Everyone has encountered a mean girl at some point in their life. Most of the time their just insecure girls who have nothing better to do than to lash out at other people they're jealous of. However, mean girls never win the end, especially when the people they bully decide they've had enough with their junk and fight back. These women took to Reddit to share their encounters with mean girls and what they did to get back at them. Content has been edited for clarity.
“I Just Kept Laughing”
“I grew up in a small town. We had one girl everyone thought was ‘the prettiest girl in the whole wide school.’
She was a mean, petty witch. Truly awful.
For example, my cat died when I was in 5th grade. She sat behind me muttering about how funny it was that my cat died, that he was a stupid cat, that he died because my mom was too poor to take him to the vet, and urging me to cry.
‘Are you gonna cry? Are you gonna cry about it? Like a big baby? Big baby cry over your stupid cat? Everyone’s gonna see you cry. You’re about to cry, aren’t you?’ – and so on.
This wasn’t even the meanest thing she did. And she was mean to everyone.
One day in 6th grade, I’d had enough. She didn’t even do anything truly awful; I was just like ‘forget Jennifer G’ and decided to do something about her. I stole one of my mom’s little index/recipe cards and meticulously wrote ‘I STUFF MY BRA’ in big bold letters. I stuffed that and a little gold safety pin in my jacket pocket. The next day, I carefully affixed this to the back of her pink Members Only jacket just before first bell rang.
She walked around with this freaking note on all day, confused as to why people were laughing at her.
She screamed and screamed when she found it. And she cried. Everyone saw her cry.
She figured out it was me. Probably because I was laughing too hard. Then, she tried to fight me. I just kept laughing which made her angrier. She kept pushing me and screaming ‘FIGHT ME’ and crying. She pushed me to the ground and I just kept laughing.”
If You Make My Best Friend Cry, You Better Be Prepared To Pay The Price!
“My bullies were a group of four girls who were the stereotypical ‘popular girls’ in middle school. I was more of a tomboy/introvert. I was primarily focused on school and soccer. One day, in art class, my bullies had pushed me to the edge. They made my best friend cry. She was pretty overweight and they severely embarrassed her in front of the whole class. This made me furious. As a 7th grader, I was surprisingly vindictive and I took grief from nobody. I could handle my own bullying, but not the bullying of my few friends. Luckily, today’s art class project involved paint.
My group was called first to grab the paint we needed. With tears streaming down my friend’s face, I looked her dead in the face and said, ‘Don’t worry. I got this.’ She was terribly confused. I grabbed red and brown paint. I mixed the two colors at my table while the rest of the students were waiting for their groups to be called up to get paint for their projects. When the bullies got up to grab their supplies, I put a dab of the red and brown paint mixture on the center of each of their chairs. Unbeknownst to them, when they sat down, they smeared their butts into what appeared to be a nasty menstrual mess. Every single one of those girls looked like Mother Nature had paid them a visit unexpectedly. The boys threw pads and tampons at them in the hallway. They had no idea what was going on until the principal called them into the office and told them to either change into their gym clothes or go home. They all changed into their gym shorts, which were deemed too short for class by the principal, and they were all sent home to dwell in their embarrassment.
The best part? The art teacher watched me do it. And when I noticed her eyes on me, I froze. She noticed my fear and just nodded her head once as a signal for me to proceed. EVERYONE hated these girls. I was just serving up justice my way.
The principal eventually found out it was me because someone who saw me do it snitched (probably for the chance at popularity). I proudly admitted to the offense with a smile on my face. I was not reprimanded. I didn’t even received a detention. The principal loved me because I was a good student and I was super friendly to anyone who approached me, despite my social anxiety. When I said I did it, he was like, ‘Oh..hmm…well, uh…stop…stop messing with your classmates. And tell your mom I said hello!’ And then he simply sent me on my way back to class.”
Don’t Touch Her Hair
“Not so much a personal bully (and I’ve been bullied quite a bit), but she had a bully personality.
I was in theatre camp with my little sister and brother. There was a girl my sister’s age who was a huge spoiled brat. I’ll call her Victoria. She was an only child and had no concept of not getting her own way, so she walked over everyone and acted like she was the best. She was friends with my sister, but also treated her poorly.
One day, she decides to turn her sights on me. This is mistake number one. We’re in a scene that requires us to be on the floor and pretend to be dead, and I happen to be in front of her, facing away from her. While we’re lying down, she grabs my ponytail (which is within reach) and pulls very quickly, so as not to break the illusion that she’s playing dead.
