2006. Sixth Grade
I was a tall eleven-year-old. While other girls my age were still four foot something, I just hit five feet. That and my pale white skin, fresh zits, and frizzy hair didn’t help what so ever when it came to being bullied. I was constantly made fun of. I had become shy once puberty hit me and had stopped writing plays or directing shows for amusement and felt hurt from the ridicule. Becoming shy caused me to become an easy target for name calling. They called me Pizzaface for all of the pimples on my face. I hated it.
The girls I was friends with in elementary completely ditched me when they realized that I wasn’t as pretty as they were. I only had one best friend, Lex, and even then, we had different lunch periods and never had any classes together. Lex was and still is very feisty. She doesn’t let anyone get the better of her and always stood up for me. She kept telling me to stand my ground and after a few months, I began to get my footing and actually stood tall. I became an angry preteen that would yell back at the name calling.
Home life became more intense. Because I stood my ground at school, I dared to attempt at standing my ground at home. Whenever my mother was in a mood and snapped at me, I would snap back. Eventually, I didn’t hurt nor care about the pain she would inflict on me. There was something deeper however. It wasn’t just me sticking up for myself. Around that time, I had noticed that I didn’t feel comfortable in my skin. It was as if I was looking at myself in the third person and I was foreign to myself. I began questioning my own feelings because everything felt like I was suffocating.
Going to school and being bullied didn’t ease my helplessness. The sixth grade was the beginning of the deep hollowness I was and still continue to experience every day. It was painful to feel it. I was in the gifted science class. It was the only gifted class I qualified for and the only class that didn’t care about the teasing other students would inflict on me. They were all in their own clique. The nerds basically. The majority of them were in all of the gifted classes together, excluding me and a few others.
I secluded myself as usual and because I felt so lost, I would daze off and imagine I was somewhere else. I would pretend that I was a famous singer in a popular band. Sometimes I would be an actress where everyone loved me and little girls looked up to me. All I think I wanted was the recognition that I was alive and present. I wanted someone to notice me in a positive light. Home life didn’t provide that for me. My mother was constantly in a bad mood where it was really like poking the dragon when I needed something from her. Something as simple as what were we going to eat. My dad never wanted to commit to me. In fact, the only letter I saw from him was one stating the fact that he didn’t want to pay for my medical expenses because he was trying to fund his own family that he created somewhere in California.
My head became my safe space and I became more reclusive. I remember it being toward the beginning of the sixth grade when it became more prevalent without me knowing. My science teacher was talking about a project that we would all be doing in groups in an attempt to get to know each other. I was already sitting next to the only girl I knew in the class, Jade. She was always a perfectionist and a know it all. I didn’t really like her but she was the only person I knew from elementary school and I was stuck in her gravitational pull before I could branch out myself. So, it was a given that we were going to be in the same group together.
I did my usual dazing off as our teacher was continuing his instructions when my vision cleared and I saw a short, tan boy with brown hair that spiked at the top. Once it became clear to me that I was looking straight at him, I noticed that he was looking at me with unease. I became red and looked away. I always seemed to put myself in awkward situations. When our teacher gave us the cue to group up, Jade actually went over to the spikey haired boy and his friend with glasses. I felt mortified. I didn’t want to interact with him but whatever Jade wanted, she got.
“Hey, I’m Jade.”
“Hi, I’m Tyler.” Spikey haired boy said. I avoided his eyes.
“I’m Dave by the way.” Glasses said.
“… Laine.” I coughed as soon as I said my name. I felt like my skin was crawling. I wanted to escape the room so bad. I remember longing for the bell to tell me to go to P.E., the one class I always hated.
“Do I have something on my face?”
“What?”
“Oh, its only because you were staring at me. Do I have leftover food on my face? Man, I hate it when that happens to me. I thought I was over that habit once I came back from fat camp.” Tyler was short, but from what I could tell, he was just skin and bones. There was no way in hell that he had been to a fat camp before.
“Fat camp?”
“Yeah. I was close to two hundred pounds. I couldn’t even use my legs. I had to crawl everywhere.” Jade was the first to laugh out of all of us. Once I saw Tyler smile, I knew it was all a joke and laughed along with Dave and Jade.
I don’t really remember the assignment we were given. The only thing I do remember, was that we made something out of Legos. It had a pulley system so maybe it was a shelter of some sort? All I really remember was Tyler constantly joking around about him being obese and a hopeless blob. GT Science became my favorite class for those moments. Jade seemed to be annoyed with him after a while but it seemed as though Tyler would try harder to impress her. I remember feeling weird after it became known that they had begun dating when we were only twelve. I was a late bloomer when it came to the opposite sex, so hearing that we could all begin to “date” each other, actually scared me. Jade began sitting next to Tyler in class, leaving me alone at my own table.
Eventually, they broke up, which made sitting next to each other difficult. We were already done with our group assignment by that point, so I figured I had gotten Jade back and she would sit next to me. I remember the day where I saw her sit next to another girl and feeling down that I was truly alone in class.
“Mind if I sit here?” I looked up to Tyler and felt for the first time my heart skip a beat for him. I’ve had crushes before so I was familiar with what I was feeling. I motioned over for him to sit down next to me and for the rest of the class I didn’t look in his direction at all for fear that I would become as red as a tomato. For the rest of the year, we talked about music, movies, shows, classes. You name it. We talked about it. He became a really good friend and even though I felt something for him, I was too shy to do anything about it. Besides, I wasn’t attractive enough for him. I was simply a friend.
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