November 8, 2016 • 29 mins
In grade 8, Julia was bullied so badly by a group of girls that she changed schools without telling anyone. Soon after, the girls from her old school showed up at her house and rang her doorbell. She didn’t answer it. For the past 20 years, Julia’s been wondering what those girls wanted.
Credits
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein.
This episode was also produced by Chris Neary and Kalila Holt. The senior producer is Wendy Dorr.
Editing by Alex Blumberg and Jorge Just.
Special thanks to Emily Condon, Maya Goldberg-Safir, Lina Chambers, Emily Kennedy, Laura Scott, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Haley Shaw.
Music for this episode by Christine Fellows, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Keen Collective. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, Happy birthday, birthday girl. Are you going out for
dinner tonight with Rick or anything?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
What?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
It's not my birthday for another seven months?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
You hang on a second, hang on, I'm.
Speaker 4 (00:14):
Hanging I'm hanging out in traffic, so it's.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Perfect for you.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
According to my calendar alert, it is your birthday, are.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
You Because I don't know how many times I'm gonna
say it's not my birthday, and how many times you're
going to repeat that it is my birthday.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
This year you.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Didn't Actually, this year, you forgot to call me on
my birthday, not even an email nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Okay, okay, what about that time you got me an
ice cream cake for my birthday knowing I'm lactose sensitive.
Do you remember the man at the roller ring kept
on knocking on the bathroom door?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh good?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
From Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight
today's episode. Julia. Julia is a journalist and she's endlessly
(01:29):
curious about the world around her. Once on assignment for
The New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria,
and as a part of her research, she didn't bathe
for a month. She's done political stories too, where she's
kept after a source or a story for years, which
is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer
(01:50):
to a question that's been dogging her for over two
decades all the more curious.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty
sure it's a Monday, and I was fourteen years old.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
This is Julia, and the question she can't stop thinking
about revolves around a moment from her own life. It
all began twenty one years ago in the eighth grade
at one of the fanciest all girls schools in Montreal.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I remember wearing my itchy green kilt.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
You have to wear a uniform there, yes, okay.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
That's sort of a puke green uniform with a button
down white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties.
Speaker 6 (02:32):
We also had bloomers.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
It was just sort of like a balloon with holes
in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
And were they ruffled? No, cursed with a lifelong inability
to distinguish between bloomers, couloats, pantelats, pantaloons, drawers, and even knickerbockers.
I was glad for the opportunity to finally sort it
all out the shape of it, but that's not why
we're here. So after a fifteen minutes of inquiry, I
was ready to move on. Okay, sorry, yes, I'll go
(03:06):
go on.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
As I left morning assembly on Monday and walked into homeroom,
I looked for my desk and I stopped and looked
around and it was missing. My desk was gone, and
that was where it started.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that
was just the beginning. Without warning, the girl she'd been
friends with since third grade completely froze her out, and
Julia had no clue why. To top it off, her
best friend was the ringleader, the.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Girl who used to be my best friend. I guess
we can give her a name. Let's call her Jane.
It was just rae. Knowing that she and I had
hung out at my house and all of the secrets
music exchanged and all of the fun we'd had, and
then seeing how she was being now it just it
(04:13):
was a bit surreal. But yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Then what started happening was every time she walked into
the classroom, Julia noticed that the girls would drop what
they were doing and study her. If she so much
as scratched her nose or sniffled, they'd furiously take notes.
It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some big project
that she knew nothing about. The notes were collected by Jane,
(04:43):
who buried them in her desk. The girls kept at
it day after day until finally Julia reached her breaking point.
She gathered up her courage, and, like the good reporters
she'd eventually become, decided to investigate.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I eventually snuck into home room one day during recess.
It was empty, and I searched Jane's desk, and there
at the bottom I found a nicely bound document with
a cover page. And I picked it up and read it,
and it said one hundred reasons why we hate Julia.
