He remembered, and he admitted he remembered. That had never happened before.

Hearing someone else admit to the same shared experiences, even from the side of taunter rather than taunted, was oddly heartening, and it called for a longer and less distant response than my first few emails. I wrote:

I don’t remember you specifically (though the name sounds faintly familiar), but I definitely do remember the teasing, which pretty much did define just how hard elementary school was for me. And this is going to sound just as strange, but it makes me glad that you remember it, too … because I’ve heard from people I went to school with from time to time, and most of the time, they seem to have no memory of what went on then, or of just how bad it was. So it’s good to see I’m not the only one remembering … and better still to see that you’re working hard to teach kindness to your kids. That makes me happiest of all, because I think we all have a role to play in making it better for the next group of kids. It’s part of why I write, too.

And I am okay, and more than okay. Things began getting better for me in middle school, too, also because I stopped caring so much what other people thought, and they kept getting better from there. And life now … is pretty much everything I hoped it would be, and more. These days, I think of myself as incredibly lucky in so many ways …

Anyway, thanks for getting back in touch … and I hope your kids enjoy my books, once they’re old enough. And here’s to both of us doing what we can to make the world a better place, in all the ways we can.

Then I sent David a link to a blog post I’d written that described my experiences in more detail.

He replied:

Your essay is excellent … and it is strange that I finally decided to look you up after all this time and you had written that essay not that long ago. I don’t know why my brain can be so locked in the past. I remember that you sat to the right of me close to the wall. I was never physical with you, but you were very sensitive to the verbal teasing that had become familiar to me as I was victimized by my older brother. One time you were out of the classroom and [our fourth-grade teacher] spoke to the class and said in the nicest way that we needed to be kind to you. That actually did help for a little while, but we know the rest of the story.

As David and I wrote to each other, I realized that because of our shared memories — because we’d both made the effort to remember the past instead of pretending it had never happened — we were on the same side now: the side that cared about making things better for the kids who came after us.

I’d thought, as I gritted my teeth and answered those cheerful emails from other classmates, that I wanted them to remember and show regret because it would make me feel better. Now I understood that remembering mattered not for my sake, but because if we don’t acknowledge the past, we can’t even try to change it. This wasn’t about what had happened to me or David, or not only about that. It was — is — about what’s happening to children and teens right now.

Of course, remembering can be uncomfortable, for former bullied and bullying kids both.  Maybe that discomfort was why so many of my classmates preferred to act as if their teasing, relentless as it often was, never happened.

I was a little hesitant when I asked David if I could share his letters, because I knew I was asking him to share pieces of his story as well, something he’d written with no intention of anyone seeing his words but me. I told him I wouldn’t write this article unless he was completely comfortable with my doing so.

His response came back within the hour, and there was no hesitation at all in it:

Absolutely yes. I am committed to help fight bullying in any way.

That told me, as much as any of our other emails had, that we really were on the same side now, after all.

Janni Lee Simner is the author of many young-adult novels, including “Faerie Winter,” “Bones of Faerie,” “Thief Eyes” and the Phantom Rider trilogy.

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