Middle school is utter shit. Kids are awful to each other as much as they are to their teachers. We literally had to pull our daughter out of her public middle school and put her in a (thankfully also public) online school because she was bullied to the point that she was having thoughts of self-harm. And she hadn’t even let most kids know she was queer yet. She just dared to do things like wear spiked collars, which apparently made her a furry. I don’t even want to know what would have happened when the school decided she was a queer furry.