(05:25):
In my memory, this document I'm holding is one hundred
pages long, but I'm sure it was only ten. And
I opened it and inside I read about myself. Everything
was something about me that they hated. I hate the
way she walks, I hate the sound of her voice,
(05:50):
I hate her face.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
After that, Julia started skipping school. Eventually, she told her
parents what was going on, and they contacted the administration,
but the bullying continued. Ultimately, her parents decided that the
only solution was to send her to a new school,
but Julia still had a few weeks left at the
old one.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
I became a double agent. I pretended that I was
coming back the following year, and I didn't tell anyone
I was changing schools because I had no friends left
to tell.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The school year ended and her new life began, But
because her new school was so close to the old one,
Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would
find her. Every day, she'd map her route to and
from school, carefully avoiding the streets her old friends lived on,
the coffee shops they hung out at, and for the
(06:53):
most part, it worked. For those first few weeks at
her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight.
She was starting to feel like things would be okay.
But then one day after school, Julia was upstairs in
the den doing homework and the doorbell rang. She went
to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the
(07:15):
doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane,
along with a few of her old classmates.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the
second floor windows. I was in a state of total panic,
and I saw them in my mind's eye, there on
the front steps, waiting for someone to answer the door,
and I was just on the ground, trying to breathe,
and they rang the doorbell again and I waited.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Eventually they left. And this is the moment that Julia
has fixated on for over twenty years. Why had the
girls shown up at her door? And what did they want?
Maybe they'd shown up to bully her, but maybe they'd
had a change of heart, realized how mean they'd been,
and were there to apologize. Whatever the case, Julia was
(08:15):
too scared to open the door and find out, and
that decision to not go downstairs and face the girls
who tormented her still haunts Julia. Even listening to her
talk about it all these years later, it still feels raw.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
I'm thirty five now, and that day has become one
of my only regrets because the memory of my weakness
sometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then,
and it makes me feel weak.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Even though you were you were just a child, I
was fourteen.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
I think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere
in my physiology. It makes me fearful when I think
of it. I just wish I'd gone down there. I
wish I'd had the guts.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
What do you think has stopped you up until now
from just posing the question, you know, like just finding
the girls and just asking them why they were there
that day.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
I'm afraid to find out what I did to bring
on the bullying, because it's very possible that I was bad.
I think, deep down, I don't really know what was wrong.
I don't know what was wrong with me, and I
don't want to know what was wrong with me.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself,
or being hard on this little kid basically, you know, like,
do you look at photographs of yourself at that age
in try not too well? I think you'd be surprised
by like I mean, I have memories of being that
age where I thought like I was at weddings and
(10:15):
I thought I was like flirting with adult women and
stuff like that. And I look at pictures of myself
and I look like a cabbage patched all.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
I think I probably looked like the ten men because
I had a full set of braces, and then after
I graduated from my braces, I immediately went to headgear
neck gear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
But I've only seen them on TV sitcoms.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So combine that with my glasses, it was a sad
state of affairs.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal
for good.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Depending on how you know the outcome of that conversation,
I might have chosen not to leave Montreal. When I'm
in Montreal once a year, I avoid the neighborhood I
grew up in where all of this went down, for
the most part, and those girls are long gone. I mean,
we're all grown ass women now with careers and jobs
(11:10):
and kids. And here I am avoiding friends of friends
on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls
to know what's going on with my life.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Do you feel like, had you answered the door and
they had apologized to you, that that would have changed
your life in some way, that it would have changed
your relationship with your past and the city and these friends.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
I think it might have, but I'll never know what
they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer
the door.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your
whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that
you try to find out why they were at the
door that day, Julius suggests that maybe the past to
just stay in the past.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
You know, we move on with our lives. We you know,
we move on, and it's another thing to open up.
You know that Pandora's Box.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Again, Even the language that you're using about fear of
opening up that Pandora's box, it is so similar to
the language that you used in describing like fear of
opening that door.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
So what you're saying is I should really just finish
the job.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
I think so after the break opening Pandora's Box, in
(12:56):
spite of her initial trepidation, once Juliet decided to find
out why the girls came to her door that day,
she was all in. Watching her take it on was impressive.
Julia went back to Montreal and reached out to her
former best friend Jane, who agreed to meet with her
but said she didn't remember anything. And so, for the
first time since eighth grade, Julia returned to her former
(13:19):
school to go through the yearbook and find the names
of her old classmates. And then she started searching.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
I reached out to probably twelve girls from from my grade. Yeah,
and in my worst moments, I imagine that none of
them were going to write back, and it was sort
of going to feel like, you know, I was on
the outside of the group again, you know, and that
(13:49):
the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were
still in play and all that. But then the responses
started to trickle in.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Yes, this is Julia.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Julia logged hours and hours of interviews.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Cool and rang my doorbell. I thought you might have
been one of them.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I don't think so. Do you remember anything about that?
