It didn’t make much sense to me that the most popular girls were the ones who were more feared than admired. No one seemed to like them very much at all. Well, except the boys.
April 12
Everyone got mad at me because they said I said Heather is a slut. (She is but I didn’t say so.) When I walked into math class everyone shoved notes in my face. All of them said things like Rot in Hell. Heather said she was going to kick my ass in.
That was it! I’d solved the mystery! The most popular girls were the ones who were wanted by the boys! The only problem was, I was not one of those girls.
May 19
I wish I was prettier. Nobody likes me. I’m a sad case. That’s all I have to say.
Far worse than not being pretty or popular: I didn’t have a single friend I could trust. Just when I thought I had found someone who liked me for who I was, I’d find out that I was dead wrong.
June 3
Today in school Jennifer wrote a note to Heather. While she was reading it, I turned to talk to her and I saw in big print I HATE MEGAN!!! This was the same person who was at my house over the weekend laughing and having a good time with my computer.
Why do people have to talk about each other like that? If I don’t like someone, I don’t hang around her. I hate this entire year in school!
I can’t really confide in anyone with my deepest feelings. Only you. You won’t tell.
Writing in my diary obviously didn’t transform me into the girl the boys wanted to kiss and the other girls wanted to be. It didn’t make any of my problems go away. But at least I had an outlet for my angst, one that would never betray my confidence.
June 17
We got our yearbooks today. When I signed Amy’s I put that I hoped to see her over the summer. When she read it she said really sarcastically, “Yeah, I’ll come over every day and do the Jersey Devil snort!” Then she walked away laughing. It used to be a joke between us. I can’t understand how someone who was my best friend could do that. It really hurt. I hung out with her most of last summer and now she doesn’t want to see me at all. I hate sixth grade! Life must get better!
School ended. I didn’t get together with Amy that summer—or ever again. Heather didn’t include me in her clique, but she never kicked my ass, either. In fact, I don’t remember much about what happened to them after we left Bayville Elementary School. When I started middle school the following September, I was the only student from my school in the honors classes and rarely crossed paths with anyone who had caused me so much misery.
I found friends among the brainiacs and creative kids, the true-blue kind I had so desperately hoped for. While I’d never again be the most popular girl in my grade, I did relearn how to take pride in being smart and funny.
And I still do.
* Note: Names have changed, but all other details are taken directly from the original source material.
“That Kid”
by Janni Lee Simner
Halfway through seventh grade, the girls from the lunch table reserved for the least popular kids came to me with a request: Could I please stop sitting with them? Their lives were hard enough already, they explained, and my being seen with them only made things worse.
I could say I was surprised, but I wasn’t. Ever since kindergarten, I’d been that kid, after all. You know the one: the kid everyone picks on, the one it’s okay, even expected, that you’ll pick on, too. Even if you’re one of the nice kids, the good kids, you don’t dare to be friends with that kid, because it might look bad to your real friends, who you can’t afford to lose.
For me, school had always been a day-in, day-out business of teasing and name-calling, of hair pulling and rock throwing. The teasing hurt more than the rocks. It began with accusations of cooties and babyishness, and progressed to taunts about my hair, my clothes, and my general unfit-ness to occupy space on this planet.
At least the adults in my life noticed, and even tried to do something about it. My elementary school lunch lady saw me sitting alone and invited me to help her clean dishes after lunch—a highly coveted job, partly because of the free ice cream that went with it. Helping in the kitchen kept me off the playground, where the rock throwing and name-calling were at their worst, and it made me feel a little bit important, like I mattered.
My elementary school principal let me read in the school office when there weren’t enough dishes to keep me off the playground until class began. He also talked to the other kids, telling them that the way they were treating me wasn’t right and that it had to stop. As far as I could tell, those talks didn’t mean much to the others, but they meant something to me. They meant that someone else thought I didn’t deserve this.
My mom also thought I didn’t deserve this, and she told me, over and over again, what I probably most needed to hear: that school wasn’t forever, and that things would get better one day. If she’d only said it once or twice, maybe I would have ignored her, but she said it so often that, eventually, I believed it. Things would get better. I had to hang on until they did.
It took a long time. The books I read helped a little, because in stories, things always got better, and downtrodden, abused, misunderstood, mistreated characters always triumphed in the end, one way or another.
In sixth grade, my mom transferred me to a different school, where I’d be with different kids. That should have helped, but by then I took every joke and insult personally, however slight. Within three days of starting at my new school, I was that kid once more. I lashed out and fought to the death when taunted. When one of my tormentors kicked me, I kicked her back, broke her finger, and got suspended. I stabbed a couple of kids with pencils, too, and got good at digging fingernails into skin.
Sixth grade was the worst year of my life. My teachers wondered why I cried all the time. All I really wanted, by then, was to be left alone.
My new school was bigger and less supportive than my old one. I don’t remember anyone coming in to talk to the other kids. I do remember that by the end of the year there was a note in my file telling all my future teachers how dangerous I was.
