Dear Bully By Megan Kelley Hall & Carrie Jones

"I don't know. I hope so. Because being a bully is easy, and being a victim is all too common. But standing on your safe middle ground and deciding to reach out where you can make a difference? That is a rare and difficult choice. Make the choice. Do something. Never shut up."

Her bullies came disguised as friends. At first, she was an independent young girl in primary school. She wore the old-fashioned and mismatched clothes she chose . . . which were different from the other girls. She had creative and artistic tendencies. She became more tired than the other girls and during dance class, she let her mother know and just sat down. "My legs are so tired mommy." At a young age, she just did not care what the other girls thought. But that would change later after the friend group developed a relationship with her, then dumped her suddenly and began to tease and bully her heinously. This vicious and hourly targeting came as a greater surprise than the original friending.

But eventually, that school year came to an end and she became stronger during the summer. She adjusted to that she had come home each day in tears. That she outgrew the bullies and became so successful that she had the opportunity to find her own people did not at times overshadow the darkness of brutality. "She learned that even those dark and terrible moments that are embedded in our psyche change and fade. That the world is not as small as it can seem. That there are people in it who will hurt you to ease their own pain, insecurity and fear." But when time passes and later comes and you find those few and special ones who can and do make your world a brighter place - people you meet in unexpected places, you find that after all you are accepted and loved just as you are.

One bully in one of the stories describes how he made the choice to depart from a gang of so-called friends to run back to the boy whom they had tied to a fence with his hoodie strings so tight that he could barely move or breathe, to free him from the unfair, lethal captivity. Still, another teenage girl whose parents were going through a divorce had no idea about her being bullied at school, her learning institution becoming identified more with misery than education, more with stomach aches and the overwhelming anxiety that if she ignored the latest name they were calling her, the group of female bullies would only move on to the next attempt at what was the infliction of enjoyable trauma for them.

Social terrorism of youth and others such as targeting the home of someone with the criminal performance of wall graffiti about or making up ugly songs about another child and singing them out loud to a person who cannot protect themself requires the attention of another adult or teacher who cares enough to be brave enough to put a stop to the abuse. "Don't just look away," the book advises. Alyson Noel promised herself that after the five years stretch of abuse that she the girl they labeled as the 'stuck up bitch' would write a book about it. "And I always swore that if I ever got published, I'd write a book about a girl who experiences something similar in the hope that my experience might help someone else." Although Art Geeks and Prom Queens was her second novel, she said that the effects of the bullying and the taunting lingered longer than the author wished that they ever would have.