Speaker 5 (14:09):
Was I there?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
No? Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
I remember one time you were hiding in a bathroom stall.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
But just like Jane, not a single person said they
could remember showing up at her door that day.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Oh yeah, well, I honestly don't remember doing that.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
I don't, I don't.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
I'm sorry, I don't.
Speaker 5 (14:29):
I don't remember anything.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I just don't remember it, promised you. I have no
recollection of this.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Well, what each of them did remember was their own pain.
There'd been a lot of bullying that year, and no
one felt safe. Julia heard about one girl who had
found her desk filled with meticulously cut out images from
porn magazines. Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors that she
had aids. I hated that place, said one. It's all
(15:01):
a big fog of chaos, said another, A dark cloud
over the class. You never knew who you could trust.
We were awful, awful little girls. The more Julia heard
about it, it started to sound like a Stephen King novel,
and not one of those cutesy ones about clowns or
talking cars. In almost every conversation, one name kept coming
(15:26):
up as the person who had it the worst. Even
Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba. Sarah had
the misfortune of being the only eighth grader who was
slightly overweight, and as such she was always kept at
a distance in high school. I was also someone who
existed on the margins, so I understand how oftentimes kids
(15:47):
like me, kids like Sarah Taba, become the eyes and
ears of the school, fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses, forced to watch
from the wings. I'm reminded of this all the time
with the friends I went to high school with who
were more popular than me. Remember the time Robert Ciolick
wore a three piece suit to school. I ask the
time Madame Rebert slammed the classroom door so hard the
(16:09):
clock fell off the wall, the day Sharon Wiener got
suspended for leaving the schoolyard during recess. Of course they
don't they were living their lives. But I was on
the sidelines taking it all in, remembering.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Hello, Hi, Sarah, Hi, it's been a really long time.
Speaker 6 (16:33):
Yeah it yes, it has.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and
what she might remember. But when she asked her if
she had any recollection about the day those girls showed
up at her door, Sarah couldn't remember anything.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The first thing I thought of when he said a
group of girls right in the doorbell, I immediately thought
it would be a bad experience, Like it wasn't people
coming looking for you to be like we miss you?
Speaker 5 (17:01):
Where are you?
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Grade eight was a bad year at that schirl. Either
you were being bullied and kicked on or you had
to turn around and become the bully.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
Yeah, maybe there was something toxic, something dark.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I think normal bullying. If there's such a thing as
normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim
and the like. But it was just so pervasive.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Do you remember the day that you realize that I
was gone.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
I don't, actually, no, I remember feeling like you were
just sad all the time.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Remember you being sad too?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (17:49):
One thing I remember people would call you tubby taba.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff
like that. I can't help but think that our grades
behavior had impacts on the staff. What do you mean, well,
(18:19):
I actually I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't.
But miss McDonald killed herself the following year.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Miss McDonald was Julia's favorite teacher and Sarah's too. Miss
McDonald had gone to the school as a student and
later returned to teach biology. She was the fun teacher
who wore frog ear rings.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
You think that there was something to do with what
was happening in the school that caused her to commit suicide.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
I think it had a role in her depression. She
left right in the end of our grade eight year.
Because what I knew of her and with her school,
it was her passion.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
She was an old girl.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
She was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love
of animals and biology and all of us, and we
were a bunch of brats. I remember there being a
lot of associations between that pig that she had on
top of her TV and her a lot of comments
about her way. Yeah, had an impact.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Ms McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer, and when
she came back in the fall, she was no longer
the biology teacher, but a substitute. The last period of
the last day she taught before she killed herself was
a class called Personal and Religious Education. The students considered
the class a joke. Sarah was there that day and.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
The grade was just running around and doing everything they
weren't supposed to do in the classroom. She tried to
get people to calm down and sit down and pay attention,
and like, I wasn't even trying to teach us anything.
