As editor Rhoda Belleza writes in her introduction, after hearing about friends’ experiences being bullied, “Learning these details seems instrumental to my understanding of who they are now – and it inspired me to turn the mirror on myself. The authors in Cornered use their stories to take us inside the minds and skins of those who are being bullied, and the bullies themselves, to show readers just how wrong thinking teen-aged harassment is “not that bad” can be. There were times, many times, I wished I was dead.” And only people on the top, or at least not on the bottom, would ever, EVER say it wasn’t that bad. When teenager Bryan Forbes says, “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” to Tiffany Sanz, a girl he and a group of others bullied in elementary school, she replies: “It looks totally different from wherever you sit on the totem pole, my friend. In the light of the recent revelation that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney may have bullied a fellow student in high school, something said by character in “The Shift Sticks,” Josh Berk’s story in this collection, gains unexpected relevance. ‘Cornered: 14 Stories of Bullying and Defiance’ edited by Rhoda Belleza
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