Dear Bully

Around day five, after successfully ignoring these girls, never sputtering a word in defense or shedding a tear in their presence, I finally broke. I couldn’t breathe, my chest was cracking from the pressure of their insults, and I entered my math class in sobs.

My teacher pulled me into the hall, demanding to know the problem, and while I didn’t want to rat (is there anything worse a twelve-year-old can do?), I needed to talk. So I confessed what I was going through, tears streaking my cheeks, nose running, until the teacher cut me off, a finger pointed in my face. “Diana, pull yourself together!” she snapped, then marched me back into her classroom.

Eventually, I found new friends, a new lunch table to sit at, and new bonds that have lasted to this day. Three of the bridesmaids at my wedding were friends I’ve had since middle or high school.

But the scars of that week have remained, and I don’t say this lightly.

As an adult, I can tell you that my relationships with women have been affected by that sixth-grade experience. As recently as a couple of years ago, I realized that I still get nervous when a friend doesn’t call me back (maybe she’s mad at me?) or when we heatedly disagree on social/political/family issues (what if we stop being friends over this?). It took me a while to identify where these extreme worries were coming from, why that sick pit in my stomach always jumped to the worst conclusion to even the most minor negative occurrence between me and a female friend.

And it is because when I was twelve years old, that was exactly what happened.

I lost my best friend over nothing. I didn’t do anything to her, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it—other than being an entirely different person, because it wasn’t an action of mine she was rejecting, it was me. She moved on to a “cooler” best friend. We never spoke again.

Somehow, until the day we graduated, we managed to be on the same sports teams, walk through the same halls, go to the same dances, and attend some of the same classes, and never share a word, never let our eyes meet. We were strangers; those five years of our lives never happened, like deleted memories. I was easily forgettable.

And then I saw her on the street. I was actually writing a book about bullying at the time (a book I’m still working on), and the memories of that ordeal were so fresh it was as if I had drawn her to me with my writing. I saw her twice more after that in the span of six months. She bought a house seven blocks from mine. Her husband joined my gym.

And I’d like to say that the universe brought her to me to learn some big lesson, but if that’s true, I’m not sure I absorbed it. Each time I saw her, I didn’t want to speak to her, I didn’t miraculously forget everything that happened, and I wasn’t happy to reminisce about the good ol’ days. But still I smiled, I nodded, I acted interested. That could not have been the lesson: to be inauthentic? But I also doubt the lesson was that I should have confronted her on the street with something that happened twenty years ago, either.

Maybe the lesson was to confront the fact that there is a name for what I went through at that time, a name I never used until now. I was bullied. And I survived it.

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.