I don't even know if there was any material to
cover that day. And then we showed up at school
Monday morning to find out that she killed herself one
(20:22):
for the weekend. Oh my god. She was my.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
Role model.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
She was the person who survived the school despite not
being the stereotypical prefect or perfect girl. She was just
this wonderful, round woman who rejuvenated life and as an
overweight teenager. For me, that was like, okay, so you
(20:55):
don't have to be perfect to achieve anything. Was my
role model who the next year killed herself and like
shattered all my dreams that you can go about living
your life the way you're living your life in this
environment and succeed, which made me want to completely change
(21:17):
my body. The only way that I was going to
get through this school was to lose a bunch of
weight to gain the respect of these people that have
basically disliked me since I was eleven, and I did it.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, I've been really over the years, I've wondered about you,
and then when I looked you up on Facebook, I
saw pictures of you and I clicked right by them.
I thought, oh, I have the wrong person. Yeah, because
you didn't look like yourself, right, So I mean you
didn't you just stopped eating it sounds like.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, yeah, in tenth grade, tenth through eleventh grade, and
then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an
illness that I've been battling for the last twenty years.
(22:22):
It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to
do so that I definitely remember because that's how I.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Ended up in the situation. I am now I'm actually
talking to you from outside of a clinic for treating
eating disorders.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
So I'm really sorry, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
It's not your fault. That's the.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
A sad reality of all of this.
Speaker 7 (22:53):
It's like, yeah, please picture you know, my nerdy looking
fourteen year old self giving you a big hug.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Oh thanks. I actually do have so much to go
because we have to have lunch now, but it was
nice speaking cute and do keep in touch.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated. The scale of
her own pain had been altered in the face of Sarah's.
Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about Julia and
(23:52):
Sarah's conversation, and as I turned it around in my head,
a theory began to form. Mss McDonald had died around
the start of the school year. Wasn't it possible that
those girls had shown up at Julia's door to let
her know. Maybe they'd been worried about the way Julia
had just disappeared from their school and feared the worst.
(24:12):
Wasn't it possible the girls had meant good that day?
That they came to the door, and if so, wouldn't
knowing that changed the way Julia felt about the past
twenty years and maybe even changed the way she saw herself.
So I took this last task upon myself. Hey is
this Christine, Hey Jennifer, this is I found up all
(24:34):
the people Julia had already spoken with, and I ran
my theory by them.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
To be honest, I would love to believe that's what
their intentions were.
Speaker 7 (24:43):
I can't be sure about anything.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I can't say, yeah, sure, that's it, because I don't
have a memory of it.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Okay, well, thank you, bye, all.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Right, you have a great night.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Okay, bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Okay, okay, okay, take it easy.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Hi, bye bye.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
There was only one thing left for me to do.
I just feel like I'm at a loss, Like this
whole thing started off as me encouraging you to give
it a try and that it might be helpful in
some way. And I don't feel like I brought you
any closer to knowing what happened at the door that day.
(25:37):
And I just if.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
There's one of us who's disappointed, it certainly isn't me.
I don't know whether I was emotionally equipped to open
the door as a fourteen year old. But to me,
the important part is is that I opened the door. Now,
I couldn't have I couldn't have confronted that if I
(26:03):
hadn't literally done what we decided we were going to do,
if I hadn't had these phone calls and asked these
hard questions. And I've forgiven that little girl for being
(26:26):
so frightened. I was so ashamed, I was so regretful,
And I don't blame myself for being afraid. Then I
had every right to be. It wasn't rational. And so
I think the biggest challenge for me and all of
this was to allow myself to slip back into that
(26:48):
fourteen year old girl's skin and say, look, you know,
I get it.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
It's okay, you know, it's okay.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
I'm proud of who I was. Then It's been a
long time since I could say that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And you feel like that's happened like that, that's happened
in this process.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Well that makes me feel better.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
Well, I'm happy to make you feel better, Jonathan.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I might.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Ding dong, I'm ding dong.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer
the door?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
That's right, ding dong, Okay, I'm answering the doorkay open
the door. What happened to you?
Speaker 6 (27:49):
I change schools and you know why.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Now that the fern entures returning to its goodwill home,
now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
The damaged post, take this moment to dissolve.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
If we meant it, if we.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Tied, were felt around for far too.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
From things that accidentally talked. Heavyweight is hosted and produced
by me Jonathan Goldstein along with Chris Neary and Khalila Holt.
A senior producer is Wendy Dore, editing by Alex Bloomberg
and Jorge just special thanks to Emily Condon, Maya Goldberg, Safer,
Lena Chambers, Emily Kennedy, Laura Scott, and the Birthday Girl
(29:16):
Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Hailey Shaw, music
by Christine Fellows. Additional music credits for this episode can
be found on our website Gimbletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight.
