Jeanette Cinelli noticed her normally funny and outgoing 13-year-old son, Anthony, had grown unusually quiet since transferring to West Cary Middle School. His grades began to plummet, and he became increasingly sullen.

Her husband, Peter, assured her, "He's just becoming a teenager."

It wasn't until late fall, when one of his classmates stole his cell phone, that they learned the truth: Their eighth-grade son had been bullied almost since his first day at the new school.

He had been threatened and shoved. Ketchup packets had been sprayed all over his clothes at lunch.

He asked teachers whether he could switch classes; he asked to change seats. But he didn't take his complaints any higher.

"I didn't want to be a snitch," he said.

That's still the "guy code" in school. Plus Anthony knew that if he narked, his troubles would go from bad to worse. Eventually, they did anyway.

One day in early December, he accidentally bumped into a member of the rough crowd while leaving the locker room. The kid stabbed him in the gut with a pen.

The blow brought Anthony to his knees. Almost instinctively, he punched at his attacker.

The other boy then lifted Anthony, held him against the wall and stabbed him four more times with the pen, ripping through his clothing and breaking the skin.

The kid used street moves, Peter Cinelli told me in his thick Brooklyn accent. The pen went in and up.

Luckily it did not cause any real physical damage. But Anthony was traumatized. He and his parents had had enough.

They demanded to know how the perpetrator had been punished. They heard he had been suspended, not expelled. Because of privacy concerns, the school could not say.

The Cinellis wanted their son transferred to another school.

"I told them I'd drive him to any other school in the county," Jeanette Cinelli said. "I just wanted to get him away from that environment."

Sitting in their Italian restaurant on Kildaire Farm Road in Cary, the Cinellis commented on the irony of their situation.

"We moved here from New York five years ago to get away from this kind of thing," Peter Cinelli said.

But here is the part of the story that I find truly amazing:

Wake County schools boast a policy under which bullying or harassment of any kind is forbidden. Yet Anthony Cinelli's transfer request was denied.

The principal claimed she could guarantee Anthony's safety at West Cary. (Forgive the Cinellis for being skeptical.)

The Cinellis didn't know they could appeal the decision all the way to the school board. They feared that a previous dispute with the school system over their permanent residence -- which is why Anthony was switched to West Cary as an eighth-grader -- was working against them.

But there is no denying the attack.

Jeanette Cinelli said that afterward, while the schools decided what to do about Anthony, her son was stuck at home, afraid of the reprisals he would face if he returned to West Cary.

She and her husband enrolled him in a Catholic school.

"No child," she said, "should have to 'toughen up' to go to school."