Jake Martinez stares at his lunch tray. He is not looking at his food. He is listening.
Giggling. Whispers. Somebody saying his name.
Half the cafeteria has phones out. They look at their screens, then at him, then back at their screens, and then they start giggling.
Something on those phones is about him. He knows it.
Why write a young adult book at all?
I wanted to write one, and I went about it the way I go about most unfamiliar forms, by studying somebody who already does it well.
In this case R.L. Stine, who has written for readers aged roughly seven to fifteen for decades and has thought carefully about what that audience will and will not tolerate on a page. His guidance on writing for young readers was what I worked from.
The subject was already there. Cyberbullying is a real problem for children now, and my sense at the time was that they had no answers available to them. That is what I remember of the motivation, and I would rather leave it there than construct a tidier origin story.
What does the cafeteria opening do?
It gets a young reader inside the experience before anybody has named it.
Jake does not know what the video is. He has not seen it. He has a turkey sandwich that tastes like cardboard, because everything tastes like cardboard when you are nervous, and he is reading a room.
Giggling. Whispers. His name. Phones coming out. The specific sequence where somebody looks at a screen, then at him, then back at the screen.
Any child who has been on the wrong end of a room recognizes that in about four sentences, and recognizing it is different from being told about it. A book that opens by explaining cyberbullying has already lost. A book that opens with a boy who knows something is wrong and cannot yet see what has a reader who is inside it.
There is also a detail I put in and left alone. At the table nearest the door, a kid Jake has never seen before is reading an actual paper book. Jake notices it and immediately forgets about it.
Why put a kid inside the internet?
Because a boring story about being harassed online is a boring story, and there are a bazillion of them.
They are written with good intentions. They are assigned in classrooms. Children can identify one from across a room by the cover, and they know exactly what is going to happen in it, and they do not read it.
A kid who is inside the internet is somewhat fresh.
The reasoning goes no deeper than that. I wanted the subject handled in a way a young reader would find interesting enough to keep going, since a book about cyberbullying that gets abandoned on page nine helps nobody at all.
So the internet becomes a place. Social Media City. The trolls have caves. The algorithms have addresses. There is a gaming district where the landscape cannot decide what it is, medieval cobblestones one moment and laser fire the next, and a giant Pac-Man chasing three screaming ghosts down a side street.
Writing for this age is harder than writing for adults, and the difficulty is specific.
An adult reader will stay with a slow chapter because they trust the book, or because they paid for it, or out of stubbornness. A ten-year-old will not. Attention has to be earned continuously, and every page is a fresh negotiation about whether the book keeps going.
Which means the serious material has to ride underneath something enjoyable instead of being delivered directly. A gaming district where the landscape cannot decide what it is. Troll caves. A dragon. A boss battle. Those are not decoration wrapped around a lesson, they are what makes it possible to say anything at all about the thing the book is really concerned with.
Why is the villain a machine?
Because that is closer to what a cyberbully is.
A single antagonist would have been easier to write and would have misrepresented the thing. Give Jake one bully to defeat and the book becomes a story about winning a fight. That is a lie about the situation and terrible advice for a child in it.
The Hate Engine is a group bully. A faceless one. That is often what cyberbullies are, and the facelessness is a large part of what makes them unbearable, because there is nobody to confront and no single person to be angry at.
It also feeds. It runs on what kids feel when the comments arrive, so Jake’s distress is fuel. Working out how it feeds comes before doing anything about it, and the ordering is deliberate, because a child who understands the mechanism has something a child who is simply hurt does not.
What does Jake work out?
Not to fight harder.
Inside the Hate Engine’s library are orbs of pain, and there is kindness hiding inside each one. What finally works is a kindness virus, used on one of the most dangerous AIs in the digital world, transforming it instead of destroying it.
A Rage Bot becomes KindBot and keeps some of its old navigation systems. That is the sort of detail I enjoy and a young reader accepts without blinking.
I will not walk through the ending. What matters for a parent deciding whether to hand this to a child is that the solution involves neither violence nor revenge, and the book arrives there across a lot of pages instead of announcing it as a moral.
What happens after the battle?
Jake lies awake at 3:15 in the morning, staring at a ceiling that is just a ceiling.
He expected to feel amazing. He went inside the internet. He fought trolls and Mega-Trolls and a dragon and the living Hate Engine, and he won. What he feels is a mild case of the flu combined with having been hit by a bus. His ribs ache. His eyes burn. His hands still hold the ghost sensation of typing.
And underneath it, quieter than everything else, is worry. About Kyle.
Kyle Brennan is the boy who made Jake’s life miserable and started all of this. During the final sequence, Kyle held the system together while everybody else ran, hands on the console, eyes rolled back.
So Jake is lying there hoping the person who bullied him is all right, and he is still working out how to feel about that when a message arrives from an account he does not recognize.
That is my favorite thing in the book, and it is the part I would point a young reader toward.
Did you plan for the bully to become a person?
No. This is one of those books that grew.
I did not start out writing it that way. Kyle began as the antagonist, and somewhere in the writing he stopped being only that, and by the end he is at a cafeteria table with Jake and Tyler saying he needs to explain why he became the way he was, and saying he is tired of keeping secrets.
The line on the sales page is his. I never had anyone show me there was another way.
That is a heavy sentence for a book aimed at seven to fourteen year olds, and I left it in, because a child who is being bullied is frequently also near a child who is doing the bullying, and both of them are somebody’s kid.
Does the book pretend everything gets fixed?
No, and I was careful about that.
Three weeks after the ending, Roosevelt Middle School feels like a different place. Not perfect. School is never perfect. There are still kids who are mean, still drama, still all the usual things that make middle school feel like surviving a natural disaster on a daily basis.
But something has shifted. Kids who used to share cruel memes share funny animal videos. Former enemies talk to each other.
Jake is not sure whether that is the work of what he did or whether it is people simply choosing differently. He decides it might be both, and the book leaves it there.
The moment he notices is two seventh graders who ignored each other all year standing at a locker looking at a phone together, laughing. The real kind of laughing, not the mean kind. Such a small thing that he stands and watches it for a second, and then goes to class.
One more thing about who the book is for, because the child being bullied is one reader of several.
A parent handing this over is frequently doing so because something has already happened. The book has to work for that reader too: a child who is currently in it, reading about a boy who is currently in it, and who needs the story to not be hopeless without being dishonest about how hard it is.
Jake spends real chapters miserable. His best friend Marcus is there and cannot fix it. There is a chapter called No Escape and it is called that for a reason. None of that gets skipped over on the way to the fun part.
What the book offers is that there is something to understand about how the thing works, and that understanding it changes what you can do.
Where does it sit in the series?
It is book one of Jake’s Internet Adventures, and the next one is Jake and the Chaos Collective.
It also sits alongside The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot and its sequel in the same young adult group, which take on a different technology problem for the same readership.
The adult version of this subject is Sins of the Internet, and the household version is Family Cybersecurity. Same territory, three different readers, and the one for children is the hardest of the three to write, because the constraint is that they have to want to keep reading.
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