I’m very sensitive about my hair and hate people touching it. So after the scene ends and we’re resetting, I say, ‘Victoria, don’t touch my hair.’
She doesn’t listen. The next time we practice the scene, she does it again. This is mistake number two. ‘Victoria,’ I say, ‘don’t touch my hair.’
Of course, she doesn’t listen. We get up from the stage and start walking back to the green room. This time she pulls my hair while we’re walking. And this time, instead of having to roll over (and break character) to tell her to stop, I’m standing up and faster than her.
And I happen to have very long fingernails, which are strong enough to break the seals on bottles of Tylenol.
Without turning around, I reach up, sink my nails into her wrist, and twist. She lets go and looks at me in shock; I don’t think anyone had ever stood up to her before.
‘Victoria,’ I say, ‘I told you not to touch my hair.’
My sister inexplicably remained friends with her for years despite her general unpleasantness, but she never messed with me again.”
When The Yearbook Turns Into A Burn Book
“I was friends with a really manipulative girl for a few years at primary school. On the outside, she was funny and charming but her MO seemed to be nothing other than getting people in trouble or breaking up friendships.
I finally felt foul of her ways in high school when she decided I’d be her next victim. The bullying that followed made me want to kill myself. It didn’t help that my parents divorced around the same time.
She encouraged other girls to walk up to me and call me ugly and make fun of my clothes. School was miserable.
Sometime around the last two years of school she decided that she had ‘forgiven’ me (for who knows what!) and tried really hard to be my friend. I was really confused, but went along with it. Turned out she was going through some personal stuff and realized I was probably the only person she knew who would be okay with it. While she was fine with me in person, she’d still try and humiliate me in front of others. It wasn’t a mutual consolidation, but I went along with it to see how it panned out.
One day our class took an outing to go kayaking, we had a ton of fun and at the end I was paddling my kayak up to the dock when said girl reached down to pull me in. I lifted my paddle and accidentally hit her, the way I’d always dreamed about hitting her right across the face. She was floored and I felt good. Of course I apologized, but I never meant a word of it.
A few months later, we were compiling stuff for our yearbook and one of the questions we were asked was ‘What was your best high school memory?’ She was first on the register alphabetically and I was next. My opportunity arose.
She was a very popular girl (hence her minions) and she was overjoyed at being the the first page of the yearbook. I suggested that we should put ‘reconnecting with each other’ would look really good on our pages. This cow used to make me afraid of being alone because I found the horror of reliving what she done that day so hard to deal with. For instance, she would call my house and swear at me down the line if I answered. One day, when the hospital was calling my parents to say my grandad was dying they couldn’t get through because this awful girl was blocking our line with abusive calls. When I stood up to her about in in school, she got most of her ‘gang’ to scream in my face about how ugly I was.
We wrote out our submission for the yearbook together. She wrote, ‘realizing your friends are right in front of you.’
I wrote, ‘finding old friends.’
When the yearbook was published, her quote was there. However, on the next page mine said, ‘Smacking XXXXX in the face with a kayak paddle, I couldn’t have paid for that experience! She was right in front of me!’ Accompanied by the photo of me winking.
It wasn’t much, but it made me happy.”
She Had The Receipts
“During my undergrad degree, I had a class with this girl named Sarah. Sarah was an…interesting…person. She’s a pretty decent engineer, her work was of good quality and everything, but she was an absolutely TERRIBLE teammate. We had a group of three, and she would NOT let either of us do any work on the project. We had to code a standardized robot (every group had one) to do a task. If she found any code she was certain she had not written, she yelled at us, deleted it from the repository, then would write her own version. We’d occasionally get into arguments about this and she would be extremely insulting. She said things like, ‘You smell. You are fat. You are too nerdy to be smart. Your voice is THE most annoying one on the planet.’ etc, etc.
Anyway, the end of the class comes around and it is time to present our robots capabilities to the professors and the rest of the class. Each and every other team not only had the robot finished, but had a list of extra features and capabilities. Sarah, to her credit, DID finish the robot and it worked just fine…but no extra features. Well, she gets more and more angry as the other teams list off their stuff. Once the presentation time ends and the professors leave, she turns to the other guy and I and just absolutely screams at us ‘YOU LAZY IMBECILES! If you had just DONE something, then we could have had extra features too!’ Now, up to this point I had just shrugged and lived with the insults, I’d long ago learned to not give a hoot when people try and insult me…but for some reason, this one got to me. So I yelled back at her, reminding her of whose fault it was that we had nothing extra. She went silent for a moment, getting red as a strawberry before screaming that she was going to go to the professors and report that I had done nothing, and for them to adjust my grade accordingly. Now, given the way the classes had been functioning in previous years, this was actually a pretty serious threat….except there is something Sarah didn’t know.
