Ok, my name is Carly Cook my story spans over a couple years but I guess it can start in sixth grade. In my town we had two middle school so one was just built when I was in sixth grade and half of them went over to middle school so basically I lost like half of my friends and I had only one good friend left. She then got her own group of friends and they were like the popular gang and you know like at this point of my life I was still wearing like leggings and big shirts that my mom would bring home from school and these kids had like made these t-shirts from her school. So like city school shirts with leggings, white tennis shoes, and like awkward glasses and I’m trying to hang out with the popular girls. My one friend was horribly adorable and didn’t have to change herself to be with other people, and I’ve learned now I’m never going to change myself, but going through this, through the years and dealing with this group of girls. So they said you can’t hang out with us unless you wear Aeropostalé, so I went out and bought Aeropostalé. Then they said you can’t hang out with us unless you wear jeans and I never wore jeans because I had eczema on my legs and it irritated it. So I wore leggings up until sixth grade, I was an awkward little thing. So then I bought jeans, and my jeans were tapered, and so my awkwardness basically increased ten fold because they were tapered.
So we were in band, and you had to wear black, and I had these black shoes. So I got black shoes and I was really short, I was really short and my feet had grown ahead of me. I had a size 9 shoe and I was like 4”9. So the concerts done, and I’m walking towards my mom who didn’t hear this but the main popular girl was like “Hey like where are you going to a circus?” and so the main girl, the evil bitch girl, I was always around her throughout middle school cause our lockers were next to each other. So in around eight grade she starts talking about having sex with these twenty year olds and we were like what, fourteen? and her locker would just reek of body splash, just swarming. She always picked on me, I ran for vice President and I was into anime and so I put it into my posters and… she would say stuff like “Vote for me, I’ll bring pokemon to school” and I was so offended because I thought pokemon was awful and liked sailor moon.
The next time I had a class with her was in eleventh grade and I had kind of grown into myself, I had friends, I was a happy person. She sat behind me in Spanish and she would copy from me and the teacher knew this… so this one time I “leaned back” – note the sarcastic parentheses with the fingers – and her hands were curled over the front of the desk and I crushed them and she yelled out. The teacher said that maybe she shouldn’t put her fingers there and moved her across the room.
So even though there were years of torture I think she helped me grow into myself and I think I got my peace in the end… even though it was violent.