BULLIED

Story 19

        How come your not a talker, how come you only listen. A question I always got.
        Presumeably you would think that people would be glad to have someone that would rather listen. There were various reasons, mainly I often mean something that’s totally different than what I end up saying. I never had friends, I never had bullies. If someone that age could have business relationships, this would be it. Though only business so far as class time was concerned. If you consider work time to be where you can interupt peoples assignments, and try to trick someone into cheating on tests. A time when everything was a test, or more accurately a running match.
        Rather than traditional bullying, it was closer to a game of follow the leader. Don’t follow and you were a bleeder, with your head smashed onto the road of a virtual reality tabletop game. I’ve never been a real fan of tabletop games. When I did I always played as a pigtailed elf girl with a scythe. Many times when we played such games, the DM would sometimes play the game off the cuff. Usual consequences, random shit: balloons falling from the sky, evil trolls kidnapping fairies. Rather than explanaining how the game works, they played the same way they always did. A bit like a squirrel trying to have a boxing match with a pack of wolves.
        At school things were not much different, though I always enjoyed occassional trips to the bookstore in the times I went out with friends.
        This is the context of what I tell my story.
        Everybody simply stared. It wasn’t anything like the bulling often seen in mainstream programming. Where the jock steals your lunch money, and jams your face into the wall. But rather that false niceness you might come to expect from being a non prep sitting at lunch with a prep. I had only just gotten over my goth phase. Though I was never like the others. Even when there were conversations, I always wondered whether such conversations were genuine. How is school today. Want to hang after school for a game of pool. Gamble a deck of cards, tossed from hand to hand. One wrong card, and you lose the whole deck. I’m not sure if some of the meanness I experienced was partially justifiable, my curious for doing different things didn’t make me popular.
        It’s not like it was all bad, the greek parties in English class were fun enough. Though I always wanted instead to play as someone in the time period of the other author’s that weren’t Shakeaspeare. Though that was at the end of the year.
        I’m still not sure what happened to be wood elf friend, and that silhouette on the wall. They must have their own adventures in the night forest and shadow city. Somehow when I met them I always got to use my regular shoes as roller skates. Those were some of the best friends you could meet. We had adventures better than any virtual reality game, going to various planets and becoming part of star fleets.
        If you need a spare star ship, you know who to ask.
        Hey that wasn’t a tabletop game, I swear!