Poor Piddy. After the milk carton incident, she gets her necklace ripped from her neck, and gets slapped on the back of the head. She then gets a message from Yaqui’s friend that she wants to fight her at a park at six. When Piddy doesn’t show up, Yaqui and her gang of friends find her and Yaqui attacks her, and not just attacks her but completely humiliates her. Yaqui manages to not only beat her up outside of her own home, but Piddy gets her bra and shirt ripped off, and is exposed to her neighborhood, and also the internet because Yaqui’s friend is recording it. This in particular angers me, because in a way it’s an invasion of privacy. To have your body exposed to the world without your consent is never okay obviously, but I have to imagine that it would be extremely traumatizing. It reminded me of this video that went viral all over the internet and it was a very similar fight in the book, where two young ladies get into a physical altercation that leads to one of girl’s breasts exposed, and people were commenting on the video laughing and thinking it was funny, it made me sick. It really made me upset that not only did it happen in the book, it happens in real life too. Piddy is forced to know that a lot of people have watched this video, and has to relive that moment over and over again because it’s now on online.

Something I can really relate to is Piddy lashing out on people. When I was in high school I had my car keyed twice, I had trash thrown on my car three times, one of those times at home, and I had a group of girls that hated me and I don’t think I ever talked to any of them once. When my car got keyed and trashed I started to lash out on people because I was so frustrated that people that I didn’t even know would do this, and didn’t like me for any particular reason. I felt I had to be mean to certain people and build walls up in order to cope with what was happening and being said about me, I was always really paranoid, which is how Piddy felt, even when it was all over. Looking back at it now I realize it was only one little part of my entire life, and I’m too old to really care about it now. Built up anger is hard to overcome when you feel you don’t have any real outlet. I really relate to Piddy in some ways.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ending of the book, the faculty gets an anonymous tip (Rob) that Piddy is being bullied, which she then admits to it, and then the ending is her going back to her old school and being accepted into the Science school. I’m not sure how realistic that is. From my experience if I was being bullied in school I wouldn’t be able to just transfer to a different school, especially in the middle of the year. Most kids find a way to deal with bullying instead of just transferring, the ending made the solution sound so simple, when that’s usually not the case.