High School Hell

High School Hell

Exiled

 So I missed all the torture in Junior High or Middle School due to transferring to Shelby Christian Academy.  When the small school closed after the 1989-1990 year, I was forced to transfer back to public school.   I attended Shelby Senior High for my freshman year.

Even though I knew many of the kids from Grade School, I still felt like a new student.  I was placed in a lot of lower level classes with mostly people I didn’t know.  Soon, the teasing and torture began.

Some stupid guy in Study Hall kept putting tiny pieces of gum in my hair.  I often had to cut the pieces out.  This really pissed me off, but I couldn’t figure out who it was for the likes of me.   I started taking study hall in the library, where I felt more at home.  I enjoyed being in the library much more than the silent sterile room they used for study hall.  This also put a stop to the gum in the hair thank goodness.

A couple of guys thought it would be amusing to put a “Kick Me” sign on my back.  I wouldn’t have known it was there, except the teacher took it off my back for me.  He was not happy about the sign and neither was I.  Again, no clue as to who was making fun of me.

Perhaps if I wasn’t in such an anxious daze most of the time, I might have been more aware of these stupid pranks.  But, unfortunately, I was often preoccupied with my reading and writing.  I did what I could to escape the mundane existence of high school by escaping into my imagination, but this caused problems for me with the other students who saw me as an easy target.

Perhaps the most damaging was the time that several students gained up on me and made fun of me to my face.   They called me buck tooth beaver, among other things.  After the bell rang that day, I fled to the bathroom where I cried my eyes out.  I cried so long and hard that I was 10 minutes late to my next class.

A couple of girls in Math class thought it would be fun to make fun of me by writing me love letters.  They claimed that it was from a guy in class, but I couldn’t tell that it was a girl’s handwriting.

This particular ploy made me skeptical of any guy’s interest in me.  So when this guy Dan asked me to Prom, I was unsure of what to say.  I felt like maybe he was just doing it to get my hopes up and then dash them or something.  When I didn’t say yes right away, he turned around and decided that he wasn’t going to Prom at all.  I was his last ditch date and I didn’t seem all the interested, so it was off.

When I went to Prom my senior year, it was a disaster.  I went with a friend, Harold, who left me in the middle of the dance to get laid by someone else.  I didn’t care so much that he those to be someone else, as I was pissed that he didn’t even have the courtesy to wait until our date was over to get with her.  I had to get a ride home with friends that night.

My freshman year I had nearly all my morning classes with Travis.  For the first part of the morning he’d act all mean and bitchy toward me.  Then he’d have a sudden mood change middle of the day and start hitting on me.  Needless to say, I was really confused.  My sophomore year, Travis apologized for his odd behavior and explained that he’d been messed up on drugs and was sorry.  We became friends after that, mostly because my friends were friends with him.  I even ended up going to a party at his house once.  It turned out that Travis was a good guy after all despite his sudden mood swings.

I got lucky that no one ever tried to kick my butt. I was a bit of a wallflower and most of the mean girls left me alone.  Alicia wasn’t nice to me, but she never actually picked a fight with me.   I was only challenged once during my high school career and that was my junior year.  I was at PJVS and this girl Stephanie tried to get this rather obese girl to fight me.  Rochelle shoved me into the wall in the bathroom one day, but I simply left the bathroom.  Stephanie called out to me, asking me if I was going to fight her or not.  I told her no and hurried off to the classroom where I was safe.

Honestly, my altercations were with guys mostly.

One guy in Spanish Class insulted me, so I took my purse from the back of my chair and hit him with it.  The class clapped for me and the teacher demanded to know why I’d done such a thing.  “He insulted me,” I said, as if it were obvious why I’d hit him.  The purse was small and had very little in it.  I’m sure it didn’t hurt him at all.  His ego is about all that took a bruising that day.

Another guy was making rude sexual comments about me before class began.  I was doing my best to ignore him, but when he said something about my mother being good the night before, I lost my temper.  I went over to him and slapped him across the face.  I pointed at him and said, “You are an asshole!”  His friend laughed at him and the guy never bothered me again.

Roy was my friend’s brother.  We shared a science class together my senior year.  I don’t remember what he said, but he was being obnoxious—as usual.  I told him if he kept it up, that he was looking to get slapped.  He pointed to his cheek and dared me to slap him, so I did.  This shocked him more than anything, although I did leave a nice red hand print on his cheek.

I had a run in with a bully once, but that was in my own yard at home.  Bobby punched me in the stomach for teasing his friends.   Hunched over in pain, I told him it was a nice punch.  This wasn’t the reaction he was looking for, so he left me alone after that.  I suppose he wanted me to either cry or hit him back and I did neither.   If it had happened in school, I could have reported him.  But since it was after school, the incident went without mention for the most part.

I had many nicknames throughout the years.  The most apt one was “writer.”  I didn’t mind being called that.  What I did mind being called was “Sperm Perm.”  I had a spiral perm and a girl, Leslie, took to calling me “Sperm Perm.”  I was so traumatized after that that I never got another perm.

My junior year we were practicing how to walk and carry ourselves with confidence when some girl mentioned that I was swinging my hips.  So I exaggerated the movement to be silly.  This earned me the rather mean moniker of “Miss America.”  Our math teacher heard them calling me that and told them to lay off.  He knew it was not meant as a compliment.   Although it annoyed me, I wasn’t too terribly upset by it.

All in all, I never really tried to be a part of the crowd or tried to be popular.  I was okay with being a bit of a loner.  Still, I did enjoy being a part of theater.  I wish I could have been involved with it more than just the one year.  I also considered going out for track, but I never did.  I loved running, but wasn’t motivated enough to tryout for the team.

Mostly my high school years are marred by my struggles with crippling depression and undiagnosed learning disability.  I sucked at Math, but no one thought to test me.  Mostly I suffered through a number of uncaring teachers who were no help whatsoever.  My disability also caused problems with spelling, grammar and foreign languages.  I was smart and reading at a college level in high school, but my true intelligence wasn’t reflected in my often average to poor grades.

It is amazing to think I failed seventh grade before transferring to Shelby Christian Academy.  Then I failed several classes my sophomore year and all of my junior year.  By summer school and some miracle, I managed to graduate with the class I started out with.  While I am proud to have not had to suffer an extra year, it did put me way behind when I started college.

But college is another blog entry all together.