Our theme song is by the Weaker Thans courtesy of
Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Hailey Shaw.
Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. Next week's episode will
(29:37):
be our season finale in anticipation of season two. If
there's a moment from your past where everything changed, send
us an email to Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com.
Hello, Happy birthday, birthday girl. Are you going out for
dinner tonight with Rick or anything?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
What?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
It's not my birthday for another seven months?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
You hang on a second, hang on, I'm.
Speaker 4 (00:14):
Hanging I'm hanging out in traffic, so it's.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Perfect for you.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
According to my calendar alert, it is your birthday, are.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
You Because I don't know how many times I'm gonna
say it's not my birthday, and how many times you're
going to repeat that it is my birthday.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
This year you.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Didn't Actually, this year, you forgot to call me on
my birthday, not even an email nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Okay, okay, what about that time you got me an
ice cream cake for my birthday knowing I'm lactose sensitive.
Do you remember the man at the roller ring kept
on knocking on the bathroom door?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh good?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
From Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight
today's episode. Julia. Julia is a journalist and she's endlessly
(01:29):
curious about the world around her. Once on assignment for
The New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria,
and as a part of her research, she didn't bathe
for a month. She's done political stories too, where she's
kept after a source or a story for years, which
is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer
(01:50):
to a question that's been dogging her for over two
decades all the more curious.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty
sure it's a Monday, and I was fourteen years old.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
This is Julia, and the question she can't stop thinking
about revolves around a moment from her own life. It
all began twenty one years ago in the eighth grade
at one of the fanciest all girls schools in Montreal.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I remember wearing my itchy green kilt.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
You have to wear a uniform there, yes, okay.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
That's sort of a puke green uniform with a button
down white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties.
Speaker 6 (02:32):
We also had bloomers.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
It was just sort of like a balloon with holes
in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
And were they ruffled? No, cursed with a lifelong inability
to distinguish between bloomers, couloats, pantelats, pantaloons, drawers, and even knickerbockers.
I was glad for the opportunity to finally sort it
all out the shape of it, but that's not why
we're here. So after a fifteen minutes of inquiry, I
was ready to move on. Okay, sorry, yes, I'll go
(03:06):
go on.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
As I left morning assembly on Monday and walked into homeroom,
I looked for my desk and I stopped and looked
around and it was missing. My desk was gone, and
that was where it started.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that
was just the beginning. Without warning, the girl she'd been
friends with since third grade completely froze her out, and
Julia had no clue why. To top it off, her
best friend was the ringleader, the.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Girl who used to be my best friend. I guess
we can give her a name. Let's call her Jane.
It was just rae. Knowing that she and I had
hung out at my house and all of the secrets
music exchanged and all of the fun we'd had, and
then seeing how she was being now it just it
(04:13):
was a bit surreal. But yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Then what started happening was every time she walked into
the classroom, Julia noticed that the girls would drop what
they were doing and study her. If she so much
as scratched her nose or sniffled, they'd furiously take notes.
It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some big project
that she knew nothing about. The notes were collected by Jane,
(04:43):
who buried them in her desk. The girls kept at
it day after day until finally Julia reached her breaking point.
She gathered up her courage, and, like the good reporters
she'd eventually become, decided to investigate.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I eventually snuck into home room one day during recess.
It was empty, and I searched Jane's desk, and there
at the bottom I found a nicely bound document with
a cover page. And I picked it up and read it,
and it said one hundred reasons why we hate Julia.
(05:25):
In my memory, this document I'm holding is one hundred
pages long, but I'm sure it was only ten. And
I opened it and inside I read about myself. Everything
was something about me that they hated. I hate the
way she walks, I hate the sound of her voice,
(05:50):
I hate her face.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
After that, Julia started skipping school. Eventually, she told her
parents what was going on, and they contacted the administration,
but the bullying continued. Ultimately, her parents decided that the
only solution was to send her to a new school,
but Julia still had a few weeks left at the
old one.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
I became a double agent. I pretended that I was
coming back the following year, and I didn't tell anyone
I was changing schools because I had no friends left
to tell.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The school year ended and her new life began, But
because her new school was so close to the old one,
Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would
find her. Every day, she'd map her route to and
from school, carefully avoiding the streets her old friends lived on,
the coffee shops they hung out at, and for the
(06:53):
most part, it worked. For those first few weeks at
her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight.
