My Last High School: Part Two

He came up to my very first day at my fourth and final high school.

As far as first days at new schools went (and I was an old pro at new schools by this point), it had gone very well. I’d walked into the cafeteria with the meanest mug I could muster on my face. Projecting my best nobody-better-fuck-with-me energy. My plan was to suss out the group of girls who would be the least amount of trouble to thrust myself into.

This was what I’d done at my previous school. I preferred an established group, but one without a leader who could match my energy. A group of quiet or nerdy girls-and I hate to admit this part, but let me not leave anything out-because they were easiest to control. I’d done this at my previous school and they’d happily accepted me. I wasn’t always nice to them, but I also didn’t let anybody else fuck with them. Like Mayra. She made one off-hand comment that pissed me off and I made her go sit at another table. I also yelled at her in Health class in front of everyone. She didn’t really deserve that. She was a little snotty. I think she rolled her eyes and called me a “ninny” like some 19th century grandma or something. So bitchy 11th-grade me banished her from the group for a day-a group of friends that had been in place long before I ever showed up at that high school.

But there was another time when a boy in one of her classes was bullying her. I cornered him in the cafeteria, got right up in his face, and said something like “Oh, you were looking for someone to fuck with, huh?” He denied that he’d been doing anything. He tried to maneuver around me. I poked him in the chest hard and told him if he kept looking for a problem with Mayra, he’d find it with me. He didn’t bother her anymore after that.

(I beg you all to keep in mine what I said before: It wasn’t all and-everybody-clapped moments where I was the badass. I took a lot of L’s fighting to keep my place on the social hierarchy. And I didn’t run the school. I pushed around the people weaker than me and stepped to the people tougher than me when I thought I had to-when they seemed like a threat. You know that moment when a wild turkey loses its nerve and skitters away, looking real stupid, because why are you that loud if you’re such a pussy?-I was that turkey many times).

So nobody fucked with Mayra, except for me, and from what I could tell, Mayra had been the leader of their group before I showed up and plunked down at their lunch table. Mayra let me stick around, gladly gave up her unofficial role to me. For God knows what reason, Mayra remembers me really fondly. She found me on facebook a few years back. And I do not have any accounts with my real name on it. A person has to be very dedicated to find me. She gushed about how much she missed me and how fun it was the time we went trick-or-treating. I don’t even remember the time we went trick-or-treating. I remember telling her she was a dumbass and not using tampons correctly (after a very graphic and horrifying anecdote from her) and then pulling her into the women’s bathroom to demonstrate. I remember she slept over and I put on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I remember her as a loud and innocent sort of human being. Very sheltered. She had an annoyingly high-pitched voice and sounded sort of like a muppet. I could take her or leave her. By that point in my life, that was really how I liked my friends: entertaining enough to provide company, but not compelling enough to really bond with. I guess Mayra liked me for whatever reason and she went out of her way to track me down online, then tried to get me to call her so that we could plan to meet up. I gave some lame excuse and did a slow fade.

Anyway, barge into a group of nerds and take over was sort of my strategic social move by this point. I think it started back in 8th grade-my second year of 8th grade-with the first girl I ever bullied. She invited me into her group of friends. I spent months turning them all against her. Kicked her out of her own group of friends. I have been saying nobody should feel bad for me. I was mean and manipulative and wanted a group of people to influence, but never had the coolness, social skills, or balls to pull this move among the actual popular kids. When the actual popular kids came to fuck with me, my aggression was high. Because I intuitively understood that I couldn’t let my posse of beta bitches see that I was uncool or scared. They needed to believe I was just too alternative and avant garde to rise to the top of the social ladder. I was slumming it with them because that’s just the type of don’t-give-a-shit tough bitch I was. Or that was the idea of the image anyway. I mean, I had a tongue ring and blue-green hair. That shit was wild for a high school junior in a town with more cows than people. The piercings and punk aesthetic were enough to trick the nerdy chicks into thinking I was tough and cool. If the cheerleaders and blonde Abercrombie bitches had never bothered me, I probably would have kept my head down and stuck to bossing the other losers around. Since they didn’t, well, that was where a lot of the fighting came in. I was always the first to escalate to threats of physical violence. I would do that if there was even a hint of a problem. Let them see weakness, let them see that you’re willing to let a little passive aggressive comment slide, well, then it’s all over.