Sixth grade should have been the year that broke me. Looking back, I don’t understand why it didn’t. But by seventh grade I’d begun writing, filling notebooks with stories of my own. Maybe that had something to do with it.
After all of that, being asked to leave the only lunch table that would have me seemed pretty minor. I wasn’t even that upset, not really. Mostly it just felt awkward, and embarrassing, and—kind of a relief. I didn’t have to pretend to be sort-of friends with those girls anymore—when we all knew better—just to have a place to sit. I was free.
Seventh grade was the year I stopped caring what other people thought. I would have friends who liked me and wanted me as I was, or I wouldn’t have any friends at all. I sat alone, and it turned out sitting alone was better than pretending. People still teased me—I had a lot of cafeteria milk squirted in my face that year, and no one invited me to escape into the kitchen afterward—but by then squirted milk seemed pretty minor, too.
And after that—slowly, quietly—things did begin to get better. In eighth and ninth grades I made my first real friends, no pretending required.
But I have one more vivid bullying memory, from right before tenth grade, the year high school began in my town. That summer, a group of girls ganged up on me at the town pool, and as I kicked and pulled hair and dug in my fingernails and mostly just tried to get away, one of them said, “You think you’re escaping. You think you’re going to go to high school and that things will get better, but we own this town.”
They were wrong. I did get away and things did keep getting better. High school wasn’t perfect—people still whispered taunts in the halls—but compared to all the years before, it was pretty good. I had a circle of friends by then, and the teasing became background noise to my life instead of the thing that defined it.
Then in college, one day as I walked through the halls, I realized the wh
ispers had gone away entirely, and that no one thought of me as that kid anymore.
I realized I’d made it through.
Yet this isn’t over. Because no one deserves to be that kid. It isn’t right, and it has to stop.
If you’ve ever shouted or whispered or posted a taunt online because everyone else was; if you’ve ever debated whether you dare talk to someone it isn’t safe to be seen talking to; if you’ve ever wanted to tell your friends to back off but decided you’d better stay quiet—after all, your life is hard enough already—I want to say: you have a role to play in stopping it.
But if you are that kid, reading this now, what I want to say is this: It will get better. I promise you. I can’t promise when. But I promise that it will.
This Is Me
by Erin Dionne
This was me in seventh grade:
The tallest person in my class. Short hair, glasses, braces. Flute player in band. Newspaper reporter. Great student. Reader. Someone’s best friend. Part of a group of girls who were smart and funny and into things like dance and science and horses and Star Wars. Sleepover attendee/thrower. Crushing on a boy. Swallowing hurt and shame and rage as the girls I’d been friends with in elementary school suddenly and mysteriously decided that my new friends weren’t cool, my clothes weren’t cool—I wasn’t cool. Gritting my teeth as they snickered and whispered when I passed. Dodging venomous comments thrown my way in the hall. Player/pawn in their mental games of Cold Shoulder, Catty Comment, Arched Eyebrow, and Flounce Away. Stressed out. Ulcers burning my stomach lining. Puking my guts up every morning before school. Puking after most meals. Swigging Mylanta out of the bottle. Scraping its minty-chalky outline off my lips. Missing weeks of classes to heal my burned and ulcerated stomach. Living on boiled chicken and mashed potatoes. Begging my mom not to get involved. Escaping into movies like Pump Up the Volume, Heathers, and Revenge of the Nerds. Confiding to my diary that I’d rather be anywhere, move anyplace, than have to deal.
In the middle of eighth grade: Dad’s transfer to California.
Escape.
Relief.
This was me in college:
Average height, medium hair, contacts, great smile. Piccolo player in band. Writer. Great Student. Reader. Someone’s girlfriend. Part of a group of people who are smart and funny and into things like dance and science and Star Wars. Dorm liver. Party attendee/thrower. Confident and funny. Walking into someone’s apartment during a party. Spotting one of my junior high tormentors. Shaking. Trying to breathe. Stomach knotting. Hands clenching. Leaving because I couldn’t deal with what came rushing up from the past. Spending the next year on edge at every school event. Keeping one eye out. Rehearsing what to say. Convincing myself not to be snarky. Fearing and wishing I’d see her. Astonished and embarrassed by the power of nine-year-old words. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Running into her outside a classroom. Taking a deep breath. Listening. Mystified as she behaved like we were old friends. Struggling with the knowledge that I didn’t matter to her while her behavior mattered so much to me. Coping with the fury that brought out. Understanding the yoke I’d lived under for so long. Casting it off.
This is me now:
Average height, medium hair, contacts, same smile. Teacher. Writer. Reader. Someone’s wife. Someone’s mom. Part of several groups of people who are smart and funny and into cool stuff like Star Wars. Home owner. Secure in myself. Proof of how much words hurt. Proof that word wounds and stomachs can heal. Using my story to help others.
