Dear Bully

by Megan Kelley Hall

  Not standing up now would keep me from fighting back if some punk who used to be my friend dragged me out of the boys’ restroom while I was changing out of my band uniform, casting me to the hallway floor in just a shirt, socks, and my tighty-whities, right in front of some preppy girls. Avoiding Kevin now would mean I’d do nothing when clubbed over the head at my locker or when my face was slammed against another guy’s crotch.

  If I didn’t fight, how would I handle the mob of boys waiting to torment me in ninth grade because I chose a girlfriend who was a year younger than me? How would I deal with the name-calling, the punch-and-runs in the hall, the tripping, and everything else?

  I think both second-grade classes turned out for the fight. Word gets around. There were a lot of kids out there. They made a ring around me and Kevin on the playground behind the school. They were bloodthirsty in their plaid bell-bottoms and cotton dresses.

  Oddly, I wasn’t so much worried about losing the fight. I’d never been in a fight before. I wasn’t even sure how it was supposed to work. My only fear was of getting caught.

  It was time. Kevin and I closed in on each other. We locked arms in some kiddie wrestling move and held for a few seconds before breaking free.

  I ran. I snatched my Charlie Brown lunch box and books off the sidewalk and ran all the way home.

  The next several years were off-and-on hell as I dealt with one bully after another, always too timid to stand up for myself. Eventually I grew out of being the scrawny, acne-riddled kid in clothes that didn’t fit. Sometime after that, most of my bullies matured, but by that time I’d learned that I had to stand up to them, even if it meant a fight. Even if it meant losing the fight. Even if it meant getting in trouble for fighting.

  I believe everything that happens to us goes into making us what we are. We are a collection of our experiences. Yeah, I suffered a lot of abuse because I chose to run away from that fight, but in the end I think everything I endured made me a better person and better teacher and certainly gave me a lot of material to write about.

  Fearless

  by Jeannine Garsee

  At thirteen, I’m smart, mouthy, and fearless.

  Overnight, I change.

  Our junior high is a battlefield, the enemy line clearly drawn: me on one side, along with Dee-Dee and Diane, and them—Renee, Cathy, and Judith—on the other. We six spend our days trading sinister stares, snide remarks, and bumps in the hall. It’s not a popularity issue; we’re all equally unpopular. Not jealousy, either; as daughters of working class families, our wardrobes aren’t special, plus we’re all plagued with acne, bad hair, and iffy figures. No cheerleaders, no jocks, no honor roll members among us—just six average, awkward eighth-grade girls.

  We simply hate one another. Without a huge circle of friends of our own, and linked by our mutual contempt for them, Dee-Dee, Diane, and I vow to always stick together.

  One evening, a classmate I know casually calls to say, “I heard some people are out to get you.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I can’t say. But I thought I’d warn you.” Click.

  Wondering if Dee-Dee or Diane know about this, I phone Dee-Dee first—and she hangs up on me! Baffled and uneasy, I then try Diane.

  “People don’t like you anymore,” she admits after a long silence.

  “People? What people?”

  “Everyone.” Then Diane hangs up, too.

  Sick with dread, I agonize over this all night long. In the morning, as usual, I wait for Dee-Dee’s mom, who generally drives the three of us to school. The clock ticks away. No one shows up. Nauseated, wondering what I’ll be walking into today, I rush to school on foot, barely making it on time.

  When I stumble into Mrs. Z.’s homeroom, Dee-Dee glares. Diane averts her eyes. I mumble “Hi” anyway, but they both ignore me. Seated, I peek nervously around—and make a hideous discovery.

  It’s not only Dee-Dee and Diane who are in on this game; everyone’s battering me with nasty looks! They whisper. They toss notes back and forth and then point purposefully to me. When Mrs. Z. calls my name, someone shouts “Horseface!” and the entire class screeches with laughter.

  “Enough of that!” Mrs. Z. snaps, which only prompts a quieter litany of “Horseface . . . Horseface . . .” She pretends not to hear them.

