Disclaimer: I do not own a thing. Not even Hester-Mae as she was the baby in Scarecrow Year One. DC owns all. Including my life.
The Scarecrow Letters
Dear Jonathan Crane,
Thank you so much for wanting to help me with people at school. I followed the ones who are mean to me as best I could even though Beth threw a rock at me. She's scared of bugs. Like really scared. She always whines when we learn about bugs in the science part of class. I don't know why. Beetles and stuff are really cute. She keeps saying Mama's a bad person because her mom says Mama's name is Charlotte or something and I don't know why that's bad and it's not true and she says it makes me a bad person too. She's stupid. I don't care if calling people stupid is bad, no one ever gets mad at her for calling me names and stuff. Her mom is always saying how smart Beth is and how pretty and always shows her off and I don't see why she's not that smart or pretty. I know I'm way smarter than her. She never believes anyone when they say Beth does anything bad. Even though she does all the time just not when grown-ups are looking. Jake is just a jerk. He keeps pulling on my hair and calling me Stickbug. On picture day I was wearing a really nice dress and he pushed me in the dirt before the picture got taken and Mama thought I did it on purpose even though I showed her the scrape on my knee from when I tried to stop myself from falling. His dad yells at him a lot and I think he's scared of him. Madison H. doesn't like being sick because she's afraid of doctors and shots. I sit next to her in class and she always tells the teacher I'm copying her and I don't. Not Madison B. She's OK. Our answers are the same because she cheats. She cheats off everyone she sits next to and always blames them and no one's found her out except the other kid she used to sit next to but he moved So she cheats off me now. No one ever believes me when I say others are mean to me and they all think I'm a liar. I don't know how all this will help but I hope it does.
From Hester-Mae
Dear Hester-Mae,
Please try to refrain from using so many run-on sentences. I know the school in Arlen is hardly up to snuff and that you are very young, but I feel you should at least know when to start a new sentence. Your situation sounds fairly bad. You do not have quite the problems that I did, but you are not yet in middle or high school. I also believe that being a girl means you are less susceptible to physical abuse, although you are no doubt suffering intense mental abuse from your tormenters. I am surprised that there are only three in your letter, but they seem to be making your life quite the living hell by themselves. Beth sounds like a tremendously spoiled little brat. She reminds me of a girl I once knew called Sherry Squires. I think I shall enjoy helping you to bring her down. Entomophobia, is it? A fairly common phobia among young girls, and one that should be fairly easy to trigger in little miss Beth. Especially considering how you mentioned that you like bugs. Good. Although I do not have much knowledge about entomology, I was able to look up what I believe to be our perfect species. The telephone-pole beetle lives in the eastern United States (where you are, dear) and is known for devouring rotting wood and causing damage to houses if unchecked. If my memories of Arlen are still clear, most of the houses are raised up from the ground and there is a mostly hollow space beneath. Hopefully Beth lives in one of these. If she does, gather as many telephone-pole beetles as you can. Wait until Beth's house is empty. Crawl under the space in the house, looking out for any poisonous spiders or other harmful things. It wouldn't do for you to be hospitalized for a black widow bite in an attempt to merely give a little girl a good fright. When you are under where you believe Beth's room to be, scrape away as much of the wood under her floor as you can. This should thin the area enough for your little beetle friends to do the rest of the work in a relatively short amount of time. Set the beetles as best you can on the area where you scraped off the wood. Knowing the humidity in Arlen, the age of most of the houses, and the pathological resistance the wretched town has to any change, the wood should be rotted enough for the beetles to feast away happily. With luck, the beetles might eat their way through Beth's floor entirely, giving her a nice scare when she sees them. If not, the house will still likely be damaged enough for Beth's family to lose enough money to stop spoiling her or, better yet, make her move away entirely.
On the off chance Beth does not live in the type of house described, wait until it gets hot enough for Beth to leave her window cracked at night. Bring a small knife and make a small cut in the bug screen covering her window. Slip in the most disgusting, non-harmful creature that will fit inside the cut. I do not care for the safety of the brat, but I would not like for you to get bitten. This plan is not as satisfactory or destructive as the first one, but it should still provide some small measure of revenge.
I will write what to do about your other bullies later. First it would be good to see if this plan will work. If so, we shall move on to the next. It will also be useful to spread out the attacks so that no one will even suspect you when your main tormenters are taken down one by one.
Best of luck,
Jonathan Crane
How do supervillains help their younger siblings deal with bullies? By trying to mold them into mini-supervillains, of course!
I think Jonathan Crane might do something like this. He has been shown in comics to have soft spots for fellow victims of bullying. He offers to make a woman named Becky Albright his partner when he learns that she was bullied in her past for her physical disabilities and even made her a costume, and in the first issue of the Batman Adventures he tracks down, terrorizes, and almost kills the abusive (and implied rapist) boyfriend of his favorite student. If he's willing to do that for those people, I don't see it as much of a stretch for him to write advice and tips-for-future-villainy to his bullied little half-sister.