CHAPTER ONE

When you were four years old, what did you dream about? Me, I dreamt I could fly all the time. Typical, who hasn’t dreamt about flying in all their time on this earth? But have your dreams ever ended with you fighting crime with one super hero or another, night after night? For days I would wake up in the morning thinking I was going crazy because any four year old girl who has vivid dreams about beating The Batman’s Joker silly or snapping Sesame Street’s The Counts neck like a twig has to be two banana’s short of a fruit basket, right? Wrong, I was one more dream away from suggesting to my father that I might need therapy only to realise my brothers were enjoying late night cartoons on our room’s television while I slept. Back then we were like gremlins to our father so the entire second floor of our house was practically our bedroom/cage, mainly because anything electrical in the house we made our mission to take apart just for the fun of it, until he brought home an old television and told us if we fixed it we can keep it in our room. Challenge accepted. To this day I honestly cannot say what we did but a month later after a lot of electrical shocks and scotch tape we got it to show, hence the addiction my brothers developed for late nigh cartoons. 1997 in Trinidad and Tobago was the golden year for kids and cartoons. But in my house, local television was even more epic.
My parents were the go with flow kind of parents, you could basically do what you wanted once it wasn’t illegal or affected them in any way. My choices were limited because I am the only girl so I stuck to things like reading, going on scavenger hunts for my dolls (which my brothers hid or buried), watching a shit load of television, talking to myself and finding eventative ways to get my brothers in trouble. Half of the time I did it by snitching, being the only girl in a house full of three boys and my father’s favourite made my snitching tolerable. My brothers didn’t catch on to my mind games until.... hell I don’t think they know I still snitch on them to this day. But this is when I was at home, in the sanctuary of my den; pre-school was another story all together. Being two years younger than my second brother, Merven and three years younger than my older brother Mevin Jr, I attended pre-school on my own. My youngest brother Merve was only a year old so I had to fend for myself in the sea of sugar induced selfish idiots that populated my classroom. Temper tantrums, glue eating, crying, self inflicted injuries that resulted in more crying, no supervision whatsoever, teachers singling out kids and my most favourite nap time.
I, Merlene Dunbar, can proudly say that I hated pre-school with a passion. At that age such thoughts shouldn’t have even passed through my head, but it did. I used to beg my mother to find some way to help me skip straight to first year or be done with school altogether, but it didn’t happen though so I endured it to the bitter end, not making any friends, avoiding that one kid who always tried to burn things with a magnifying glass. Can’t remember when I finished though but I do remember when I started first year at the Febeau Government Primary School in the year 1998.

(taken in 2007)

Located right in the area where I lived, not much concern was given into people’s children safety since the school had no security and no fencing. In the front entrance there was a brick wall but on the other four corners to seal in the school there was nothing.  Just dirt, a tree on each side of the school building, a tiny box meant for the security guard and a little parlour on the other side of the school where some old guy usually sold just snacks and really bad preservatives. Lunchtime was war at his shop seeing as he was our only source of junk food on the compound. After a week I developed a system where I slid under kids legs because I was so short and then used whoever was in front to launch me onto the counter.
Not only that, I was red skinned, so much so that it immediately made me a target for the bigger girls. And when I say bigger girls I don’t mean in a higher standard, I mean these chicks were the same age as me which was around five or six years old, in the same class which was first year yet they looked like their parents gave them steroids to take everyday with their morning tea.

(this is what they looked like to me)

All six of them just gravitated towards each other that first day and formed a pack. My brothers were of no help when the giants (the girls) started following me around the one building on the compound that housed every facility in the school, calling me names. My brothers literally used to go in the other direction whenever they saw me verbally sparring with the giants in the schools court yard. Until one day they went too far and put a dead rat in my new book bag. That bag was the first official school object I had ever gotten that wasn’t a hand me down, and they desecrated it. Sitting at my seat in that hot dusty classroom staring blankly at the dead rat tucked nicely between the pages of my already worn down mathematics textbook, something with in me snapped, my mind just started whirling with violent ideas for me to get my revenge. Scenario after scenario, where I pushed each one of them into a bubbling volcano as they screamed “I’m sorry,” in their decent into the pits of hell where rats chased them forever and ever. But, it wasn’t meant to be because another more reasonable plan came to me when my brother walked past my classroom window. The plan was so deliciously evil I started chuckling like The Brain from Pinky and the Brain when he cooks up a really evil but half thought out plan.

First I waited until the giants commandeered the court yard to play hop-scotch at lunch time. They did that like everyday yet no one challenged them, so that was my chance. My plan was to use the one thing little kids always had a hard time coping with in any facility in which they are surrounded by their peers, humiliation. I wanted to humiliate them to the point where I saw tears on someone’s face and the appearance of a stutter when their parents came to pick them up after school so that I could have felt better. My first target was, let’s call her Keisha because I never tried to learn their names. She was the leader, dark skinned, strong, had the shiniest forehead in the world and had a major crush on my brother Merven. Girls gravitated towards him and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. But what they didn’t know was that he was a huge mama’s boy and lost his mind whenever someone touched his stuff. Ergo his power rangers pencil case our mother had bought him after he had one of his melt downs in the store, he loved that thing more than me so when he went running all over the school like primary school boys loved to do, I lifted it from his bag. Part one of the mission completed. Next I had to find some way to get it into Keisha’s hands the exact same moment my brother realised someone was in his bag, which I left sufficient evidence of seeing his stationary was all over the floor. Muahahahaha.....
Anyway, accosting Keisha during their hop scotch game was easy. Getting her to get angry and try something on me was the hard part. She might have been a bully but she was a professional one at that, she tortured without leaving physical evidence. The pencil case was my main mission in getting it into her muscular man hands but when I saw her jumping up and down on the court yard, reflecting light to out of space on her forehead the rage resurfaced and I went way off script. I took a swig of liquid courage (a dollar juice) and stomped off into the yard. When I reached face to face with her, I pushed her. Didn’t really do much considering I was the one who stumbled but that got her attention.
“Gyul, you crazy ah what!” she yelled.
At that point I realised I fucked up because in my revenge plan, getting the living tar beaten out of me if things didn’t work out was skimmed over in my rage. So seeing her nostrils flare was a clear sign I was about to die by size ten shoes to the chest in which caved in my ribs in turn puncturing my heart, an unseen force caused me to propelled the pencil case I had in my hand toward her, which she caught because duh... it was empty. The entire court yard erupted into laughter at my feeble attempt at survival, causing Keisha to prance around with the case waving it in my face when the sight of my very pissed off brother launched her across the court yard with a solid push came as a surprise. So was him jumping on top of her and grappling for the pencil case that for some reason she didn’t want to let go of. I just stood there fascinated with the events because one; my brother was stocky and strong for his age yet Keisha held on to the pencil case like a pit bull with a piece of steak meat and two; the fear of getting a concussion from getting slapped with Keisha's gorilla hands had locked up my knees. Results of the fight were inconclusive seeing as the school’s ninja security guard I had never laid eyes on before came and separated them. Through the process of the teachers and parents holing up in the office of the principal all evening not once was my name called also the giants never harassed me after that. They kind of just disbanded after witnessing the awesome powers of my unstable brother whom they thought I was going to sick on them. Keisha though turned into a lunch time stalker, where my brother went she went. It made my brother crazier for a while until my father had to come in school and have a chat with the principal about it. My school life was bully free for a while.