  So do I.

  Shaky, sweaty, my stomach burning, I rack my brain to figure this all out: Why is this happening? What did I do to Dee-Dee and Diane? We were fine yesterday!

  The day straggles on, each class a rerun of the one before. People call me names, throw spitballs at me. At lunch, when I spot Dee-Dee and Diane chatting with Renee, Cathy, and Judith, my situation becomes horrifyingly clear.

  Yes, my two best friends have joined ranks with them.

  Sickened by this blatant betrayal, I sit far away, yet not nearly far enough; I can still hear their comments about “what a bitch she is” and how they hope to “kick her ass!” When a balled-up lunch bag smacks me in the head, I ditch my uneaten lunch and slink off to the library.

  After school, when nobody kicks my ass, I walk home alone, praying for a miracle. Make tomorrow different. Make things normal again. Make it all a bad joke. Please, God, please!

  But the next day, nothing has changed. Attempts by teachers to stop the harassment have little effect; what my new enemies can’t accomplish in class, they take to the halls. They snatch my books, push me and trip me, spit in my face, and jerk my hair. They call me “Horseface” incessantly. They tell lies, spread rumors.

  And this lasts . . .

  . . . and lasts.

  Day after day.

  Week after week.

  One endless, unimaginable nightmare.

  When Dee-Dee and Diane rebuff my timid attempts to make up—for what? What? I don’t even know!—I lapse into a numbing depression. I sleep as much possible, hoping I won’t wake up. On better days, I plot my revenge, fantasizing gory events I know I’ll never carry out. I frequently play sick, missing days of school on end. The only advice my distant parents have to offer is “If you ignore them, they’ll leave you alone.” They are so, so wrong.

  Ostracized and alone, I’m sure of only one thing: People hate me.

  Hate me!

  And though I hate them back, I know I’ll forgive them in an instant—if only they’ll forgive me for whatever I did to them.

  I try one last time and telephone Diane. “Please tell me why everyone hates me!”

  “You’re too tough,” she says flatly. “You’re a tomboy.”

  For that my so-called friends turned the whole class against me? I plead for more details. She merely hangs up on me.

  Regardless of Diane’s words, I know I’ve lost all my toughness. I feel trapped and helpless, irreparably broken. I’ll never survive the rest of the year, I think. Something will happen to me first . . . something terrible!

  I do survive, and it’s my writing that saves me. Not only do I detail this experience in my diary, but I also plunge into writing fiction to escape my reality. I spend my lunch periods in the library plotting out new worlds. I huddle over my typewriter long past midnight, inventing characters less cowardly than me, ones with far happier lives.

  Eighth grade ends at last. Ninth grade turns out to be nearly as insufferable. By sophomore year, the abuse dwindles, though I occasionally hear “Horseface!” directed at me in the halls. After two years, Dee-Dee, shyly, attempts to renew our old friendship. I’m polite but superficial; I don’t care about her anymore. Nor can I forgive her.

  Writing now with a feverish vengeance, I finish my first novel by the end of tenth grade: the story of a girl who is smart, mouthy, and fearless.

  I am me. I am whole.

  No one can break me again.

  Without Armor

  by Daniel Waters

  “You’re the guy who writes about dead kids,” she said, her mouth tight. It wasn’t a statement or a question; it was an accusation.

  I’ll admit the comment
threw me. Obviously, I’d never been on a book tour before, much less a prepublication tour, and had little idea of what to expect. To be more accurate, I’d tried to keep myself free from expectations. Doing so allowed me to enjoy the process much more than if I had obsessed over everything like I usually do.

  The downside of walking around open to the world, free from expectation, is that it involves taking one’s armor off. All writers have armor. Armor is required gear for anyone who willfully engages in a career path fraught with rejection, public criticism, or, worse, obscurity. I actually think my armor is pretty tough, battle hardened by far too many years trying and failing to “break in.” But like any other writer’s, it is patchy and cobbled together out of spare parts, rife with weak spots that could let deadly, near-mortal wounds pass through. Regardless, I’d left it home.

