So Not Okay: An Honest Look at Bullying from the Bystander (Mean Girl Makeover, Band 1) - Softcover

Rue, Nancy N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400323703 ISBN 13: 9781400323708

Verlag: Tommy Nelson, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

There is no such thing as neutral.

According to the Ambassadors 4 Kids Club, one out of every four students is bullied—and 85% of these situations never receive intervention. Parents, students, and teachers alike have amped up the discussion of how to solve the bullying problem for a networked generation of kids. 

Written by bestselling author, Nancy Rue, each book in the Mean Girl Makeover trilogy focuses on a different character’s point of view: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. Each girl has a different personality so that every reader can find a character she relates to. The books, based on Scripture, show solid biblical solutions to the bullying problem set in a story for kids.

So Not Okay, the first book in the series, tells the story of Tori Taylor, a quiet sixth grader at Gold Country Middle School in Grass Valley, California. Tori knows to stay out of the way of Kylie, the queen bee of GCMS. When an awkward new student named Ginger becomes Kylie's new target, Tori whispers a prayer of thanks that it’s not her. But as Kylie’s bullying of Ginger continues to build, Tori feels guilty and tries to be kind to Ginger. Pretty soon, the bullying line of fire directed toward Ginger starts deflecting onto Tori, who must decide if she and her friends can befriend Ginger and withstand Kylie’s taunts, or do nothing and resume their status quo. Tori’s decision dramatically changes her trajectory for the rest of the school year. 

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Nancy Rue has written over 100 books for girls, is the editor of the Faithgirlz Bible, and is a popular speaker and radio guest with her expertise in tween and teen issues. She and husband, Jim, have raised a daughter of their own and now live in Tennessee.

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So Not Okay

MEAN GIRL MAKEOVER BOOK 1

By NANCY RUE

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2014 Nancy Rue
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4003-2370-8

CHAPTER 1

It was a Monday. January 26, to be exact, and I like to be exact. I remember the date because it needs to be circled on a calendar. In red Sharpie.

That's because it was the first time since the start of middle school that Kylie Steppe actually looked at me and apparently saw something besides, well ... nothing. And it changed, well ... everything.

My best friend Ophelia Smith and I were leaning against the wall across from the office at Gold Country Middle School waiting for our other best friend, Winnie George, to pick up her slip to get into classes after being absent. The line snaked out the door and down the hall, like half the school had suffered from some kind of epidemic, and Kylie was standing in it. I figured she'd probably been out having her nails done because she had been standing there inspecting them for ten minutes like Sherlock Holmes on a case.

But suddenly she looked up and stared right at me. She was so still, I wondered if she had a pulse.

Ophelia noticed the look too. She hid half her face—not hard to do when your thick yellow hair is like a curtain all the way to your waist—and whispered, "The Alpha Wolf is looking at you, Tori. That's weird."

It really was weird because Kylie hadn't shown any signs of noticing me since the first day of sixth grade when she started deciding who was cool and who wasn't. I wasn't. She couldn't prove it. I just wasn't.

I was okay with that. Ophelia and Winnie and I weren't even on Kylie and her Pack's radar. Okay, I know wolves don't use radar. Mrs. Fickus, our English teacher, would say I was mixing my metaphors. The point is: we were like Saran Wrap to the Pack.

But Kylie couldn't seem to stop looking at me now. Her nose wrinkled like she smelled something bad, which was totally possible in our school. Between the stinky sneakers and the kids who hadn't been told about deodorant yet, you were better off breathing through your mouth when a bunch of us sixth-graders were crammed together in the halls.

I was considering telling Kylie that I had looked it up and found out the reason boys' sweat could now gag you was because puberty caused their sweat glands to become more active and secrete odor-causing chemicals, when she said, "Why don't you get your eyebrows waxed?"

I opened my mouth to say, Hello! Because it's painful! but Ophelia gave me a warning poke in the side. She was right. Kylie wasn't going to listen, so I just shrugged. My mom didn't like it when I did that, but it usually ended conversations I didn't want to be in to begin with.

But that didn't work on Kylie. Clearly, she wasn't done.

"They're starting to grow together in the middle." She gave her splashy little dark brown haircut a toss. "You're gonna have a unibrow. That's so gross."

