Author chiming in here. I won't elaborate too much on how artificial stuff might seem, except to say I was a novice when I started, and pretty much every event you see in relation to bullying was something I experienced, or something shared with me while I volunteered at the local children's hospital (used with permission).
You have to understand that for Taylor, it's been a year and a half since the bullying started. When things opened, she was off balance. Dealing with someone who was once a friend attacking her, putting her down, seeing what she could get away with. By the time she caught her balance, the pattern was there. She tried to handle some initial incidents by going to authorities and because she was off balance and didn't fully grasp what was going on, she maybe didn't handle it well, stuff fell through the cracks, and people brushed her off or minimized it.
Look at Emma's chapter. Taylor stands up to Emma, demands her mother's flute back. She drops a line, "I thought you were better than that." "I think that says a lot more about you than it says about me." Knowing, hoping, that it stings Emma a little. Emma reacts, not directly, but in a vicious way that hurts Taylor far more, a day or two down the line.
What happens is you get to a point where you need to make a call. You've heard of the
spoon theory? A person has X spoons available in the day. Every action takes Y spoons to perform. Some people have more, some people have less. When you're disabled, you have less, or certain things take more (I'm hard of hearing, socializing and listening take more). When you're bullied, the bullies are actively taking away your spoons.
What happens, a little ways down the line, is you have to make choices. You have 10 spoons left by noon. You need 4 for getting through the rest of the school day as anyone might, with boring classes and general focus and all that stuff. You need 3 for homework. You need 1 to focus enough to pay attention to longer-term goals, and you need at least 2 to just deal with the extra stress, alertness, problem solving and general emotional cost of being bullied.
Dealing with the bullies is going to take anywhere from 1 to 5 spoons. What do you sacrifice? Do you slack off in school and pay for it over the next few days? Do you watch TV instead of checking your agenda and remembering you have a project that's due in a week? Above all else, what do you gain? You get increased harassment as they try to reaffirm their hold on the situation, beating you down physically, mentally, or emotionally. They take more spoons from you tomorrow, the next day, and maybe once or twice next week, until they're satisfied. Past experience suggests you're not going to change anything.
Taylor makes a call, and she compartmentalizes. Every part of her life goes into a separate space. School, personal life, and superhero life. Look at her reaction when her dad presses her for more details. Look at how she reacts when teammates offer to go after the bullies on her behalf. Or even the sheer emotional toll when two aspects of her life overlap (school and family, school and superhero, family and superhero). She knows she won't win a fight where she's outnumbered, and most of the circumstances are ones where it isn't even physical bullying, but social stuff where she can't call people on it without looking crazy. The direct stuff is timed to catch her when she's off guard, at her lowest points, leaving her ill-equipped to deal with it.
Worm deals a lot with consequences. Taylor is acutely aware of them from the outset, because she has to constantly think about the bullies in terms of costs vs. gains. What Taylor recognizes is that when you're truly bullied, when you're in an environment like that, you don't win, or victory comes at a cost that makes it not worth it. It might satisfy the reader, but I don't think the glorious moment of revenge really satisfies reality.
Sometimes, when you're bullied, you just endure. And it does suck, and it is frustrating.
