the king of manipulating girls to do what he wanted. He had this skill, he would make girls feel like shit but on some level they would actually respond to it. It was pretty twisted.

I went to a different high school than most of my friends from McClure for freshman year but I still stayed in touch with all of them.  After freshman year I transferred to Ballard High School where most of my friends from McClure went. By this time Will had been rebuffed by Maddie so many times that he figured he was never going to get anything from her and that he might as well make her life into a living hell. By sophomore year Will was at his peak of being a bully. He would bully and harass anyone he could but a lot of the time it was either focused on Maddie and her friends or members of our own group of friends. This continued into junior year, which would be my last year at Ballard. By this time we were all experimenting with drugs and alcohol, so a lot of our time would be spent driving around Queen Anne in one of our parents cars drinking, smoking weed and just generally causing trouble. This was when Will started convincing us to start vandalizing Maddie’s house. Writing this sounds ridiculous because I can’t imagine ever doing something like this to someone I cared about but high school was a weird time for me. Will would get us all drunk and then convince us to go egg Maddie’s house or do something else super messed up. We would have literally followed Will off a cliff when we were all drinking, he was that charismatic and I think his charisma only increased when we were all inebriated. I would never participate in the actual vandalism and most times I would try to convince the others to not do it, but I was still there and so I guess I am just as guilty. One night we were all hanging out at the Seattle Center drinking and smoking clove cigarettes from what I remember. I remember us drinking for hours and then I left to walk home. Later that night I woke up to find my phone ringing and that I have a bunch of belligerent, furious messages from Maddie. I figured they must have done something awful but I didn’t know what. That next morning I found out that Will and a couple of other friends threw a brick through Maddie’s mom’s car window. I remember just thinking that this was so messed up and wrong that they had done this for literally no reason. This ignited a small firestorm in our neighborhood and Maddie’s parents got involved and it turned into an epic shit storm. Maddie told her parents how Will had been harassing her for years and that he was pretty much the only one that could have done this. Nobody got arrested but there were threats made and it was just a super unfortunate, totally unnecessary situation. I never talked to Maddie again.

After this I decided I needed to break ties with Will and all of these other people. I started thinking about all of the bullying that I had been a part of just by default because I was friends with Will. I started to feel guilty. I realized I never again wanted to be part of a social group like the one I had been a part of for so long. I wanted to be independent and to make my own choices based on my own morals. I felt like in that group I had no control to be myself without being criticized.  I became conscious of how negative a group mentality could be. After junior year I enrolled in community college and never looked back. This was a turning point for me because I realized that I could be myself without being part of a group of people that defined me.