Megan Hall - Dear Bully

You might hate it when adults tell you this, but with two decades separating me from this experience, I can honestly say that the best revenge really is living well. I’m thrilled to go to class reunions now, because I know I’m not the same mousy person I was back then. I’m proud of who I turned out to be, because of and in spite of everything that happened to me growing up. Plus, I wrote a book about the ordeal, so maybe authors really do need to suffer for their art, maybe that’s why I so vividly remember what it was like to be a teenager, and maybe that’s why I write for young adults now.

So, to the teens who are reading this and are currently being bullied, I say: you will get through it, you will not forget it, it is a big deal, but hey, maybe one day you can turn it into a great novel. That’ll show ’em.

* Names have been changed. Obviously. But I’m sure if “Amanda” were ever to read this, she’d know this essay is about her . . .

Objects in Mirror Are More Complex Than They Appear

by Lauren Oliver

I have a confession to make: I was not bullied in high school. I was not harassed, insulted, humiliated, or ostracized.

At various times, I was, however, the victim of rumors: there was the time when I was a sophomore and I hooked up with a popular junior in front of forty or so of my classmates on a dare; afterward, people shot me dirty looks for weeks, and whispers, snake hisses, followed me down the halls.

Then there was the time as a senior that photos of an (ahem) intimate nature made it into the hands of some sophomore boys and managed to circulate throughout almost the entire class before I was able to retrieve them.

But these were blips, minor traumas—not the seismic, permanent, and isolating ruptures so many teens experience during their high school years. For the most part, things were easy for me. I went to parties. I threw parties. I had friends, had boyfriends (many of them older), and if anything, was probably feared more than fearful: I wasn’t always very nice, I am ashamed to say.

Then who was I in high school? To answer that question is also to explain why I wanted to contribute to this anthology. Because there were unquestionably two different me’s in high school: there was the me as it was created by others, the me who could be comprehended in, and thus reduced to, a sum of facts and stories (Lauren: smart, slutty, mean ).

Then there was the me as I understood—or, more accurately, didn’t understand—myself. And that me was far blurrier, far less easy to categorize. Angry, self-conscious; brave and also desperately insecure; fiercely loyal to my friends; both a partier and a bookworm; promiscuous and deeply ambivalent about sex. I was a soccer player and a smoker, a theater nerd and a lifeguard, a wild child and an impeccable student.

But that description is blurry and full of contradiction, and people have a very limited tolerance for contradiction; and so I remained Lauren: smart, slutty, mean.

Humans have a long and not-so-illustrious history of dehumanizing people in order to dominate, subjugate, or otherwise abuse them—from the infamous three-fifths of a person compromise in the US Constitution to our colonizing ancestors’ determination that the Native Americans were savages to the trials at Salem in the 1600s, in which weird (or promiscuous) women were burned at the stake for being witches.

This is what happens in high school, too: We call people witches. We decide that they are too weird, too different. They are not us.

And then we burn them at the stake. We spread nasty rumors; we call them names; we alienate and ostracize them.

But my point is that the impulses that facilitate this kind of abuse are the same that had me labeled “mean” or, at least briefly, “a slut”; these are the same impulses that also lead us to assign labels like “jock,” “theater nerd,” “video-game geek”: impulses to categorize, to box, to hold desperately to our fragile identities by saying clearly what we are not . After all, it has always been easier to understand what we like by virtue of what we don’t—anyone who has ever heard the phrase “I like all music except for country!” knows that.

In order to find some solution to the bullying problem, we’ll have to be more tolerant of ambiguity, subtlety, and strangeness not just in other people but in ourselves . It may be important to your identity that you are a soccer player, but it may be equally important that you can whistle the national anthem backward and make the world’s best spicy popcorn and do a wicked impression of Victoria Beckham. Schools, parents, and educational endeavors should encourage people not just to empathize but to discover and celebrate the weirdness in others and in ourselves. We need not just to think but to live outside the box. Weirdness is good. It keeps things interesting.

I’ll end this essay with a metaphor. Imagine a plate, compartmentalized. In one corner is a pile of plain cooked pasta, lumped together; in another is steamed asparagus; in yet another is a pile of chopped basil; lastly, there is a small pile of feta cheese. The plate is orderly, clean-looking. It is also boring and unappetizing.

But shake things up a little, mix all the ingredients together . . . and, my friends, the miraculous will occur.

I feel I am still very young in many ways, but in the past ten years, since graduating from high school, I have learned several very valuable lessons. I can say with confidence that being kind and generous will make you happier than being mean and withholding; that the only thing worth striving for is individuality; and that celebrating people’s differences is, paradoxically, the best way to bring people together.

Speak

Levels

by Tanya Lee Stone

Being on top is cool

especially after working our way up from the bottom

But being on top is nothing

if you’re gonna use it

to put people down.

I tried to reason with you,

talk to you man to man,

but you just laughed

and kept right on after them.

Can’t you see they’re already scared of you

without you acting beneath yourself?

They look up to you

even though

you don’t deserve it,

looking down from your flimsy cloud.

But I’m big enough to tell you

and I’m not gonna stop until I get somewhere.

What are you going to do about it?

I don’t care if I piss you off,

calling you off

those kids.

Yeah, we’re both on top

But you just

sunk

a little

lower.

Slivers of Purple Paper

by Cyn Balog

Every high school class has one. One person whose name is synonymous with tragedy, whispered with a serious shake of the head or a “tsk, tsk.” High school is painful as it is, but for some it’s downright torturous. I’m talking about the one who didn’t live out the four years, the one for whom all the pressure was just too much.

In my school, that person was Avery.

I had nothing in common with Avery. Avery was smart and athletic and popular, all the things people like me wished we could be. If you put my picture in front of the members of my graduating class, most would probably say they’d never seen me before in their lives. I’d been in the school district since kindergarten, and yet, I was the invisible one. My classmates didn’t think of me. They would describe me, if they absolutely had to, in one word: shy.