(People often say being a bystander is just as bad as being the offender.)

Last month, a girl(I will call her S) in year 11 messaged me saying that she had something to tell me.
I told her to go on, and at that she said had been offered to skip a grade and come up to year 12.
I was taken aback, for sure, but then she had always been a smart girl, and the best in her year group by a vast degree of preeminence, so this news wasn’t something completely outrageous.

She asked me to keep it a secret for the moment being, saying that she didn’t want people to know about it before it was completely finalized, and of course, I said yes. After that, we talked a bit about her subject choices, how strange it would be to have her in her year group, and a bunch of other tangent topics- and that was the end of our conversation.

A week later, S didn’t come to our classes. Every day, I expected her to come, but she didn’t.

I thought she must have a good reason for doing so, and decided it best not to ask her about it, thinking I might come across as meddlesome or nosy if I did so.

But then, rumours started going around.

I first knew about the rumours when a friend of mine asked me about S skipping a year. She knew I was on friendly terms with S and wanted to know if I knew anything about this news. Remembering S’s request not to tell anyone about it, I told my friend that I didn’t know much about it either.

But by then, it was too late; the rumour had practically reached everyone in our year group, including the parents, and I had no idea where it had started from.

Some people said that it was the parents that had said so, and some said that they had heard it from S herself-no one seemed to know for sure.

As one might expect, the reaction of our year group wasn’t exactly welcoming. As more and more talk went around, the prevailing sentiment was one of annoyance, and though no one admitted, envy as well. People were complaining about just how unfair it was that she got to skip a year when we had practically been forced to endure the distressing year of GCSEs. And as time passed, these gossips turned more and more bitter, until it seemed like an almost established fact that she was this ‘enemy figure’ that our year group had to fight against.

And all through this, I was in a rather tight position. At first, I tried to defend S, saying that it wasn’t her fault that she had been offered to skip a grade and that we shouldn’t be talking about her in such a harsh way without any confirmed facts.

But then, after hearing people talk badly about her over and over again, and numerous stories of friends’ past experiences that showed how she had always been a calculative person, I, without fully realizing myself, began to think negatively about her as well. After all, it was true that her coming into our year group was going to mean increased competition, and nobody wanted that.

So weeks passed without me actually asking S why she wasn’t coming up to our year group, and I just let the gossips surround me, without particularly trying to set things right for her or defend her.

And then, something completely unexpected happened. S came to me one day after school, crying, and told me that she was leaving the school.
At asking her what had happened, she told me that things had gotten out of control and way too complicated, and that the decision had been made for her to go to a different school.


I honestly didn’t know how to react. A mixture of feelings came to me: sadness, pity, surprise, and though I hate to admit, a sense of relief.

And the moment I realized what I was feeling, I couldn’t have felt worse about myself.

It’s always sad to realize that I’m not as good a person as I regarded myself to be. I, with my nonchalant and untroubled guise, was actually nothing more than a judging and mistrustful teenager.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the way I had dealt with the situation was completely insensitive and immature.

S had trusted me enough to confide her secret, and all I did when things got tough for her was well, nothing.
I had been a true bystander.

If I had just had the sensitivity and maturity to just go up to S and ask her if she was okay, or stand up for her when my friends were talking bitterly about her, maybe things would have been even the tiniest bit easier for S.

And even more, maybe I could have actually brought all the bitter talk to an end- after all, out of our year group, I was the closest with S, and the thought comes to me that, if I had took a strong stance in standing up for S from the beginning, maybe people would have listened to me, instead of all the groundless rumours.