Didn't Barb confirm this to Chris during a time when he was trying to get back in touch with a lot of high-school people? If Barb didn't want to just straight-up tell him the truth about this in order to spare his feelings, she might have wanted to let him know this so he would stop trying to bother these girls from 10+ years ago, thinking that they were ever friends with him in the first place.
There's no evidence of actual bullying.
Chris was not bullied in school, period.
When a troll pretending to be an old-gal pal says he was bullied, he rejects this. Yes, Chris, for once, actually NOT playing the victim.
Elsewhere he mentions a few mean comments he got during middle school, and calls it bullying, but says next to nothing about it. If there was any "there" there, he would have latched onto a few incidents at least and talked about it constantly. He would have mentioned bullies by name and made them part of his mythology (the way he mentioned Roach and the evil principal, etc). But there are no such evil bully figures. There was no bullying to any notable degree "as such".
And then we know about the incident in which he had a scuffle to get off the bus first, one time.
I don't see how the girls would have "sheltered" him from hypothetical bullies. It isn't like they physically shielded him or fought battles for him. They let him sit at their lunch table and they went to one of his birthday parties. That's IT. He had to sit somewhere during lunch. If he sat with them, that just sort of proves that this group of girls were the nicest and/or weakest table for Chris to sit at. They made his life easier and less lonely.
Actually, I don't see how Chris at the time would have been a gigantic albatross for them.
A lot of us have said that during Chris's high school years he appears much closer to normal than he does in the years afterwards. He would have been kind of a weird kid, but it isn't like he was walking around with an attraction sign or wanting to grope people during that time.
We shouldn't interpret high-school Chris as if he was the gigantic annoying disaster or the troll-magnet that he would become from the mid-2000s onward.