Mari Mancusi
I’ve got an update for you from the future: Alex A. wrestles alligators for a living, and he loses every time.
Okay, okay, my update isn’t completely nonfictional; I don’t know that for sure. He might have ended up as a partner at a highly successful law firm. Or invented the inexplicably popular PajamaJeans (as seen on TV). For all I know he could’ve retired at twenty-nine after making a killing on his Apple stock. I don’t know what he’s actually doing these days, but I have to admit: I like to imagine his clothes reeking of swamp and defeat at the end of the workday.
I know, I know. It’s not very nice to wish such misfortune on a former classmate. Especially one who might be off digging wells right now, so that thirsty children somewhere can have clean water to drink.
But I can’t help it. I look back at the way he treated you in junior high and it still makes me furious.
Back then, not too many people talked about bullying. And even fewer did anything about it. If anything, parents had this crazy idea that whatever didn’t kill you would make you stronger.
What total BS!
As if it wasn’t hard enough for you to make the transition from a small private school to a huge public one. To leave your friends behind and get swallowed up in a sea of strangers. The only thing that made you feel at all safe was your art. The only place where no one could hurt you was a hand-drawn world of your own creation.
But did Alex A. understand this? Did he allow you to quietly escape your troubled reality for a rich hideaway of your own imagination? Nope. He crashed in, uninvited, invading your private world and publicly ridiculing you and your art. He exposed you and humiliated you in front of classmates you already had difficulty relating to. And when he had finished, you were so embarrassed you ripped up those once-precious drawings and threw them away in tears. You never picked up a pencil again.
You let Alex A. take something important from you. Something that mattered. Something that gave you comfort and hope. Today I can’t draw to save my life. Alex stole that from me. From you. From us.
I don’t know why Alex A. targeted you back then. Maybe he was feeling bad about himself and needed to rip into someone else to save his own self-esteem. Or maybe he sensed a sweet, sensitive soul who would take his cruelty to heart, giving him power for the first time in his life. But in the end, it doesn’t matter why. He hurt you, and the experience didn’t make you any stronger. It didn’t make you a better person. Anyone who says bullying builds character can suck it.
But don’t worry. In the end, you grow up to write a novel about bullying. You dig deep into your own psyche and fictionalize the pain you once experienced for real. And the best part? You give your heroine a happy ending. The kind you didn’t get in real life. She rises above her haters. She doesn’t let them rob her of her passion for art.
And the book winds up inspiring tons of teenage girls! Girls currently in junior high (and who are facing their own Alexes on a daily basis) take the time to write you e-mails telling you how your character’s courage has helped them find some courage of their own.
So now that I think of it, maybe you did get your happy ending after all. While that little bully, Alex A., is busy trying to outwit (or outrun) a thousand-pound lizard.
Emmy Award–winner Mari Mancusi works as a freelance TV producer and is the author of books for teens, including the Blood Coven Vampire series and Gamer Girl (2008). She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, Jacob, and their daughter, Avalon.