Dear Bully полностью

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 critical 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.