It started when I was in the 6th grade. It was a group of girls. It started as pointing and laughing in the hallway. And at first, I was like, they can’t possibly be pointing at me. So I kind of shrugged it off. But then it happened more and more often. And I was like, they’re pointing at me. So I was kind of like, what are they pointing at? What’s wrong? Is there something wrong with me? So I didn’t tell anyone, because I should shrug it off. It’s probably not a big deal. So I just lived with. And then it got worse. It started turning into words like oh my God. She’s so fat. She’s so ugly. That bitch. That slut. And so I’m like, am I really ugly? Am I really fat? It made me doubt myself. Yet I still didn’t tell anyone because they’re the popular girls. So I thought if they got into trouble everyone would hate me. So I just dealt with it and it was eating me up on the inside, like, am I like that? So then it just got worse. They started trying to get me in trouble in class, like Grace has her phone in her pocket. She stole my pencil. So I’d be embarrassed in front of the whole class. And I still didn’t tell anyone because I was scared. And then one day after school I was having a normal conversation with my mother and it slipped out. She casually says, what have they been doing? How long has this been going on? So I told her everything. And then she marched up right to my school and told the VP. Then he told the counselor. And she marched the girls in one by one, and then it stopped. No more yelling, no more pointing, no more words, no more trying to get me in trouble during class. And each teacher knew about it. So they would come up to me and be like, are you okay? Anything to report? It was fine. I had this army of teachers behind me. It was great. The whole year was perfect until the last day of school. The last day of school you have movies, you have signing yearbooks. So at the last half of the day, you got to sign up for a movie. I wrote my name under The Princess Bride. I love that movie! And then I went to go sign yearbooks, and I came back to see who else was in the movie, and it said, is a retard. So it spelled out Grace is a retard. And I guess some girls just can’t let it go. So I went right up to one of the teachers I could trust and told them. So they got the group of girls and he found out who did it. He put her in in-school suspension for the rest of the day. At the end of the day she comes up to me and says she’s sorry. Then she hands me this piece of paper. And on that piece of paper is how she’s sorry and how she actually doesn’t think I’m a retard and how she thought if she did that she would fit in with the popular girls. So I gave her a hug, because I know how those girls can be persuasive, because they made me think – this confident girl – that I was fat and ugly. And then next year they started this club called the Peace Team, and it’s about how we can stop bullying at our school. I volunteered, and I wrote my story. And they promoted to me one of their leaders because of my story. So we went around school doing presentations, like lectures, and stuff. And I could intervene when people were getting bullied, because I don’t want people to go through what I went through.