Be Nice to Her

Be Nice to Her

Sadly, bullying has become a part of every child's life nowadays. It can only be small group of kids who have never experienced bullying at some level but most have, whether it's themselves who have been bullied, been the bully them self or just been a silent bystander - or an active one and actually spoken up against bullying.

Bullying is the theme of the Canadian short story "Be Nice to Her" from "The Elizabeth Stories". The story is about the insecurity of children - the need to belong to the group - and the means they use in order to get accepted by the group - in this case (and far too many others) - they use bullying.

The main character of the story, Elizabeth, is a girl, who is kind of chunky and wears glasses. Her and her group of friends bullies this girl, Celia. At first they always laugh at her, because her name is far too rare and a grown-up name. And they laugh at her, because she wears thick glasses, she is chubby and diabetic and she has a very round head and she seems bland, stupid and fruitlike. But despite of that this poor girl, made peevish by the bullying, still tries continuously to get into the group. She's always at the playground in the recesses, hoping that they others will let her play with them. But alas, they will only let her play skipping, if she is an ender. And it doesn't end there: they tell her she "can't skip a fart" and calls her a fart.

And this still doesn't scare of Celia. She lives on Brubacher Street along Elizabeth and some other girls and even though they continue to ignore her, she always follow them home, whining about them walking faster. And when wintertime comes, they even throw snowballs at her.

Elizabeth's mother has noticed how mean she is towards Celia and tells her be nice to her. She has already foreseen that Celia won't live to be very old and she doesn't want her daughter to be one of the persons who push this fragile girl over edge. The way Elizabeth treat Celia makes her sick, which makes her forbid Elizabeth to be mean to her. Here it seems like Elizabeth's mother actually worry for Celia and maybe she does, but mainly it's because it doesn't give them a very good reputation among their friends and neighbors if their daughter is bullying another girl in school. This is shown in the end, when she says: "I'll never be able to lift my head on this street again!" We don't hear much about the father - only that he - alongside her mother - picked Elizabeth up at the school and spanked her the same night in order to punish.

Another that shows, her parents - mostly her mother's motives behind her worry for Celia, is the remark the narrator-Elizabeth makes, at page 3, line 35: "[...] and they became so embittered by their own shame that they slapped my buttocks for personal revenge