I knew I’d rather get my ass kicked in a fight I’d started then get pushed around or laughed at and be too scared to fight back. Although, I did chicken out on the handful of occasions when my “fight me, bitch” was met with a “cool, take your shot.”

But I’ve gotten off track.

Here I was in this brand new high school, with barely six months of the year left. Then I was done with high school for good.

I no longer had my cool punk aesthetic. When I moved in with my grandparents, the first thing my grandma did was throw almost all my clothes out. I think I was too tired to fight her on it. My hair was dyed back to brown. My gel was taken so I couldn’t spike it up cool. The only thing I fought her on was my piercings. So to her chagrin, I still had a barbell through my tongue and a number of cartilage piercings when I showed up for my first day at Blankity-Blank High School. Aside from that though, the woman had dressed me in a yellow button-up sweater and the nerdiest jeans I think existed in 2006. They weren’t flared, which was the current style. They weren’t skinny, which was just starting to enter the collective fashion vernacular. They just hung on me. And the shoes! God, she took my converse. Said they looked trashy because I’d written all over them. She brushed my short hair straight down and clipped it in place with barrettes. Again, I didn’t fight her too hard. But I did snarkily ask her if she planned to tape a “kick me” sign to my back, because she had me looking like I was asking to be fucked with.

“Oh, stop it, Jennifer. You look beautiful. See?” She pulled me over to the big mirror hanging in her hallway. “You look lovely. Now we’ve just got to get that skin under control.”

“You don’t know what high school girls are like, Nan. You’re basically sticking me in please-come-fuck-with-me costume. Hang a billboard over me that says ‘I’ve never thrown a punch’.”

“Don’t swear! Be a lady!”

“Well, I’m really not gonna be a lady when I’ve gotta fight a bitch, because you got me looking like a Brady Bunch extra. Seriously, I look like an absolute goober. I’m wearing a cardigan.”

“It looks beautiful. It goes nice with your green eyes.”

“Crying out loud. I look like a social retard. These farmer kids are gonna think I’ve been homeschooled.”

And then, there I was in this cafeteria. A small cafeteria.

There were a lot of eyes on me. This was another teeny-tiny rural school. It was shared by two towns. I believe there were…maybe 60? kids in my graduating class. So slightly larger than my previous school.

The first thing that happened, as I glared around at this new group of kids and tried to suss out from a single glance which group of girls I could sieze as my own, was about the weirdest coincidence of my life.

“Jen?”

I turned around to lock eyes with….well…I couldn’t place him.

“Hi?”

He was giving me the weirdest look.

“I know you?” I asked.

“I went to elementary school with you. We heard a girl from New Jersey was starting here. This is weird, right?”

“Ah…who are you?”

He told me his name, but I still didn’t remember him. He knew me though, so I smiled and pretended I recognized him.

“That’s crazy,” he laughed. “Both of our families moved to the middle of nowhere New Hampshire!”

I laughed too, because it was crazy, but I really didn’t know who he was. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t in the same grade as me. He couldn’t have been. Remember I repeated the 8th grade. By Senior year, everybody I’d been in the same grade with in elementary school would have graduated. So I really don’t know how that boy knew me. A coincidence like that seems like it should mean something. It really didn’t though. I’m fairly certain (although not entirely) that I never talked to him again after that. I’m also not sure how word got around that small school that I used to live in New Jersey. That had been two years ago at that point. Small towns are fucking weird.

The next thing that happened was a group of girls at a table not far from me all started waving.

“Hey, come here! New girl, want to sit with us?”

I almost didn’t. I didn’t like how assertive they were. This was a….popular group of girls, one that I wouldn’t be able to hold my own in. I tried to come up with some reason to tell them to fuck off. I already had my eye on a group.There was a group of girls, three of them, in all black, two of them scribbling in notebooks, hanging out at a table in the corner. That looked like my group. They all had their heads down. They all looked sad. I could vibe with that body language. This group of happy, outgoing girls though…they didn’t look like my crowd. And there were 9, count em, NINE, at this one big round table. A group that large is sure to be of higher social standing. I realize I sound like a sociopath. All I can say is I favored the big fish in a small pond approach. Easier to do that and save up all my aggression for the times the much bigger fishes came over to my pond to make waves.

