With a little help from her hero, a bullied Central Texas high school student has turned a cruel insult she received into a rallying cry for a great cause.

KCEN-TV reported Sunday that 16-year-old Dannie McMillan, a student at Lampasas High School, was mortified when someone forwarded her a Twitter screen capture of the words "fat whale" superimposed over her face.

Angry and deeply hurt, McMillan reached out to plus-size model Laura Lee via Facebook, who encouraged her to do something positive with her negative feelings.

"I jokingly told her: part of me wants to cry all day. And, the other part of me wants to get a t-shirt with a whale on it and wear it to school to show that they can't get to me," McMillan told KCEN. "And, she was like 'oh, we should.'"

McMillan took Lee's advice and created a t-shirt reading 'Dee the Fat Whale Saves the Whales', which she's selling to raise money for California-based charity Save the Whales. As of Monday morning, her Booster and GoFundMe pages had raised $545 in t-shirt sales, the proceeds from which will go toward conservation efforts.

Meanwhile, the cowardly bullies who mocked McMillan have deleted the Twitter account where the harassing image was originally posted.

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