A short story about a point in my life.
I graduated the sixth grade with no friends, but I was twelve years old and that didn't bother me much. To be totally honest I thought I had friends, but I served no purpose to them except to give them someone to passively-agrressively make fun of or have run around for them. I worked tirelessly to gain their approval, even though somewhere I knew that they wanted to look good and date boys and "hang out" while I still wanted to play pretend and pokemon. Still, they were all I had, and I clung to them like glue as I graduated that day. We took pictures and laughed and smiled and reminisced about the "Good 'old times". Yeah, good my ass. The conversation went a lot like this:
"Remember when Camryn sneezed a big boogie onto the table in third grade?"
I laughed and pretended not to be embarrassed, like it was all in the past now.
"Yeah, that was almost a gross and funny as every time she blew her nose"
I again, waved my hand in a way that signified "That used to bother me everyday and make me feel like an outcast, but when you put it like that, it's hilarious" and smiled, determined to make the best of my big graduation day.
Despite my so called friends, my sixth grade graduation was a big deal. I was picked to sing our national anthem to open the ceremony. One by one I watched all the people I had grown up with get a diploma saying they'd succeeded. One kid from another class made a big deal of going up to get his piece of paper with a loud and enthusiastic "OH YEAHH!" but otherwise it was a typical event. I won an award for being an upstanding citizen and I looked like a sweet little girl in my pretty blue dress. I was confident that day.
I don't remember much about the summer that followed. I'm sure there was a flurry of "She's so grown up" and "Straight A's. How wonderful" and "She's looking like a lovely young lady." For the most part, I agreed, but looking back I was most certainly not blossoming into a lovely young lady. I was tall for a girl, with long gangly arms and legs, flyway frizzy hair that I was too lazy to figure out how to fix, like the rest of the girls my age, and teeth that screamed for braces. Not to mention my classic nerd glasses, but by then they had just become part of my face. I was acne less for a while, my one redeeming quality, but that wouldn't last long into junior high when puberty finally hit full force. I was over opinionated and loud, with a hate on for politicians, Christians, and anyone else who would tell me I didn't know everything. I would have been the most annoying thing in the neighborhood had it not been for the fact that I spent most of my time inside playing video games and browsing the blossoming internet.
In the middle of the summer I went to week long sleep away camp and made tons and tons of friends. There was such a diversity of kids there it was easy to find some with similar interests as me, as opposed to school where I was confined to the same class of twenty people for six hours a day. Unfortunately for me none of the friends I made at camp were anywhere near my school, some lived hours away from my hometown. We vowed to keep in touch through the internet and MSN messenger (c) but like most camp friends, we never really did.
In September, school started again, and despite my obviously lovable personality, proved by all the people I had befriended away from home, I entered Junior high in the shadow of the people who I'd known for so long,
"Remember when Camryn sneezed a big boogie onto the table in third grade?"
I laughed and pretended not to be embarrassed, like it was all in the past now.
"Yeah, that was almost a gross and funny as every time she blew her nose"
I again, waved my hand in a way that signified "That used to bother me everyday and make me feel like an outcast, but when you put it like that, it's hilarious" and smiled, determined to make the best of my big graduation day.
Despite my so called friends, my sixth grade graduation was a big deal. I was picked to sing our national anthem to open the ceremony. One by one I watched all the people I had grown up with get a diploma saying they'd succeeded. One kid from another class made a big deal of going up to get his piece of paper with a loud and enthusiastic "OH YEAHH!" but otherwise it was a typical event. I won an award for being an upstanding citizen and I looked like a sweet little girl in my pretty blue dress. I was confident that day.
I don't remember much about the summer that followed. I'm sure there was a flurry of "She's so grown up" and "Straight A's. How wonderful" and "She's looking like a lovely young lady." For the most part, I agreed, but looking back I was most certainly not blossoming into a lovely young lady. I was tall for a girl, with long gangly arms and legs, flyway frizzy hair that I was too lazy to figure out how to fix, like the rest of the girls my age, and teeth that screamed for braces. Not to mention my classic nerd glasses, but by then they had just become part of my face. I was acne less for a while, my one redeeming quality, but that wouldn't last long into junior high when puberty finally hit full force. I was over opinionated and loud, with a hate on for politicians, Christians, and anyone else who would tell me I didn't know everything. I would have been the most annoying thing in the neighborhood had it not been for the fact that I spent most of my time inside playing video games and browsing the blossoming internet.
In the middle of the summer I went to week long sleep away camp and made tons and tons of friends. There was such a diversity of kids there it was easy to find some with similar interests as me, as opposed to school where I was confined to the same class of twenty people for six hours a day. Unfortunately for me none of the friends I made at camp were anywhere near my school, some lived hours away from my hometown. We vowed to keep in touch through the internet and MSN messenger (c) but like most camp friends, we never really did.
In September, school started again, and despite my obviously lovable personality, proved by all the people I had befriended away from home, I entered Junior high in the shadow of the people who I'd known for so long,