  You’d think after writing a book about dead kids, and dead kids falling in love with living kids and vice versa, that I’d have been a little more battle ready. I may officially be an author of young adult books, but I’d grown up thinking I would be a horror author, and so I read all the introductions to great horror novels and anthologies. These were usually autobiographical in nature, and almost invariably the intros had some anecdote about the social awkwardness of being a horror author. I gathered that it was weird enough being a “normal” author (World to author: What is it you really do?), but horror authors, it seemed, dealt with another level of bizarre social awkwardness entirely. Some of their experiences I read about included having their books banned, getting ostracized by the local PTA at their children’s schools, being accosted constantly by armchair psychoanalysts, or—one of my favorites—fielding questions like “Ever et raw meat?” (one posed to Mr. Stephen King, who has many such anecdotes). A horror author clearly had to deal with a segment of the public that was less than adoring and, in many cases, downright hostile. Maybe I should have done more to guard myself against such hostility.

  There was a pause as I took note of the woman’s posture, her tone, the glint in her eyes. She wanted to fight. Did I? Am I the guy who writes about dead kids? A hundred responses, mostly defensive, many belligerent, sprang to my mind. Responses about judging books by covers and did you actually read the book or do you actually read any books and much, much worse. As a writer, you don’t get to tell someone the meaning of what they just read. That’s the job of the book itself. You can, however, talk about what informed the writing, what your mood was, and what was going on in your head when you were writing the story.

  The initial idea for Generation Dead came from some newsmagazine show I’d seen on violence in schools. According to the program, it was becoming all the rage in schools across America to videotape planned fights or random acts of violence and put them up on YouTube for the entire world to enjoy. The show ran a number of the actual clips of young people hurting other young people. One of the clips featured a little boy in a coat that was too big for him waiting for the bus to arrive. A much larger boy ran into the frame and punched the smaller boy in the face, dropping him to the pavement. The little boy sat, alone and crying, bleeding from his nose and mouth.

  We’ve all got our horror pressure points. That was mine. That’s what I wrote about.

  Well, really I wrote a love story. That’s what it says on the dedication page, anyway: For Kim, a love story. The back cover copy of the book promises love and romance and those topics are what, presumably, the marketing efforts will highlight. And if you ask me, I will tell you I wrote a love story. It just happens to be a love story with zombies. Teenage zombies.

  But the damaged boy crying on the pavement is in the book, too, as are the damaged boys that attacked and filmed him. You won’t see them as you see Tommy, the living-impaired boy who falls for Phoebe, the traditionally biotic girl who notices that Tommy is different from all the other boys in her class in more ways than the obvious one. The YouTube victim and his assailants aren’t physical characters in the book, but they are there lurking somewhere under the surface of the story.

  I think the zombies were my brain’s (my braaaaaiiiiiin’s!) way of coping with what to me was a truly horrific subject. Cthulhu scares me. Dracula is creepy, and I fear the Rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem, but the idea (no, not the idea, the reality) of a kid injuring another kid for no other reason than the entertainment value he assumes to be inherent in the act absolutely horrifies me. The zombies allowed me to inject humor into a subject matter that, if I dwelled on it for too long, would put me in the deepest blue funk imaginable. The zombies helped me cope.

  And zombies are, of course, wicked cool.

  I wrote a story that thrilled me and gripped me emotionally. Generation Dead made me laugh, it made me sad, and it scared me. Writing about love and death and zombies and being young and never growing old taught me so much. I wrote about things that were important to me, and while I may not have known what I was trying to do when I started, by the time I finished I had a very clear sense of what I’d written and what I was trying to do as a writer. And I care very deeply about those kids—the kids on YouTube and the kids in my book. My dead kids are not “dead kids” in the sense that the tight-lipped woman was implying.