Bullies for Me
by Mo Willems
To Carolyn Mackler,
From Elizabeth in IL
Dear Ms. Mackler,
Hello, my name is Elizabeth and I am a sixth-grade girl. I really loved your book The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. It is definitely one of my favorite books. The character Virginia Shreves really spoke to me in a way that no other character ever has. When I read this book, I felt like this was a book about me. I completely understand the way she felt in the bathroom when the Bri-girls were talking about her. I, having been ridiculed my whole life, would know that overhearing people trashing you is a lot worse than them saying it to your face. I feel like I couldn’t be this happy without the inspiration your book gave me. I can feel every emotion she feels with all the description you gave. When she bites the insides of her cheeks, I can taste blood. Whenever she cries, I can feel myself starting to tear up. I can especially feel the triumph of her rebellion. I think my favorite part is when she is in Seattle and she realizes she isn’t numb anymore. Thank you for writing this amazing book. I have never loved a book the same way before. If possible, please send a response to my letter. I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Yours truly,
Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth
by Carolyn Mackler
Dear Elizabeth,
I only just got your note. You must be in seventh grade by now! Every so often I receive a letter from a reader that makes me pause in my way-too-busy life (book deadlines and two young children), reflect on what I do, and feel moved by the fact that my novels might possibly speak to someone when they most need it. Thank you for writing that letter.
You said you’ve been ridiculed your whole life. While I wish I could wave a wand and evaporate all bullies and jerks (wouldn’t that be great?), I can’t. But I can say this: I totally sympathize. Before I get to my last paragraph—all about how someday you’ll be in high school (slightly better) and college (even better) and then you’ll hit the real world, where you can pick who you spend your days with (not people who ridicule you) and one day you’ll have a way-too-busy life, surrounded by friends who love you for who you are . . . before I talk about all this, I want to acknowledge how hard it is to be in the trenches. Believe me, I was there.
It started when I was in seventh grade. Someone slipped a note in my locker. Dear Carolyn, the person had written. Welcome to Hoser High. I didn’t know what a hoser was, but I had a sinking feeling that this couldn’t be good. It went from bad to worse. Boys started teasing me about being Jewish. They coughed “Jew” behind their hand as I walked into the cafeteria. In French class, when we learned the word jupe (meaning skirt), it sounded enough like Jew to make them turn in their desks and snicker at me while I lowered my head, my cheeks burning, my insides dying. As the bullying continued—everything from a group of kids making fun of me for showing up at school with wet hair to boys wearing swastikas on Halloween—my self-esteem tanked. I started junior high happy and confident. Sure, I was a little quirky and I didn’t care about clothes and I designed elaborate villages for my dolls, but at the beginning of sixth grade, I felt good about myself and my place in the world. By the end of eighth grade, I was skittish and nervous and insecure. I barely even liked myself anymore.
The hardest thing was that I didn’t know where to turn. It helped to read novels about teenagers with different lives and hope that someday I would escape my conservative small town. I had my best friend, though she was a grade younger and didn’t know how bad it was for me at school. I told my parents, who talked about it with the principal. But nothing got better. My teachers didn’t even make the boys remove their swastikas on Halloween!
This was twenty-five years ago. Maybe things have changed in the schools. Hopefully they have. Hopefully, Elizabeth, you have an adult you can confide in, someone at school who can help you. I know it’s tricky. I know that to tell someone risks calling further attention to yourself. I’m glad you were inspired by The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. That was an important story for me to write, particularly when Virginia starts embracing herself as she is, not changing to please other people.
And this brings me to my inspiring last paragraph. The teasing subsided by the end of junior high. I went to high school and made new friends and had boyfriends and fell in love for the first time. I went to college and then became a novelist (my grown-up version of playing dolls!) and met my husband and got married and we
now have two beautiful boys. No one teases me anymore. I feel safe in my life. Those hellish years are over.
Okay, one more paragraph. Because even though those years are over, they’re not. Being bullied is part of who I am today—in the way I think, the way I treat people, the way I raise my children. It was scarring. Now and then I have to take a deep breath and fend off the inner voice that says I’m, well, a hoser. But it also made me a deeper, more sympathetic, more compassionate person. It’s allowed me to write novels about teen characters and really feel what they are going through. Which, in turn, has resulted in letters from readers like you! Yes, I wish I’d never been bullied (enter magic wand here). But I’m writing to say that there’s hope on the other side. Hang in there.
Love,
Carolyn
Resources for Teens
NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION LIFELINE
A twenty-four-hour, toll-free suicide prevention service available to anyone in suicidal crisis.
1-800-273-TALK (8255)
www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
THE BOYS TOWN NATIONAL HOTLINE
A toll-free number available to kids, teens, and young adults at any time—if you’re depressed, contemplating suicide, being physically or sexually abused, on the run, addicted, threatened by gang violence, fighting with a friend or parent, or if you are faced with an overwhelming challenge.
1-800-448-3000
www.boystown.org/national-hotline
www.yourlifeyourvoice.org
NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT HOTLINE AND NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT ONLINE HOTLINE
Dear Bully Page 18
