In seventh and eighth grade, Allison Clarke’s* murder attempts kick-started the best writing piece I’ve ever created.
Let me clarify: she never put a knife to my throat or a gun to my head. Allison attempted murder in the subtle ways that bullies do. She wanted to see me break down, but I was too hard, too jaded by that point to care about what she did to me. Well, almost too hard and jaded. The rumors she spread about me, the insults about the natural hair I couldn’t afford to upkeep properly, and the wads of paper she enjoyed throwing at my back felt like severe punishmentsfor a crime I never committed.
To deal with Allison’s childish behavior, I did what I did best: I wrote about my feelings. Through at least one hundred angry songs, I retold tales of her daunting actions. I used admittedly whiny poetry, as teenagers do, to wonder why she liked to target me in particular. And through Death by Society, I created a fictional universe where I came to terms with how I felt about her and hypothesized potential reasons for her bullying ways. Death by Society is my second novel. …show more content…
In it, I use the viewpoints of four different girls to send a message about the effects of bullying on the bullied, bullies, and bystanders. Carter Harper is the misunderstood gothic who was into computers, cutting, and contemplation. Lilly Fieldsman is an innocuous popular girl who saves Carter’s life. Carrie Aren is a mean popular girl who loved shopping and ruining Carter’s days. Slater Schaeffer is a quiet bystander who’s afraid revealing her lesbian identity and, therefore, telling the world she’s different. These characters deliberately sound stereotypical, but I gave them all qualities and backstories to make them unique, showing the reader that we all have yin and yang, good and bad, inside of us. Although my goal for the story has changed with revision and time, by creating this story I hoped Allison would eventually find it and realize she couldn’t treat people unkindly and expect consequences to not arise from her actions. Once, I did lose control in front of her. During gym class, also known as hell on earth, she “accidentally” served a volleyball directly into my face. As the entire class laughed, I stomped over to her team’s side of the room. The room suddenly grew quiet as I got closer and closer to Allison. I’m 95% sure that in that moment, I planned to bash her face in with a volleyball. Luckily, some random girl in our class understood my intentions and ran to the gym teacher with the volleyball to prevent an ugly scene. I later included the scene as an intro to a class-wide volleyball fight in Death by Society. (Spoiler alert: Carter broke Carrie’s nose.) In middle and high school, it felt like somebody was always trying to hurt me. So I started hurting myself before everybody else could. When my mother’s incapability to realize that being unemployed doesn’t pay the rent got us evicted, I began to self-harm inside of the five places where we lived during the span of eighth grade. When we got another house but had no nutritious food because she was being paid Pennsylvania minimum wage and received limited SNAP benefits, I ate at least four packs of ramen a day, capped off by a Pop-Tart every morning. When we couldn’t afford hot water thanks to an unforgiving $10,000 gas company bill, I only washed up once a week, too depressed to practice basic self-care. Still, I allowed myself to escape my world of poverty and hurt through writing. I wrote about a rich girl whose only issue was trying to start a clothing line at sixteen. I created a short story about a California girl who murdered her older brother then realized she killed his twin. I created a magazine to make enough money to get out of poverty (it paid part of the rent one month, but that’s about it) and distract myself from my depression, social anxiety, suicidal ideation, and binge eating disorder. When something very bad happened in eleventh grade, I chose to escape in a different way than the usual. Things had been going downhill for two months, but I
Let me clarify: she never put a knife to my throat or a gun to my head. Allison attempted murder in the subtle ways that bullies do. She wanted to see me break down, but I was too hard, too jaded by that point to care about what she did to me. Well, almost too hard and jaded. The rumors she spread about me, the insults about the natural hair I couldn’t afford to upkeep properly, and the wads of paper she enjoyed throwing at my back felt like severe punishmentsfor a crime I never committed.
To deal with Allison’s childish behavior, I did what I did best: I wrote about my feelings. Through at least one hundred angry songs, I retold tales of her daunting actions. I used admittedly whiny poetry, as teenagers do, to wonder why she liked to target me in particular. And through Death by Society, I created a fictional universe where I came to terms with how I felt about her and hypothesized potential reasons for her bullying ways. Death by Society is my second novel. …show more content…
In it, I use the viewpoints of four different girls to send a message about the effects of bullying on the bullied, bullies, and bystanders. Carter Harper is the misunderstood gothic who was into computers, cutting, and contemplation. Lilly Fieldsman is an innocuous popular girl who saves Carter’s life. Carrie Aren is a mean popular girl who loved shopping and ruining Carter’s days. Slater Schaeffer is a quiet bystander who’s afraid revealing her lesbian identity and, therefore, telling the world she’s different. These characters deliberately sound stereotypical, but I gave them all qualities and backstories to make them unique, showing the reader that we all have yin and yang, good and bad, inside of us. Although my goal for the story has changed with revision and time, by creating this story I hoped Allison would eventually find it and realize she couldn’t treat people unkindly and expect consequences to not arise from her actions. Once, I did lose control in front of her. During gym class, also known as hell on earth, she “accidentally” served a volleyball directly into my face. As the entire class laughed, I stomped over to her team’s side of the room. The room suddenly grew quiet as I got closer and closer to Allison. I’m 95% sure that in that moment, I planned to bash her face in with a volleyball. Luckily, some random girl in our class understood my intentions and ran to the gym teacher with the volleyball to prevent an ugly scene. I later included the scene as an intro to a class-wide volleyball fight in Death by Society. (Spoiler alert: Carter broke Carrie’s nose.) In middle and high school, it felt like somebody was always trying to hurt me. So I started hurting myself before everybody else could. When my mother’s incapability to realize that being unemployed doesn’t pay the rent got us evicted, I began to self-harm inside of the five places where we lived during the span of eighth grade. When we got another house but had no nutritious food because she was being paid Pennsylvania minimum wage and received limited SNAP benefits, I ate at least four packs of ramen a day, capped off by a Pop-Tart every morning. When we couldn’t afford hot water thanks to an unforgiving $10,000 gas company bill, I only washed up once a week, too depressed to practice basic self-care. Still, I allowed myself to escape my world of poverty and hurt through writing. I wrote about a rich girl whose only issue was trying to start a clothing line at sixteen. I created a short story about a California girl who murdered her older brother then realized she killed his twin. I created a magazine to make enough money to get out of poverty (it paid part of the rent one month, but that’s about it) and distract myself from my depression, social anxiety, suicidal ideation, and binge eating disorder. When something very bad happened in eleventh grade, I chose to escape in a different way than the usual. Things had been going downhill for two months, but I