“Define bullying,” I mumbled aloud, reading off the paper. I snorted. “What a stupid task.”
The school has just had its annual useless anti-bullying assembly. I guess they just wanted to check if some kids were still awake, so they sent us home with this sickly pale yellow sheet of paper and fourteen solid black lines to hand in again tomorrow. My assignment was to reply to the prompt in any way I deemed fitting. It’d be a laugh if I wrote, “If you don’t know what a word means, you should look it up in the dictionary.”

I doubt there’s a child that hasn’t been bullied. I’m sure that the person who came up with this had a few school yard squabbles themselves. So why ask me what they already know?

“Bullying is when a first grader finally admits to the teacher why she cries during recess and the teacher replies, ‘suck it up.’” I laughed, recalling my earlier days. Why wouldn't I treat this like a joke? Stopping bullying is a joke. Kids will always be cruel.

I wrote my first thought down. Tapping my fingers on the hardwood desk, I decided I’d give them exactly what they wanted.

“Bullying is when the girl who smiles the most is afraid to go to school. She’s picked on because of her hair, or her body, or her words. They mock her grades, no matter how hard she works for them. She’s teased for the things she can’t control. Every day, she lives in fear of the next strike. All she did was speak her mind, and BAM! She’s public enemy number one,” I scrawled out the words on the page, throwing legible penmanship out the window. “Bullying,” I spoke out loud with an angered tone. “is when a girl decides not to be friends with the villain anymore. She chooses not to be the butt of every joke, the punch line to every crack. It’s when her friends invite the bully to sit with them at lunch, just to see her squirm as she picks at her tuna fish sandwich. Bullying is when she has to race to every class just to avoid passing him in the halls, and if she does, she shrinks at the death stare she receives.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. His piercing brown eyes were still fresh in my mind. “Bullying is when his eyes appear in her dreams as those of hungry tigers or evil demons that scratch at her face or squeeze her heart until she feels like she’s about to drop dead and wakes up covered in sweat and can’t stop crying.”

I pushed my chair away from my desk and stood up. I grabbed a bottle of water off the window sill by my bed and quenched my thirst, clutching the container in my hand until it was a mangled piece of plastic. I couldn’t believe the searing pain pouring out of me, like all the words I had kept inside just needed to explode through my pen. The feeling was so indescribable, a mix of hesitation, rage, and a bit of relief. I sat back down and decided to finish off my little masterpiece with something that would really show whoever this was going to exactly what I thought of their little task.

“Bullying is a cruel, practical joke that never ends. It’s why the girl still shakes in terror when she sees her predator in the hallways, and why the mention of his name makes her heart drop down into her stomach. It’s why she stopped writing “HOPE” on her wrists after realizing such a notion did not exist,” I glanced down at my own wrist, seeing the bare, pale flesh with a greenish vein slashing it in two. “Bullying is the reason for this stupid assignment. Good luck trying to stop something bigger than all of us.”