She was starting to feel like things would be okay.
But then one day after school, Julia was upstairs in
the den doing homework and the doorbell rang. She went
to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the
(07:15):
doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane,
along with a few of her old classmates.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the
second floor windows. I was in a state of total panic,
and I saw them in my mind's eye, there on
the front steps, waiting for someone to answer the door,
and I was just on the ground, trying to breathe,
and they rang the doorbell again and I waited.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Eventually they left. And this is the moment that Julia
has fixated on for over twenty years. Why had the
girls shown up at her door? And what did they want?
Maybe they'd shown up to bully her, but maybe they'd
had a change of heart, realized how mean they'd been,
and were there to apologize. Whatever the case, Julia was
(08:15):
too scared to open the door and find out, and
that decision to not go downstairs and face the girls
who tormented her still haunts Julia. Even listening to her
talk about it all these years later, it still feels raw.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
I'm thirty five now, and that day has become one
of my only regrets because the memory of my weakness
sometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then,
and it makes me feel weak.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Even though you were you were just a child, I
was fourteen.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
I think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere
in my physiology. It makes me fearful when I think
of it. I just wish I'd gone down there. I
wish I'd had the guts.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
What do you think has stopped you up until now
from just posing the question, you know, like just finding
the girls and just asking them why they were there
that day.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
I'm afraid to find out what I did to bring
on the bullying, because it's very possible that I was bad.
I think, deep down, I don't really know what was wrong.
I don't know what was wrong with me, and I
don't want to know what was wrong with me.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself,
or being hard on this little kid basically, you know, like,
do you look at photographs of yourself at that age
in try not too well? I think you'd be surprised
by like I mean, I have memories of being that
age where I thought like I was at weddings and
(10:15):
I thought I was like flirting with adult women and
stuff like that. And I look at pictures of myself
and I look like a cabbage patched all.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
I think I probably looked like the ten men because
I had a full set of braces, and then after
I graduated from my braces, I immediately went to headgear
neck gear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
But I've only seen them on TV sitcoms.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So combine that with my glasses, it was a sad
state of affairs.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal
for good.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Depending on how you know the outcome of that conversation,
I might have chosen not to leave Montreal. When I'm
in Montreal once a year, I avoid the neighborhood I
grew up in where all of this went down, for
the most part, and those girls are long gone. I mean,
we're all grown ass women now with careers and jobs
(11:10):
and kids. And here I am avoiding friends of friends
on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls
to know what's going on with my life.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Do you feel like, had you answered the door and
they had apologized to you, that that would have changed
your life in some way, that it would have changed
your relationship with your past and the city and these friends.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
I think it might have, but I'll never know what
they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer
the door.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your
whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that
you try to find out why they were at the
door that day, Julius suggests that maybe the past to
just stay in the past.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
You know, we move on with our lives. We you know,
we move on, and it's another thing to open up.
You know that Pandora's Box.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Again, Even the language that you're using about fear of
opening up that Pandora's box, it is so similar to
the language that you used in describing like fear of
opening that door.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
So what you're saying is I should really just finish
the job.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
I think so after the break opening Pandora's Box, in
(12:56):
spite of her initial trepidation, once Juliet decided to find
out why the girls came to her door that day,
she was all in. Watching her take it on was impressive.
Julia went back to Montreal and reached out to her
former best friend Jane, who agreed to meet with her
but said she didn't remember anything. And so, for the
first time since eighth grade, Julia returned to her former
(13:19):
school to go through the yearbook and find the names
of her old classmates. And then she started searching.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
I reached out to probably twelve girls from from my grade. Yeah,
and in my worst moments, I imagine that none of
them were going to write back, and it was sort
of going to feel like, you know, I was on
the outside of the group again, you know, and that
(13:49):
the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were
still in play and all that. But then the responses
started to trickle in.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Yes, this is Julia.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Julia logged hours and hours of interviews.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Cool and rang my doorbell. I thought you might have
been one of them.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I don't think so. Do you remember anything about that?
Speaker 5 (14:09):
Was I there?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
No? Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
I remember one time you were hiding in a bathroom stall.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
But just like Jane, not a single person said they
could remember showing up at her door that day.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Oh yeah, well, I honestly don't remember doing that.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
I don't, I don't.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
I'm sorry, I don't.
