After evening prayers, three of us, standing in front of the sixty girls we shared a boarding house with. Our house mistress giving us to read out loud in front of everyone the note we had sent to A. X was excused from reading it as it was her first term at the school. Y couldn’t read it because she was crying too much. So I read it, to the silent gasps of our house.
Then an evening of standing in the corridor facing the wall in silence as various older girls told us we were bitches and didn’t deserve to live.
Separated from our peers for what felt like weeks and made to sleep in a strange part of the house in small rooms where we couldn’t hear the morning bells and were shouted at for being late.
The terror of returning to my parents at the end of term many weeks later, knowing that a letter had been sent from the house mistress about our bullying note. My parents never mentioned it at all.
Carrying the shame for years into adulthood; one day spotting the person we bullied on a school friend’s Facebook feed and asking them to mediate by sending her my message of apology.
We were eleven years old. There was no-one to help us understand.