You see, given the problems teams had previously had with slackers, the Professors had created a ‘weekly reporting’ system, where each team member wrote what the team had accomplished, and what they thought the distribution of work was (by percent), and any other comments the Professors might need to know. VERY early on, I had gone to them to explain about Sarah’s behavior and I was told to just report it in the weekly system and things would be taken care of. Sarah and the other guy had just been putting the work down as 33.33% for each of the three of us, assuming that I was doing the same. In actuality, I was taking notes about what was going on, sending in copies of the code I had written (because I knew it would be deleted), and comments about Sarah’s behavior.
So when she threatened this, with that massive smirk on her face, I just leaned in with a smile on my face and calmly explained to her what I had done the whole class while I packed up my bag. I’ve never actually heard someone scream in incoherent rage before, but that sound will be one that I treasure for a long time.
Bonus points, I was given several high fives from people that had been former teammates of hers before.”
Need Some Aloe For That Burn?!
“There was this annoying girl in 8th grade. She’d apparently feel a sadistic constant need to try and ‘roast’ me in front of people. She was the kind of girl to dress like she’s ‘so pretty’ (bright lipstick, mascara, blush, etc. It made her look like a party clown). She was also the kind of girl to get in trouble with authority, namely teachers, because of her need to argue with everyone.
So, my teacher went to use the bathroom, and we were given a 5-minute break to talk, hang out with our friends, stuff like that. I’m sitting with my group of friends (near where the party clown was sitting). I was fiddling with one of those Bic Cristal ballpoint pens, bending the part of the cap backwards. She says to me, ‘When you bend that pen, it makes you look like an idiot.’
I say back to her, ‘How? Why would it make me look like an idiot?’
She says back to me, ‘It doesn’t matter, the square shape of your head proves it enough already.’
That’s when I come up with a comeback on the fly. After months of having to deal with this, I say to her, ‘I think you’re just self-conscious because I made the ballpoint pen as crooked as your fake eyebrows. I shouldn’t have to take insults from somebody who thinks it would look good.’
She shut up for the rest of the year after that.”
Standing Up To Her Bully Backfired
“When I was a kid, these two girls, let us call them Pam and Tara, made fun of me without any reservations. I hated them. I hated how they made me feel. I hated how they just ganged up on me and how they got away with it. I hate it how they would ruin any friendship I would start, spread rumors, and just made me miserable.
Well, I made a group of friends and my friends were kinda beginning to make friends with Tara. I was at my one friends house, lets call her Maggie, and she was on the phone with Tara. Maggie knew I hated Tara and asked if I had anything to say. I felt threatened that Tara was moving in on my friendships and didn’t want to have another group of friends turn on me.
So, I gave Tara a top ten list of why I hated her. Starting with number 10, David Letterman style. She cried, the phone call ended, and there we had it. I said I could think of at least 100 more reasons, but I just didn’t have time in my day.
I felt kinda proud of myself. I stood up to a bully and now hopefully it would stop. I usually cried and ran away and shut down. I was glowing until I learned what happened next, and then I felt the worst I had ever felt in my life. Tara tried to kill herself. She apparently was struggling with making friends, especially after falling out with Pam, and I inadvertently took my revenge on someone who was vulnerable, alone, and sad. Much like how I was when she made fun of me.
I felt the worst I ever felt. I had to tell my parents, which made it worse. I apologized to Tara, but clearly it wasn’t enough. She ended up changing schools. Before the school change, we kinda got along better and even were able to hang out with friends together. I always felt bad though and no matter what, I couldn’t take back those words. Pam was still a mean girl, but it wasn’t worth it to fight her. We ended up taking home economics together and actually ended up halfway getting along by the end of the year. She tried to bully me and I just ignored her. For whatever reason, that stopped the bullying. Being forced to work together made us at least tolerate one another.
Since then, I refuse to enact revenge. You never know why people act the way they do and it isn’t your business to police them. To date, I still cringe when I think about what 12 year old me did. Yes, she made my life miserable. Yes, she made fun of me. Yes, I left school in tears a number of times. But clearly, she had her own demons and because I couldn’t control myself, she almost killed herself. I still think of her from time to time. I hope whatever she had going on stopped and she was able to have a better life somewhere.”
