Unfair Aspect of Teenager's Lives

In the book, Be More Chill, by Ned Vizzini, the main character Jeremy, starts out as a loser, but later becomes much more popular. In teenagers’ lives, the kids who have a lot of friends, and are cool and popular, tend to not get picked on. The kids who have less friends and attract much less attention tend to get picked on by popular kids, which is a very unfair part of many teenagers lives. Jeremy is a great example of a kid who doesn’t have a good social life and gets picked on because of that. What made me sure of this connection between Jeremy and certain teens, is the humiliation sheets Jeremy keeps with him, which is a paper where he writes down every type of humiliation he goes through.

Jeremy struggled to even make the smallest conversations with girls in the beginning if the book. Once, he tried talk to this girl Christine, and he was going to give her this chocolate bar he got for her, but the conversation did not go well and he didn’t even give her the chocolate. After his failure, Jeremy went to the bathroom to clean out his pocket, because the chocolate melted. Then Rich came in, a pretty popular and muscular guy, and started picking on Jeremy. “What you do, crap your pocket?” “Meanwhile, Rich laughs and calls me a b**** again.” This shows how Jeremy gets picked on in school because he is so unsocial. Jeremy even says, “It never ends with this school, and with Rich, and for everyone one of them there are mini-hims like George or Ryu.”

In school, some girls were making fun of Jeremy because he is so weird in their opinion. “Ooh, I heard Christine Caniglia has new stalker,” on of the girls said, and they were clearly referring the Jeremy. After this, Jeremy makes marks on his humiliation sheets. I think the fact that he even keeps humiliation sheets shows how low his social status is, and how much he gets picked on.

This book proved that teenagers get picked on not because they look ugly or they’re fat, but because they have no social life. This is just an unfair part of teens’ lives, and it’s just how people are. Popular people pick on unpopular kids just because they can, and that’s the way it works. Later, when Jeremy became more popular, Rich acted acted like he was his friend. This relates to so many teenagers in the world, and I’ve already started to see a little of this before in my life.