Speaker 5 (14:29):
I don't remember anything.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I just don't remember it, promised you. I have no
recollection of this.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Well, what each of them did remember was their own pain.
There'd been a lot of bullying that year, and no
one felt safe. Julia heard about one girl who had
found her desk filled with meticulously cut out images from
porn magazines. Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors that she
had aids. I hated that place, said one. It's all
(15:01):
a big fog of chaos, said another, A dark cloud
over the class. You never knew who you could trust.
We were awful, awful little girls. The more Julia heard
about it, it started to sound like a Stephen King novel,
and not one of those cutesy ones about clowns or
talking cars. In almost every conversation, one name kept coming
(15:26):
up as the person who had it the worst. Even
Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba. Sarah had
the misfortune of being the only eighth grader who was
slightly overweight, and as such she was always kept at
a distance in high school. I was also someone who
existed on the margins, so I understand how oftentimes kids
(15:47):
like me, kids like Sarah Taba, become the eyes and
ears of the school, fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses, forced to watch
from the wings. I'm reminded of this all the time
with the friends I went to high school with who
were more popular than me. Remember the time Robert Ciolick
wore a three piece suit to school. I ask the
time Madame Rebert slammed the classroom door so hard the
(16:09):
clock fell off the wall, the day Sharon Wiener got
suspended for leaving the schoolyard during recess. Of course they
don't they were living their lives. But I was on
the sidelines taking it all in, remembering.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Hello, Hi, Sarah, Hi, it's been a really long time.
Speaker 6 (16:33):
Yeah it yes, it has.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and
what she might remember. But when she asked her if
she had any recollection about the day those girls showed
up at her door, Sarah couldn't remember anything.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The first thing I thought of when he said a
group of girls right in the doorbell, I immediately thought
it would be a bad experience, Like it wasn't people
coming looking for you to be like we miss you?
Speaker 5 (17:01):
Where are you?
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Grade eight was a bad year at that schirl. Either
you were being bullied and kicked on or you had
to turn around and become the bully.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
Yeah, maybe there was something toxic, something dark.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I think normal bullying. If there's such a thing as
normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim
and the like. But it was just so pervasive.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Do you remember the day that you realize that I
was gone.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
I don't, actually, no, I remember feeling like you were
just sad all the time.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Remember you being sad too?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (17:49):
One thing I remember people would call you tubby taba.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff
like that. I can't help but think that our grades
behavior had impacts on the staff. What do you mean, well,
(18:19):
I actually I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't.
But miss McDonald killed herself the following year.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Miss McDonald was Julia's favorite teacher and Sarah's too. Miss
McDonald had gone to the school as a student and
later returned to teach biology. She was the fun teacher
who wore frog ear rings.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
You think that there was something to do with what
was happening in the school that caused her to commit suicide.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
I think it had a role in her depression. She
left right in the end of our grade eight year.
Because what I knew of her and with her school,
it was her passion.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
She was an old girl.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
She was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love
of animals and biology and all of us, and we
were a bunch of brats. I remember there being a
lot of associations between that pig that she had on
top of her TV and her a lot of comments
about her way. Yeah, had an impact.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Ms McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer, and when
she came back in the fall, she was no longer
the biology teacher, but a substitute. The last period of
the last day she taught before she killed herself was
a class called Personal and Religious Education. The students considered
the class a joke. Sarah was there that day and.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
The grade was just running around and doing everything they
weren't supposed to do in the classroom. She tried to
get people to calm down and sit down and pay attention,
and like, I wasn't even trying to teach us anything.
I don't even know if there was any material to
cover that day. And then we showed up at school
Monday morning to find out that she killed herself one
(20:22):
for the weekend. Oh my god. She was my.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
Role model.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
She was the person who survived the school despite not
being the stereotypical prefect or perfect girl. She was just
this wonderful, round woman who rejuvenated life and as an
overweight teenager. For me, that was like, okay, so you
(20:55):
don't have to be perfect to achieve anything. Was my
role model who the next year killed herself and like
shattered all my dreams that you can go about living
your life the way you're living your life in this
environment and succeed, which made me want to completely change
(21:17):
my body. The only way that I was going to
get through this school was to lose a bunch of
weight to gain the respect of these people that have
basically disliked me since I was eleven, and I did it.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, I've been really over the years, I've wondered about you,
and then when I looked you up on Facebook, I
saw pictures of you and I clicked right by them.
