As a child, I was an easy mark for playground torments: smart, insufferably rule-abiding, decidedly unpretty. The tormenter I remember most distinctly was not my first bully, nor my last, but his attacks would turn the others into footnotes.

He was in my class for years; his mom was my softball coach, driving me to and from practice when my single mother could not. In class photos his face is round and almost cherubic, but I remember it contorted in anger as he spat insults at me, telling me to shut the hell up, flailing his hands against his chest and moaning — an approximation of what he said I sounded like.

We were seated next to each other in class, year after year, and when I finally complained about this arrangement, one of my teachers said that maybe I’d be “a good influence on him.”

My proximity to his mother did nothing to protect me. Sitting in the back of her van after my team lost a softball game, he snapped: “It smells in here. Close your legs.” Reflexively, I did as he instructed. When his mother climbed into the driver’s seat a few moments later, oblivious to what had happened, he was still doubled over with laughter. I was 10.

When I returned home, tearful and broken down, I comforted myself with the idea that one day, I would be happy and successful and my bully would not. I internalized the bromide used to soothe all bullied children of my generation — the universe would mete out some sort of karmic justice.

This idea is everywhere: Biff Tannen waxes George McFly’s car at the end of “Back to the Future,” having been beaten into submission (literally) years earlier. In “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie finally snaps after years of torment and attacks Farkus, who is left tearful and bleeding. Regina George — the Machiavellian queen bee in “Mean Girls” — eventually relinquishes her bullying crown, but only after she’s publicly shamed (twice) and flattened by a bus...READ MORE