Early Signs of Being Different
When I was young I had 1 friend in Elementary school from 1st grade to 4th grade. He was a boy who was a year older than me. We would play pretend on the playground and go on epic adventurers with our own versions of 'OC's as kids. Playing together was always a lot of fun, but unfortunately he was a year older than me. So when he went to middle school we were both suddenly alone. For a while I didn't remember 5th grade. It must have been stressful for little me.
Not only had I had a 'boy' as a friend (a social faux pas in Elementary School) I was also "The Weird Kid" in my grade. My class sizes were all fairly small so all of that combined meant that I had a lot of trouble making friends. I had a lot of courage, but I could also be annoying and weird with my interests (dragons, fantasy, weird cartoons, ext). Fortunately, I was still brave enough to be me at a young age and I did eventually find some friends in 5th grade. They were the other kids in my grade who were considered "weird", they had just been in different classrooms!
We were friends all through middle school and befriended two more girls in our grade. One was the quite girl and the other was the new girl.
Eventually in High School my friends and I started the anime club. We proceeded to collect all the "weird kids" in the grades under us and added them to our club. There was some drama, as always happens in anime clubs, but I'd like to think it gave some of the kids there a nice community for when we graduated.