I thought, oh, I have the wrong person. Yeah, because
you didn't look like yourself, right, So I mean you
didn't you just stopped eating it sounds like.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, yeah, in tenth grade, tenth through eleventh grade, and
then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an
illness that I've been battling for the last twenty years.
(22:22):
It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to
do so that I definitely remember because that's how I.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Ended up in the situation. I am now I'm actually
talking to you from outside of a clinic for treating
eating disorders.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
So I'm really sorry, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
It's not your fault. That's the.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
A sad reality of all of this.
Speaker 7 (22:53):
It's like, yeah, please picture you know, my nerdy looking
fourteen year old self giving you a big hug.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Oh thanks. I actually do have so much to go
because we have to have lunch now, but it was
nice speaking cute and do keep in touch.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated. The scale of
her own pain had been altered in the face of Sarah's.
Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about Julia and
(23:52):
Sarah's conversation, and as I turned it around in my head,
a theory began to form. Mss McDonald had died around
the start of the school year. Wasn't it possible that
those girls had shown up at Julia's door to let
her know. Maybe they'd been worried about the way Julia
had just disappeared from their school and feared the worst.
(24:12):
Wasn't it possible the girls had meant good that day?
That they came to the door, and if so, wouldn't
knowing that changed the way Julia felt about the past
twenty years and maybe even changed the way she saw herself.
So I took this last task upon myself. Hey is
this Christine, Hey Jennifer, this is I found up all
(24:34):
the people Julia had already spoken with, and I ran
my theory by them.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
To be honest, I would love to believe that's what
their intentions were.
Speaker 7 (24:43):
I can't be sure about anything.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I can't say, yeah, sure, that's it, because I don't
have a memory of it.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Okay, well, thank you, bye, all.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Right, you have a great night.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Okay, bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Okay, okay, okay, take it easy.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Hi, bye bye.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
There was only one thing left for me to do.
I just feel like I'm at a loss, Like this
whole thing started off as me encouraging you to give
it a try and that it might be helpful in
some way. And I don't feel like I brought you
any closer to knowing what happened at the door that day.
(25:37):
And I just if.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
There's one of us who's disappointed, it certainly isn't me.
I don't know whether I was emotionally equipped to open
the door as a fourteen year old. But to me,
the important part is is that I opened the door. Now,
I couldn't have I couldn't have confronted that if I
(26:03):
hadn't literally done what we decided we were going to do,
if I hadn't had these phone calls and asked these
hard questions. And I've forgiven that little girl for being
(26:26):
so frightened. I was so ashamed, I was so regretful,
And I don't blame myself for being afraid. Then I
had every right to be. It wasn't rational. And so
I think the biggest challenge for me and all of
this was to allow myself to slip back into that
(26:48):
fourteen year old girl's skin and say, look, you know,
I get it.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
It's okay, you know, it's okay.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
I'm proud of who I was. Then It's been a
long time since I could say that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And you feel like that's happened like that, that's happened
in this process.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Well that makes me feel better.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
Well, I'm happy to make you feel better, Jonathan.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I might.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Ding dong, I'm ding dong.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer
the door?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
That's right, ding dong, Okay, I'm answering the doorkay open
the door. What happened to you?
Speaker 6 (27:49):
I change schools and you know why.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Now that the fern entures returning to its goodwill home,
now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
The damaged post, take this moment to dissolve.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
If we meant it, if we.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Tied, were felt around for far too.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
From things that accidentally talked. Heavyweight is hosted and produced
by me Jonathan Goldstein along with Chris Neary and Khalila Holt.
A senior producer is Wendy Dore, editing by Alex Bloomberg
and Jorge just special thanks to Emily Condon, Maya Goldberg, Safer,
Lena Chambers, Emily Kennedy, Laura Scott, and the Birthday Girl
(29:16):
Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Hailey Shaw, music
by Christine Fellows. Additional music credits for this episode can
be found on our website Gimbletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight.
Our theme song is by the Weaker Thans courtesy of
Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Hailey Shaw.
Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. Next week's episode will
(29:37):
be our season finale in anticipation of season two. If
there's a moment from your past where everything changed, send
us an email to Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com.
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