When I was 10 or 11, I was a coward.

It was a one-event wuss but I’ll never forget it.

I was in sixth grade at the time. One of my classmates was a trashy girl named Edie May. There were serious differences between us.

I was the best student in our class and she was one of the worst. I lived in a newish tract home with my parents and brothers and she lived in a ramshackle-y place with a loud undistinguished family. There may even have been a wrecked car on cinder blocks in her yard; I remember her house was within sight of the school playground.

I don’t know how the argument started, but we were on the asphalt play area near the classroom when she called me out.

“I don’t fight with babies,” I remember responding, in the futile hope that those words would make it all go away. But she kept glaring at me, with freckles inflamed and fist-ended straight arms. It looked like she wasn’t done.

We all walked to and from school then. I had two friends named Candy, both from the block adjacent to mine, from houses with similar floorplans. We had just crested the small hill and were on the downslope toward the entrance to our Cinderella home development when Edie May and her gang surrounded us.

Surrounded me, I mean. Because suddenly Candy and Candy were also in the circle of observers. They had apology instead of hostility in their faces, but they were as unwilling to help me as the rest of the girls.

Edie May put up her dukes and invited me to violence. I refused. I just stood there.

So she shamed me. She took up a pencil and approached me and then wrote whatever nasty words she could imagine (she didn’t have much vocab or spelling ability) on my white cotton blouse.

I just stood there. Candy F mouthed “I’m sorry,” and Candy C didn’t meet my eyes.

Eventually Edie May tired of her game, or ran out of room or words or pencil lead; she stopped. She and her pals retreated almost as quickly as they’d arrived, and I was able to finish my walk home.

My mother was outraged. She removed my blouse and tut-tutted over the torso scratches that had overcome the cloth. She tore into some folks in the school office for “letting it happen.” I don’t remember her receiving any satisfaction for that. I sure didn’t.

I learned a little something about “friends” that day. But I learned more about self-esteem. I don’t engage in physical violence, but since then I’ve never backed away from a fight.