Story_Strange

Sure, everyone says their high school years were the best times of their lives. Than you have the others who always seem to get omitted, those who spoke of pain, mental illness, family troubles all of these things that made up high school hell on the high seas. And myself, high school brings to mind, my feeling small, akward and lost. High school was a time of hypocrisy, envy, pride, stupidity, intelligence and almost always about image. Because if your not someone, your no one.
So many images are burnt into my memory. I felt like for being my age I shouldn�t have been seeing. My friends were crazy. For a time, I thought the things around me, the thoughts I thought, and the way that I felt were all normal. Than I came to see, none of this could possiably be normal. There�s nothing normal about these people.
I was twelve. That was the year when everything changed. I was young and naive. And it was all the rage to gossip. It was new to everyone, and it seemed like every day was a competition to see who had the most friends. Everyone wanted to fit in. No one wanted to be that person sitting alone at lunch who was constantly taunted by the �popular� crowd. And there I sat with people I called my friends. Although I don�t really thing I knew what friends were, at the time. Friends were one more pair of initials you could inscribe on the straps of your book bag. My friends weren�t popular but at the same time, they weren�t losers. They were in between the spectrurm, respectivly, not really touching either extreme.
I called everyone my best friend if it appeased them. I was the akward tall girl, who didn�t quite know how to dress. I wanted so much for my friends to like me. I�d do anything. I was pathetic. But everyone was, because we all yearned to be a part of the popular crowd. Those were the girls and boys who dressed right out of the catologues and brought last months high school fashions to the middle school.
I remember crying a lot. I drowned myself in them for the majority of seventh and eighth grade. None of my friends liked me. Most of the time I couldn�t really convince myself of it anyway. What I was on the outside wasn�t what I was on the inside. Inside I suffered, inside each and every tear I cried, burned. I was dissapointed with myself and that�s probably why I felt so poorly internally. I was just a shadow of my true self. It hurt me to be that way. But I was forced to. Or so I told myself.
If I had one image in my mind of what I was during that time, I�d picture myself starring off into space sitting alone at a desk in an empty class room in some shirt that was too big for my slim body. My face would have a look of confusion and sadness. Overall I�d look like I didn�t belong.
I went through more friends in seventh grade than I think I�ve gone through in my elementary years. I became the biggest victim out of all the girls in my group. At one point or another I think each and every person I�d called my friend filled me up with false hope and than dropped me. Just to see how hard I�d hit the bottom each time. Like some sort of sick pleasure. Or maybe because it brought them up further in the scheme of things. So I know how much it made me hurt. I knew what it was like to fall. Too fall harder than you ever have in your life. But the hardest part was facing those people again the next day. They�d being walking surrounded by five friends, respectivly, than they saw you and they�d all turn to the girl next to them and whisper. It made your ears burn because you always knew it was about you. It was like walking through a dark tunnel all alone, and hearing hundreds of whispers pierce your skin. And each one of them was one of your innermost fears and insecurities.
One day I remember vividly is halloweeen. We all went to Jesse�s house. She was close to the leader of all of us. She had high self confidence, talked the most about everyone. Yet everyone had this strange respect for her. Her parents were divorced long ago. Ever since she was little her mother has been pumping her will positive things about herself to a dangerous level. Her mother was crazy though, I remember one time Marie (Jesse�s Best friend at the time, although she had said this after they had stopped being friends), said �The crazy apple, doesn�t fall far from the crazy tree� and she was quite right. Jesse had dark brown, nappi, hair that she didn�t quite know how to manage. She was short and undeveloped, she slightly resembled a rat. Never the less, she had a strong, yet strange presence. And everyone in our group envied her in a way. She was outgoing, in an immature way and when your twelve it�s funny and it�s cool. She was slightly althetic. Jesse played soccer, and all the popular girls did too, so that gave her an in with them. Although she was friends with us still. She was the gateway to acceptance. And she knew it quite well and used it to her advantage.
It was a cold halloween, the kind that makes the tip of your nose numb and your ears bright red, and tingling with a slight pain. There wasn�t really a lot of sun. Unfortunatly it was also a week day, so we walked to Jesse�s house after school, I knew her from french class. She dressed as a flapper from the twenties, and I was a devil. Jesse invited this new girl who had just moved here from the city. Her name was Naomi. She was kind of odd, slightly over weight, short, and had long dark thin hair. But we accepted her into our group reluctently. We only did it because Jesse invited her and wanted it that way. We were all mindless. We depended off one main mind to operate off of, unfortunately it was jesse�s. She was the worst possiable person to be the main operative mind. She was so screwed up from her mother that it almost rubbed off on all of us who knows. We were all waiting outside Jesse�s, Me, Marie, Jesse, Becky, we were waitng for Naomi to meet up with us, because she lived right down the street from Jesse. Once she came, dressed as a witch, we began heading down Woodland Boulevard, the long winding street they lived on. I recall me and Marie making fun of Naomi a lot the whole time. She was a weirdo, we didn�t want to accept her so we flat out didn�t. We were so obssesed with normalcy that we wouldn�t give one person who slightly different from ourselves a chance. That day, I remember not a lot, but everyone walking in a group and there I stood behind everyone. I tended to do that and I never understood why, I just never fit. I was like that akward piece in a puzzle you don�t know quite where to put it.
There wasn�t much to say for seventh grade. It was a pretty bland year. My grades weren�t so good. I wasted my whole middle school years so enthralled in problems with my friends that I let my grades slip. I felt so stupid, so foolish like such a waste. Besides the mental effect that middle school had on me, it was a time of nothing. Accomplishing nothing, doing nothing, and hating everything.
The rest of middle school went by in a haze. I became smarter in eighth grade although, my grades didn�t improve. I always started off well and messed up towards the end. But I became wiser with my friends, and as a result people became more trust worthy of me.
No longer did everyone follow Jesse, In fact they flat out, despised her. She had abused her position amongst us. We felt betrayed. Marie and I had become really close, and we had an unspoken pact, we weren�t to betray eachother. And for some reason of another, I haven�t gotten in a fight with her since.