  Which brings us back to Danny’s First Critic. She taught me something. She taught me that I’m better off without the armor, because no matter how much I fortify it, no matter how well oiled the plates are, and no matter how tightly I weave the chain links, there’s no way it can really protect me. An arrow can always slip through; a swung club could always bruise. And that’s okay, really, because it is as much a part of my job to feel as it is to make others feel.

  I’m glad I’d left the armor at home. If I’d prepared for battle, I don’t think I would have answered her in quite the same way, and I don’t think my answer, in turn, would have made her grim expression soften. I don’t think she would have done what she did next, which was pick up the advanced reader copy of the book and add it to the considerable pile she had already amassed. She didn’t go as far as to have me sign it, but she took the book.

  “No,” I’d told her, “I’m the guy who writes about kids who’re trying to live.”

  The Seed

  by Lauren Kate

  There is a girl in your seventh-grade class. She is not exceptionally pretty. She isn’t rich or all that great of a singer. She is no more or less popular than you. You are friends with each other’s friends, but you are not friends.

  There are meaner girls than this one. Your school is teeming with them. Down every hallway lurk bigger snobs and scarier gossips. And yet, for some reason, ever since your elementary school and this girl’s elementary school flowed together into one great big middle school, this is the girl who makes you feel the most uncomfortable in your skin.

  In the mornings, she and her friends stand outside the cul-de-sac where the bus drops off, handing out religious pamphlets. When you don’t take one—and you never take one—she is the girl who always asks, loudly enough for the whole bus full of kids to hear, why you want to burn in hell for all eternity. This is the worst, but not the last, of it. In gym, she flirts with the boys you have crushes on. In English, your favorite class, she challenges the things you say about the reading assignment to the point where you are dumbstruck, even though you know the answer. On the rare occasions when you and your friends are being mean girls—once, at a slumber party, after the first girl fell asleep, you and your friends soaked her extra underwear and put it in the freezer—this girl rolls over in her sleeping bag and catches you, singles you out, makes you feel worse than your own mother did when she heard about the incident.

  This girl may not even know it, but she has perfected the art of making you feel as if everything you do, everything you say, and especially everything you don’t say is under her scrutiny, and wrong.

  You are not good at comebacks. This isn’t something that will ever change, by the way, even twenty years down the road. The words that were nowhere near the tip of your tongue at the crit
ical moment begin to haunt you. They keep you up at night. You lie in bed, replaying the dialogue that left you speechless earlier that day. The way this girl kept pressing you to talk about why you weren’t going to the school dance—in front of the boy you wish had asked you.

  Here’s the difference: In your mind, you’re wearing cooler clothes. You visualize every detail, down to the way your socks are scrunched (this is Texas, after all). Your cheeks don’t turn bright red and your voice doesn’t shake and you don’t spit out a lame and unconvincing excuse about your grandparents coming into town. In your mind, you say something funny, really funny, that makes the boy who was pretending not to hear your conversation laugh out loud. Also, it shuts the girl up. For a change.

  The fantasy of a perfect conversation becomes a nightly ritual. You don’t know it yet, but this is the beginning of your career as a writer. And this girl—the one you cannot stand—planted the seed in you. In your imagination, you are the smartest, funniest version of yourself. You are inventing the person you want to practice being, and she’s brilliant. So brilliant someone should write a book about her.

  You grow up a little bit. Some things change and some don’t. The girl stops handing out those little blue copies of the New Testament, but she still makes you tongue-tied most of the time. At least the cute boy from gym class doesn’t do that anymore. It’s easy to say the thing that makes him laugh. Another dance is coming up. You have a date.

  Years later, you leave home. In college, you meet people who remind you of this girl. The difference is you don’t let them get under your skin. All those nights, all those scenes you played out in your head—it’s as if they have given you wings. You’ve even started writing a few of them down. Before you know it, you’ve written a book. You call it The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove.