Heavyweight - #7 Julia

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

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

Hello? Happy birthday, birthday girl. Are you going out for dinner tonight with Rick or anything? What? It's not my birthday for another seven months. Hey, hang on a second. Hang on. I'm hanging. I'm hanging. I'm in traffic, so it's perfect for you. Well, according to my calendar alert, it is your birthday.

It's not my birthday. Are you sure? On, on, on. Could you stop? You're 100% sure? Because I don't know how many times I'm going to say it's not my birthday and how many times you're going to repeat that it is my birthday. Are you sure? Could you stop? You're 100% sure? I don't know how many times I'm going to say it's not my birthday and how many times you're going to repeat that it is my birthday. This year you didn't actually, this year you forgot to call me on my birthday. Not even an email.

Nothing. 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 rink kept on knocking on the bathroom door. Oh, that's good. Are you kidding me?

That's good. Are you kidding me? From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Julia. Julia is a journalist, and she's endlessly 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 to a question that's been dogging her for over two decades all the more curious. I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty sure it's a Monday. And I was 14 years old. This is Julia, and the question she can't stop thinking about revolves around a moment from her own life. It all began 21 years ago, in the 8th grade, at one of the fanciest all-girl schools in Montreal. I remember wearing my itchy green kilt.

You have to wear a uniform there. Yes, sort of a puke green uniform with a button-down white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties. We also had bloomers. I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were. It was just sort of like a balloon with holes in the bottom. And were they ruffled? No. Cursed with a lifelong inability to distinguish between bloomers, culottes, pantalettes, pantaloons, drawers, and even knickerbockers, I was glad for the opportunity to finally sort it all out. But that's not why we're here. So after about 15 minutes of inquiry, I was ready to move on.

Okay, sorry, yes, go on. 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. 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 girl who used to be my best friend, I guess we can give her a name, let's call her Jane. It was just strange knowing that she and I had hung out at my house and all of the secrets we'd exchanged and all of the fun we'd had and then, you know, seeing how she was being now. It just, it was a bit surreal, but, yeah.

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, 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.

I eventually snuck into homeroom 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, 100 reasons why we hate Julia. 100 Reasons Why We Hate Julia. In my memory, this document I'm holding is 100 pages long, but I'm sure it was only 10. 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. I hate her face. 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. 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. 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 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 doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane, along with a few of her old classmates. 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. Eventually, they left. And this is the moment that Julia has fixated on for over 20 years. Why had the girl 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 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. I'm 35 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. Even though you were just a child? I was 14. I think it's the memory of that fear. It's 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. 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. 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 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. 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? Uh, I try not to.

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 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 Patch doll, you know? I think I probably looked like the Tin Man because I had a full set of braces. And then after I graduated from my braces, I immediately went to headgear-neckgear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that, but...

I've only seen them on TV sitcoms. So combine that with my glasses. It was a sad state of affairs. As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal for good. Depending on 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 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. going on with my life. 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? I think it might have, but I'll never know what they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer the door. It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that she try to find out why they were at the door that day,

Julia suggests that maybe the past should just stay in the past. You know, we move on with our lives, and we, 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 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. So what you're saying is I should really just finish the job? I think so.

After the break, opening Pandora's box. In spite of her initial trepidation, once Julia 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 school to go through the yearbook and find the names of her old classmates. And then she started searching. I reached out to probably 12 girls from my grade.

And at my worst moments, I imagined 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 the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were still in play and all that. But then the responses started to trickle in. Hello? Hello? Hello? Yes. This is Julia. Julia logged hours and hours of interviews. And rang my doorbell. I thought you might have been one of them. I don't think so.

Do you remember anything about that? Was I there? No. Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school, to be honest. I remember one time you were hiding in a bathroom stall. But just like Jane, not a single person said they could remember showing up at her door that day. Well, I honestly don't remember doing that. I don't. I don't. I don't. I'm sorry. I don't.

I don't remember anything. I just don't remember it. I promise you I have no recollection of this. I'm sorry. Sorry. But 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'd 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 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 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 8th 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 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 Siolik wore a three-piece suit to school, I ask? The time Madame Robert slammed the classroom door so hard the 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. Hello?

Hi, Sarah. Hi. It's been a really long time. Yeah, it has. Yes, it has. 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. The first thing I thought of when you said a group of girls riding 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, where are you? Yeah. Grade eight was a bad year at that school. Either you were being bullied and picked on, or you had to turn around and become the bully. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe there's something toxic. Something dark.

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, it was just so pervasive. Do you remember the day that you realized that I was gone? I don't actually, no. I remember feeling like you were just sad all the time. I remember you being sad too. Yeah. One thing I remember, people would call you Tubby Taba. 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, actually, I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't, but Miss McDonald killed herself the following year? Yeah. 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 earrings.

You think that there was something to do with what was happening in the school that caused her to commit suicide? I think it had a role in her depression. She left right in the end of our grade 8 year. Because what I knew of her, it was her school. It was her passion. It was, she was an old girl.

She was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love of animals and biology in 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 weight. Yeah, it had an impact.

Miss 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 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, she 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 over the weekend. Oh, my God. to find out that she killed herself over the weekend. Oh, my God.

She was my role model. 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 don't have to be perfect to achieve anything. She 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 my body. 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 11. And I did it. 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. Yeah. Yeah, in 10th grade. 10th through 11th grade. And then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an illness that I've been battling for the last 20 years.

It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to do. Well, that I definitely remember, because that's how I ended up in the situation I am now. I'm actually talking to you from outside of a clinic for treating eating disorders. I'm really sorry, Sarah. It's not your fault that's the sort of sad reality of all of this

it's like yeah please picture you know my nerdy looking 14 year old self giving you a big hug. Aw. Thanks. I actually do have to let you go, because we have to have lunch now.

But it was nice speaking to you, and do keep in touch. The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated. The scale of her own pain had been stop thinking about Julia and Sarah's conversation. And as I turned it around in my head, a theory began to form. Miss 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. Wasn't it possible the girls had meant good that day that they came to the door? And if so, wouldn't knowing that change the way Julia felt about the past 20 years and maybe even change the way she saw herself? So I took this last task upon myself. Hello?

Hey, is this Christine? Hello? Hey, Jennifer, this is... I phoned up all the people Julia had already spoken with, and I ran my theory by them. To be honest, I would love to believe that's what their intentions were. I can't be sure about anything, but I can't say, yeah, sure, that's it, because I don't have a memory of it. Okay. Well, thank you. Bye.

All right. You have a great night. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye, Jonathan. Bye. Okay. Okay. Okay. Take it easy. Bye.

Bye-bye. 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. And I just... If 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 14-year-old, but to me, the important part is that I opened the door now.

I couldn't have confronted that if I 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 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 in all of this

was to allow myself to slip back into that 14-year-old girl's skin and say, look, you know, I get it. It's okay. You know, it's okay. I'm proud of who I was then. It's been a long time since I could say that. And you feel like that's happened? Like that's happened in this process? Yeah, I do.

Well, that makes me feel better. Well, I'm happy to make you feel better, Jonathan. I'm happy to make you feel better, Jonathan. Ding dong. Um... Ding dong. Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer the door? That's right. Ding dong.

Okay, I'm answering the door. Okay. Open the door. What happened to you? I changed schools. And you know why. I'm sorry. Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit Take this moment to decide

If we meant it, if we tried or felt around for far too much from things that accidentally touched. Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Chris Neary and Kalila Holt. The senior producer is Wendy Doerr. 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, Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Haley Shaw. Music by Christine Fellows. Additional music credits for this episode

can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. Next week's episode will 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.com.