Interesting. Very good. See, in this scene the MC is at the school looking at old records. A school counselor or vice principal loans him his office. The kid comes in, mistakes the MC as the actual office-holder, and requests the transfer. The MC, distracted and behind the even curve, asks why, rather absently. The kid mutters something. The MC, annoyed because of the interruption and what he perceives as disrespect, tells the kid to sit up and sound off like a man, not a mouse (or words to that effect. The kids then goes into a rant about being bullied. MC realizes the errors that led to this conversation as the kid rants. When the kid is done, either passionately flushed and angry or in tears, MC simply tells him to go tell someone else, along the lines of 'someone who cares', and returns to his search. My intention is that this not only sets forth the MC's mindset and motivations early on in the work, but also opens up the situation for a second encounter between the two in a much later portion of the book, perhaps through the kid's suicide or violent murderous outburst on a bully. This is just a sidebar, but one that I believe could be very illuminating.
It was a quick and easy solution when I was a kid, as I noted above. The scene is not between a school official and a kid, but rather between the MC and a kid who mistakenly believes that the MC is a school official. Even so, the attitude that the kid is 'taking it' is in the MC's view of the situation; what actually says to the kid is a brush-off along the lines of 'tell someone who cares'. The kid is not his problem. As to your first comment, I really don't have an answer. As I noted, bullying as a concept did not exist when I was in school. If a kid picked on you, you settled it after school. Fighting, especially between boys, was not prohibited, merely regulated (not inside school property or on pavement). This is why I'm asking for help in Research: I don't know what bullying looks and sounds like at the user level. I was hoping (as has happened) that people would point me in the right direction. I think I've got enough to make the scene work, although any other input would surely be welcome.
For some reason--I suspect there's a valid reason, but it's not instantly coming to me--I might suggest making this rant partly about the bullying and partly about the bureaucracy. Maybe the kid requested the transfer (edited to clarify: To a different school) months ago, and he's been waiting for paperwork, and getting psychologist's reports, and waiting for the school to act on the transfer after he and his parents have totally done their part of the job months ago. I find myself hearing him say something like, "You wanted a doctor's report. I gave you my therapist's report months ago; apparently that wasn't enough. Now I can add the report from the emergency room about my (list of injuries) when (awful bullying story). Will that do? Is there a minimum quota for blood and bone fractures before you'll sign the (expletive of choice) form?" I think that my reason here is that this paints the kid as doing things, battering against the cage, not being entirely passive, and he still can't escape.
As a Catch-22, maybe the kid's transfer application is being delayed because he has been charged with a misdemeanor for defending himself in the incident in my previous post. It's a desirable school; they don't want violent kids, and he is now painted as a violent kid.
That is a good list of points for a rant, but it sounds awfully mature. I was looking more for the contrast: this is a kid without hope, without the inner strength to stand up and fight or just to ignore his oppressors on one side, and the MC, who is only interested in trying to find some shred of logic in old records even though there is no real point in what he is doing. A study in contrasts: the kid, whose life is being shredded by casual shoving and torments and constant ridicule, and MC, who is choosing to put his life on hold for the obsessive answer to a question no one else really cares about; not incidentally both are alumni of the came school, MC when it was new, the kid when it is nearly the end of it's service life. The kid is just a prop, something MC dismisses without a thought because the kid is not his problem, and because the kid's problems are alien to the MC's world view. Earlier, coming to the school is a trip of pleasant nostalgia for the MC: his days on the basketball team, dates with cheerleaders, rough-housing and practical jokes, the usual hurly-burly of school life.
I could argue that it's not too mature--the kind of geeky kid that gets bullied tends to be fairly mature (in the ways that would support the rant, at least)--but my argument would be irrelevant because I agree that the kid ranting my rant is the wrong contrast for your goal as described.
Oh! Hey! If you want a truckload of reading, there's the Slashdot Voices from the Hellmouth material, after Columbine: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth And the Revisited page: https://features.slashdot.org/story/00/10/23/1521250/voices-from-the-hellmouth-revisited-part-1 From the introduction: In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories ...
Some good stuff there (in terms of my needs)! Thanks! That should do it. I'm going to gather some likely statements onto a word doc, and when I write the scene I will use that to build the kid's input. The project itself is a story about a police officer getting off work and hitting the on-site gym with his buddies. Afterwards they BS in the parking lot a few minutes and he walks to his truck, only to see a man approach him pulling a cut-down shotgun from a sports bag. The officer (MC) is wounded but survives, the shooter does not. The officer heals up, while the shooting board and Grand Jury clear him. He returns to light duty a hero to his fellows and is assigned to run down light-weight property crime while waiting to be cleared for full duty. It starts as simple curiosity: he wants to know why the guy tried to kill him. He gets access to the full shooting report; since the incident was caught on the parking lot security cameras, it is brief. They found no known motivation. The MC starts digging, as his light duty is very light. The shooter has no arrest record, not even a traffic ticket. To his surprise, the MC discovers that the shooter and the MC attended the same junior high and high schools, one grade apart, but he doesn't recall the guy at all. The MC starts digging into the shooter's life, which leads to getting access to both his and the shooters' school records, in a borrowed office, which leads to the interaction with the kid. The trail through the shooter's life takes the MC through his own life. Near the end, I plan to have the MC and the kid cross paths again, the MC not really remembering the kid.
