From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is My Unsung Hero, stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

My Unsung Hero is a boy named Spencer.

Every Sunday, Julie would drop off soup at our house.

I look forward to it everywhere.

I would say thank you for giving me one of the best gifts of my life.

Today's story comes from a woman named Jennifer.

We're only using her first name to protect her privacy.

As a kid, Jennifer felt like she never quite fit in. Her classmates made fun of her for being socially awkward and wearing

unfashionable clothes. Going to school felt like torture. But the bullying escalated to a whole new

level in seventh grade.

There was a gang of girls these days we'd call them the mean girls

who made it their special hobby to torment me all year.

And they would wait for me in the hallway at the end of class

so that they could start picking on me right away,

and they would corner me in this area of the school called the draw off, where they would kind of form a ring around me and insult me. And I had no defense against any of this. I would just, whatever insult they said to me, I just said right back to them. So they would say, you're stupid, and I'd say, no, you're stupid. And so you're ugly, and I'd say, no, you're ugly.

The school year was terrible. I was miserable. My grades were terrible.

I cried most days on the way home from school, trying to get myself together so my mother wouldn't know what was going on.

In the summer, between 7th and 8th grade, the ringleader of this gang of girls was tragically killed in a car accident.

And although I had never wished anything like that on any of them, I really just had wanted them to stop picking on me, I did hold out some hope that this might mean that eighth grade could be different.

And that hope lasted about two days into the new school year.

When I discovered that the gang of girls was still together, they had a new ringleader,

...