I guess my curiosity got the best of me. I sat down at their table and they were all….nice? I was very confused. They were real nice. Not passive-aggressive nice. I was passive-aggressive to the two that I decided were the leaders. I did it to test them out, see what they would do. One looked uneasy, but didn’t do anything. The other didn’t even seem to notice.

Tara-a pretty red-head who was a devout Christian but kept giving her boyfriend head in the artroom closet anyway. I pegged her as the second-in-command.

Macy-a fat girl, but not the self-conscious sort. She was the queen bee of the group. Despite her not seeming to notice the underhanded dig I’d taken at her, I quickly decided I couldn’t usurp her authority. She was tougher than me. A foster kid with a chip on her shoulder, yet weirdly very sweet with her friends. Give her an adult to argue with though.

Ariana-another chunky girl. She copied everything Macy did.

Lana-a quiet blonde girl who only ever picked at her food and I never learned very much about.

Kristy-a tall girl with thick curly black hair who only wore guy’s clothes. She loved the Simpsons and Pixar movies. Two years after we graduated, she’d kiss me in her backyard and then beg me not to tell her boyfriend.

The rest I can’t remember. Not even a little. Which is weird, because I know all of them came over my house at least once. Most of them came to see me in the hospital after everything went wrong. Yet, I’ve forgotten them all. They exist in my mind as amorphous blobs, background scenery to the next few months. I’m aware they were there and they said things. I can’t recall any of it.

Many people came over to this table during lunch. Other girls. Boys. I noted the body language. The girls approaching the table, either excited or deferential. This was a group of high social standing. If I tried to make them like me and failed, there would be no coming back from that. But if I was the bitch who was too good for this crowd, who rejected them,….that could be good for me. Nobody would fuck with me for the rest of the year.

But all of these weird Machiavellian plans were gone by the end of the day. After I was asked out on a date by Joe.

My last class of the day was art. At lunch, Ariana had asked to see my schedule. She snatched it out of my hand and said gleefully, “You have art with me! This is great!”

And I just nodded and stared. I was so put off by how quickly these girls had taken to me.

“Oh good,” Macy said. “Arianna you can show her how to get there?”

“Yep. Yep. I can do that,” Arianna nodded eagerly. “Hey, my seventh-period class is right down the hall from yours. If you just wait by the door, I’ll meet you there and bring you to art.”

“Cool…”

“What’s her next class after lunch?” Macy demanded. “Who is gonna show her how to get there?”

I stared at her. What on earth was the plan here? You bring a new person into the group, you can’t just be friendly right away. A pecking order has to be established. I tried to figure out how this girl was fucking with me and really couldn’t find anything. She was either playing some 4D chess so far above me I couldn’t conceive of it or she was actually just nice. I begrudgingly accepted the latter, but told myself not to be surprised when it turned out to be the former.

“Her next class is math,” Arianna announced. “Seniors! Who has math next?”

I can’t recall who showed me how to get to math class. I thought about pointing out that their school was like the size of a large tennis court and I’d been finding my way solo all morning. But thought better of it. Since I couldn’t figure them out, I decided to actually try to relax, at least until I found a reason not to.

Arianna was a junior. She met me outside of math and she brought me to art. She chattered the whole way.

“Wait, wait! Is your tongue pierced?”

“Yep.”

“Macy has her tongue pierced too. She’s so cool.”

“She seems okay.”

By all accounts, I think Macy and I should have been great friends. We never were though. Her boyfriend was friends-sort of-with Joe, and we haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet, but you already know, it all goes wrong.

Macy never had a problem with me after all of that. And she let me keep sitting with her group. But she didn’t talk to me after it all went wrong, and since she was the Queen Bee of that group, they all followed her lead. I did try to move on and find another group. I sat down at the table with those three girls who dressed all in black and drew. But by that point, I didn’t have the energy to make a group mine. I never talked to them. I sat with them, and I put my head down too. And some days they would put all their stuff up on the bench because they didn’t want me there, and those were the days I went back to Macy’s table. She never sent me away and I don’t know why. But I’m getting really really ahead of myself.

There’s a lot we have to cover before we get to all of that, and it started when Joe came up to me in art class, told me I was pretty, and asked if he could take me for a drive.