couldn’t hear what she was saying and wasn’t able to read her expression. The call was brief, lasting no more than two minutes, and then she motioned for me to return to her office.
“Mrs. Hakimi said you could talk to her daughter. Before that happens, though, I am going to talk to Dinah, and I will tell her that she doesn’t need to sit down with you if she doesn’t want to.”
Whatever the assistant principal told Dinah didn’t scare her off. Durand accompanied her to a small conference room where I was waiting. After making introductions, Durand left the room and I motioned for Dinah to take a seat across the table from me. She was shy, avoiding direct eye contact. The girl was five foot and a little change, and no more than a hundred pounds. Dinah was fine boned, with high cheekbones, glistening hair, pretty dark eyes with long lashes, and almond skin. If not for her pronounced front teeth, she would have been considered very attractive.
At the start of our talk her hand self-consciously covered her mouth, but before long she seemed more at ease in my company and her hand dropped to the table. I think it was my scars that put her at ease. Misery loves company. Or it might have been that I started with softball questions.
“How well did you know Paul Klein?” I asked.
“Not very well,” she said.
“What year in school are you?”
“I am a junior.”
“Did you have any classes with Paul?”
She shook her head.
“I understand you had a problem with Paul and his friends last year.”
Dinah stiffened a little and then said, “Not really.”
“Someone saw him teasing you. It must have been pretty bad. Kids don’t usually report things.”
She shrugged, pretending indifference, but she had to blink away tears from coming to her eyes.
“What was he saying to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I think you do. And I think that wasn’t the only instance where he was bullying you, which explains why you left this at the oil well memorial.”
I placed the handmade card on the table. Dinah’s hand covered her mouth, but she would have been better served to cover her eyes. The fright and dismay at her being discovered were clearly on display.
“Tell me about the hell he put you through, Dinah.”
In a small voice she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You seem like a smart girl. Why did you let yourself be a victim?”
Her eyes sparked. “What was I supposed to do? He was popular. And if I had complained to the school, his pack of friends would have vouched for him.”
“How long has the bullying gone on?”
“Since my family moved to Beverly Hills in the ninth grade. Up until that time, I had never even heard the name Bugs Bunny.”
My hand reached out to her card and gently traced the lettering where she’d written “You made my life HELL.”
“It started during my first week at school,” she said. “I was trying my best to fit in. I was sitting in the cafeteria by myself, and that’s when this boy sat down right across from me. He was holding a carrot in his hand, and standing behind him were five or six other boys. ‘Eh, what’s up, Doc?’ he said to me. I didn’t understand what he was saying, so I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And then he said, even louder this time, ‘Eh, what’s up, Doc?’ And that got not only his group laughing, but what seemed like the whole cafeteria.”
“Welcome to Beverly.”
“He knew where I was the most self-conscious.”
“How bad did it get?”
“Bad. It was ongoing torture. I remember one day he and all his friends wore these Billy Bob teeth. And whenever he saw me, he’d open his mouth and show off his terrible teeth, and he’d shout so everyone could hear, ‘I want to marry you, Bugs, but you’re not my first cousin.’”
“I am sorry.”
“The more others laughed, the more it hurt. Last Halloween he came to school dressed as Elmer Fudd. He had this brown hat and baggy suit, and he kept coming up to me asking me if I’d seen any wascally wabbits.”
“How often did he bully you?”
“It varied. Sometimes a week or two would go by and he and his group wouldn’t bother me, and I would hope and pray that he was finally done with me, but it never lasted. He always came back.”
“No one ever intervened?”
She shook her head. “Everyone was afraid if they did he would go after them. And he was smart about the way he did it, making it look like a big joke.”
“Were you his only target?”
Another head shake. “There were others. Sometimes I’d see him going after them. I probably should have said something, but I never did. I was just happy that he was leaving me alone.”
“I need the names of the others being bullied.”
“There’s a ninth-grade boy named Sam Nahai that he liked to bother.”
“Did Paul only target Persians?”
She thought about it and said, “Mostly, but not all. He liked to give an overweight boy named Steven a hard time. Paul and his friends called him Chinny Chin Chin.”
“Chin?”
“He said Steven had more chins than there were in a Chinese phone book.”
“So Paul was an equal opportunity bully?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Persians were his favorite targets. He liked to speak with an accent and say he lived in Tehrangeles. And when he talked about Brownies, he always made sure you knew he wasn’t referring to Girl Scouts.”
“What are Brownies?”
“Brown Jews,” she said.
It was clear I still didn’t understand, so she said, “The Persian community in Beverly Hills are Sephardic Jews. There are many Ashkenazim-European Jews-that look down upon us.”
Klein, a Jew, was apparently an anti-Semite. I wondered if his bigotry had anything to do with his death.
“What did you think when you heard Paul was crucified?”
Dinah looked me in the eye and said, “I was glad.”
“What else?”
“I was relieved. It was a weight off my shoulders. From now on I’ll be able to look at a razor blade and see a razor blade.”
“What do you mean?”
“He made me so miserable there were times I thought of killing myself.”
“What stopped you?”
“I made a friend at the Community Crisis Line, a good man who made me think beyond the moment and look to the future. And now I have saved almost three thousand dollars. Soon I will be able to pay for my braces.”
Dinah smiled and almost showed her teeth.
CHAPTER 8:
I worked the high school until midafternoon, trying to learn more about Klein. I also tried to get a lead on the identity of the second dissenting note writer. The assistant principal arranged it so that I could talk to Steven