In front of Kylie in line, her friend Heidi laughed out of her puggy nose. It was only a matter of time before her other friend Riannon would be throwing back her hair—just like Kylie's except mouse-colored—and howling—followed by Izzy and Shelby. That was one of the dozen reasons I thought of them as a pack of wolves closing in on their prey.

I was sure Kylie was going to pull hot wax out of her backpack and come after me with it when our principal Mrs. Yeats parted the kids in the doorway like she was coming through drapes and clapped so hard it made the skin on her upper arms jiggle inside her sleeves. A hush settled over the mob because her chins were wobbling too. That meant the detention slips were about to come out of the pocket of the gold wool vest she always wore.

"If you are not waiting to get a readmit slip," she said in her voice like a French horn, "please move out of the hallway."

"What if we're waiting for someone?" Heidi said.

"Wait for them someplace else."

Mrs. Yeats jiggled back into her office, and Heidi and Riannon stepped out of the line. But Kylie said to them, "It's okay if you stay."

That was the thing with the Pack. They thought the rules didn't apply to them, and most of the time they kind of didn't. But they applied to us, so I nodded for Ophelia to follow me away from the office. Besides, I still wasn't convinced Kylie wasn't at least going to break out the tweezers.

"What was that about?" Ophelia said as we hurried up the steps to our usual before-school meeting place at the end of the sixth-grade lockers by the window.

"What was what about?"

"That whole thing about your eyebrows."

"I have no idea," I said. "I guess Kylie's into eyebrows now."

Ophelia lifted one of hers, which was so blond you could hardly see it. "She waxes so she thinks everybody else has to."

"To be cool. Which I'm so not."

Ophelia dropped her backpack under the window and looked over both shoulders. Kids were clanging their lockers and yelling stuff at each other, so nobody was paying any attention to us, but Ophelia still talked with her teeth together. "Why did she decide to pick on you?"

"She wasn't really picking on me, Phee," I said. "She was just making an observation."

"She said you were gross!"

"She said I was going to be gross."

Ophelia blinked her ginormous brown eyes at me. I'd always wanted to measure them to see if they really were bigger than most peoples' or if they just looked that way because her face was tiny.

She started to braid her hair so it wouldn't get caught in her backpack zipper like it did about 80 percent of the time. "I just don't see why she all of a sudden noticed that about your eyebrows. I mean, not that they are like a unibrow ... I'm just sayin' why you when she hasn't talked to you since—"

"The last day of school in fifth grade," I said and did my let's-change-the-subject shrug. Ophelia always had a new topic at the ready.

"You have to help me with that math homework. It was so hard!"

"Okay—"

"I tried to call you last night. Where were you?"

"I was—"

"I was, like, starting to cry because I couldn't get it, and you know my mom is no help, and my dad just gets all yelly with me because I'm such a loser in math—"

"You're not—"

"I am! You have to help me. Please?"

"Phee."

"What?"

"I will."

"I love you!"

She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed a laugh out of me.

"Okay, okay—jeepers."

"I love it when you say that." Ophelia pulled her now-braided hair up on top of her head and let it bounce down. "Where did you get that again?"

"When I had strep throat and Granna came over to stay with me and she had TV Land on the whole day."

"And you watched all those episodes of that one show about the chipmunk."

"Chipmunk? It was Leave It to Beaver."

"I knew it was some cute animal."

"It was a kid! His nickname was Beaver, and he said 'jeepers' all the time. I liked it."

"I love it!"

"So where's your math homework?"

"Oh, yeah."

Ophelia unzipped her backpack, which had so many stickers on it you could hardly tell it was purple, and pawed through what looked like a wastebasket full of papers.

"I hope Winnie's gonna be okay," she said as she dug. "She's having a really hard time at her grandmother's house."

Winnie's dad had lost his job and then her family lost their house. After a lot of listening in on grown-ups' conversations, I figured out that "losing their house" meant they...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tommy Nelson
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1400323703
• ISBN 13: 9781400323708
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Reckitt Benckiser Deutschland GmbH; consumerhealth_de@reckitt.com; ; Darwinstrasse 2-4; Heidelberg; 69115; Deutschland