She Went From Being The Big Bad Bully To The Laugh Of The School
“I was a sophomore in high school. I had friends but really I was more of a loner preferring one close friend (who is still my best friend til this day) over a big social group. I was popular, but I was not the typical popular type. I stood up for unpopular kids if I saw them being messed with. It was even common for me to give Nelson, a guy who was wheelchair bound, a joy ride to the cafeteria five minutes before lunch started so he could get his lunch first.
There was this dragon/bulldog senior chick who did not bully me but she was notorious for bullying other girls verbally. She thought she was big and bad. She TRIED me once, and I knocked her out. The fight happened the day after she put up a picture of me online and said she was going to burn my house down and show me a real beatdown after she graduated (because I had a falling out with one of her friends).
It took place in the cafeteria toward the end of the school year. I was supposed to be taking a test with the rest of the sophomores, so she did not expect me at her lunch. Oh, but I was there alright (I was an on and off skipper). She did not get to hit me not once. She was actually bigger than me, taller and wider, but I was faster, adrenaline packed, and more forceful. Her clique of friends who talked a whole lot of backing mess beforehand and just stood in utter shock watching. When I was done with her, I told them they were next if they followed her footsteps. They were speechless.
Needless to say, her group of friends would not even dare stare my direction or speak of my name after that. And for the girl I fought? Well, her ego and image was badly damaged. She went from big bad bully to the laugh of the school. She was the 19-year-old senior who got knocked out by a much smaller 16-year-old sophomore. To my surprise, girls she had bullied started coming forward and thanking me after this, or sending a thank you message with a mutual friend if I did not know them.”
Kill Her With Kindness
“My BFF as a high school freshman was Samantha. We had assigned seating on the cheese wagon home and she got placed next to Heather. Heather was a senior who lived in a ramshackle trailer park way outside of town. She was a mean, cruel witch. One day she swore Samantha touched her butt and had a huge screaming fit about how gross Sam was. The next she made herself throw up into Sam’s book bag.
One day, it got really bad and Heather pinned Sam to the window and wrote ‘TROLLOP’ on her forehead with a permanent marker.
Sam’s mom was a heavy drinker, when she saw Sam with ‘trollop’ written on her forehead she did what most drinkers do: she left for the bar. Sam came over to my place and we got it off. I told my mom it was Heather and she just sighed.
The next week Heather mysteriously disappeared from the bus.
Turns out my mom had called the local church and asked some nice old church ladies to pick up/drop off Heather. Those church ladies knew exactly what was up and basically tortured Heather with kindness. I heard there was carol singing everyday and scripture readings all along the drive. They made some very pretty signs that said ‘Heather’ in rhinestones and stood outside our high schools doors every day just waiting for her to be humiliated. Every day, it was something crazy embarrassing they did to her in front of the whole school.
Moral of the story: don’t mess with old church ladies who have nothing better to do.
I also figured out later that Heather had been abused pretty much all her life, and she ended up in foster care when her dad went to jail for animal abuse. My mom knew all that because she worked at CPS. She just couldn’t do anything.”
She Was Mean AND Stupid
“In 9th grade, I was 5’6 and maybe 100 lbs. I usually kept to myself, usually reading a book or drawing. This made me a target for a girl in my Spanish class, Aretha. She did the usual things to get a reaction: she picked on my clothes and shoes, called me names, etc. I always got good grades in the class, and she frequently tried to intimidate me into letting her copy my answers. I would usually speed through the test, marking a few incorrect answers along the way, go back and fix the answers, then turn in my test in about 5 minutes.
The turning point, though, came one day after lunch. The way the class was scheduled, we had an hour of class, went to lunch, then came back to the class for 15 minutes before being released. Everyone was in the hallway after lunch, waiting for the teacher to unlock the classroom. I was leaned against the lockers reading my book, when Aretha decided to mess with me. She walked up and popped my book closed. My thumbs were still holding my place in the book, so I ignored her. She closed the book again. Same result. This made her mad, so she slapped the book out of my hands. I made eye contact with her briefly, then retrieved my book. At this point, the teacher had opened the classroom and everyone went inside. Still unsatisfied with my reaction, Aretha stood over my desk, thumping bits of paper at me. I continued to ignore her.
Finally, she threw a pack of gum at me. To this day I don’t know why, but I slammed my book closed, look her in the eye and said something similar to ‘Cual es su problema?’ Which was the best of my high school mind’s translation of ‘What is your problem?’
She looked at me in bewilderment and asked, ‘Did you just cuss me out in French!?’ I just laughed and opened my book. She never messed with me after that.”