A moment of waiting, of the display telling me that he was typing.
SmallvilleGuy: I was typing too fast. I don’t know what I meant. Too much reading about aliens on the boards.
SkepticGirl1: Klutz. ;-)
SkepticGirl1: My story goes live at 7 a.m. tomorrow. Just about Anavi, and the way they bothered her, the way Butler said the school wouldn’t help.
SmallvilleGuy: Good. I’ll let you know if I hear anything useful from my friend, but maybe the whole thing will go away. I’d rather not see you get shot again.
SkepticGirl1: I’m Kevlar, you’re glue . . . Or are you something else?
Earlier I’d resolved to leave the “who are you?” question out for once. This wasn’t exactly asking that. So it didn’t count.
SmallvilleGuy: Night, Kevlar.
Of course it didn’t count. He didn’t answer.
CHAPTER 13
“From their earliest years, children are taught that if they have a problem that is too big for them to solve themselves, if they are in trouble or in danger, they should tell a trusted adult. Parents might give examples—police officers, soldiers, ministers, coaches, teachers, and, of course, principals. And so, to go back to our story, when 16-year-old Anavi Singh, excellent student and one of only 98 people to ever win the Galaxy Spelling Bee, was being targeted by this vicious group of gamers, who could blame her for trusting that her principal would help her?
“This reporter observed firsthand Principal Robert Butler treating Singh’s plea for help and confidential complaint not with the care it deserved, or by meeting his responsibility as a trusted adult to help her, but with disdain. He brushed it off. He brushed her off, left her to fend for herself. As he himself stated, ‘We don’t baby our students here. Real bullying is much rarer than these news reports make it out to be.’
“They tell us a trusted adult will be on our side, but what about when those adults can’t be trusted? What then? Then, we must protect each other and tell the truth.” – from “A Tale of Two Bullies” by Lois Lane (Devin Harris and Maddy Simpson also contributed)
*
I was rarely early for anything. It wasn’t my fault. Usually. Life threw too many distractions in my path, like videos of frolicking goats online or possible research lab conspiracies offline. But today, I arrived at school an entire ten minutes before the first bell. The red and blue halls were teeming, the hum and buzz of morning conversation a dull roar.
Could it be my imagination, or was there a brief silence as I passed people?
“She’s the one who wrote it,” a skaterish boy said to a girl rocking a fauxhawk.
The girl gave me a thumbs-up: “Way to stick it to Butler.”
I beamed at her with the force of an exploding sunspot. “Thanks!” I said, continuing on with more confidence.
There were a few more thumbs-ups, points and smiles—and the expected grumbling from people I could only assume were jerks or bullies themselves, adding a nasty comment here and there. But they couldn’t get me down, not when everyone else’s reaction was the equivalent of yay with pom-poms and confetti cannons.
Or close enough.
Maddy rushed up and took my arm.
“Oh. My. God,” she said. “Everyone read it. A couple of people even read some of my music reviews and shared them. Unbelievable.”
Devin materialized on my other side, holding up his palm, which I slapped. “We did it,” he said. “This is almost better than finding a dire wolf cache or getting a dragon to come over to House Devin’s side in Worlds.”
“Almost?” I said with mock offense.
He shrugged. “Dragons. Dire wolves. Versus school?”
James the Third was coming up the hallway toward us, and I felt Maddy and Devin tense. He wore an honest-to-god sweater vest. I hardly expected him to even bother to greet us unless he planned to express his disapproval again.
But he slowed, waiting until we reached him, and gifted me with a grudging nod. “Good work.”
I put my hand over my heart and gave Maddy a light elbow in the ribs. “You might need to catch me. I may faint here.”
The Third rolled his eyes, but he held up his phone so we could see the screen. The browser was open to the Scoop—not my story, but a sidebar that had been Devin’s idea. The teaser encouraged people to post their own bullying stories to demonstrate how common an occurrence it was.
I leaned in to get a better look at the glowing screen, and my mouth dropped open when I saw the number. “Is that a one-zero-zero? Already?”
James angled the screen toward himself, tapped it. “That’s a one-zero-one, because someone just posted a new one. They teased your story on the Daily Planet homepage, so you got Perry’s seal of approval too. Almost all of these are stories are not so different from Anavi’s, thanking her for being willing to come forward. And the Scoop for running it.”