Will Clarke contributed an essay called “How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes” to an anthology called When I Was a Loser, a collect of “true stories of barely surviving high school,” that has offended parents in Cumberland, Rhode Island. But it’s not what you’re thinking based on just the title: “The story, which contains profanity and sexual references, tells the story of a high school misfit who discovers how subliminal use of language can be used in marketing campaigns, playing on consumers’ subconscious fears and anxieties to manipulate them into doing things that they would not do otherwise,” says the local newspaper. “The student, who also serves as the story’s narrator, eventually campaigns for a position as a class officer using this knowledge, spurred on by the belief that he has found a way to ‘kill’—or change beyond recognition—his former unpopular self in the eyes of other students.” (In other words, pretty much how many of us actually spent our high school years.)
As is so often the case in such incidents, the school allowed students whose parents were freaked out by all the nasty words to read something else, and the story would’ve ended there if disgruntled parents hadn’t run to the local TV station to express their disgust. But the school superintendent is adamant that “we’re not banning books or anything like that… That’s not a boundary that I’m ever willing to cross.” (I could make snide remarks about the citizens of Cumberland and Woonsocket whose denunciation of the superintendent enlivens the paper’s comments section, but frankly it’s too easy.)