Strangers

Her story

Taylor sighed and looked away.

"I think you deserve to know"

She took a sip of water trying to hide her nervousness before she began her story:

"I should probably start by saying that I was a perfectly normal kid to begin with. Trusting, naive, and kind. In elementary school I had a lot of great friends, I was bathed in human love, and everything was fine. Until I went to middle school. As I remember now, I was looking forward to that moment. I couldn't wait to grow up and make lots of new friends. I imagined how much fun I would have. But as is often the case, all my expectations were not met.
Somehow, from the very first day, I found myself on the sidelines. I was not able to fit in and I was very upset because of that, because before that I was not in a situation where I had no friends at all. I was not completely ignored, but you know, sitting next to a group of people at lunch and knowing that if you get up and leave now, none of them will notice because they do not care is not the most pleasant feeling. I felt so tedious, and I kept thinking "am I really such a person that none of them are interested in being friends with me? Why are they all friends with each other but not with me?"
I used to love school, but this situation made me hate it. Then for the first time I wanted to come home sooner. Just to get away from that scary place. Every day of school was a pain in the ass, every morning I didn't want to go there.
That's how I existed for one year. Existence, that's what it was. And at the end of the year, having a huge tantrum with lots of tears and screaming I persuaded my parents to transfer me to another school"

Taylor grimaced, hiding the pain behind a semblance of a smile.

"I'm a fool, I didn't know the worst was yet to come. Just like last time, I created a lot of expectations for myself. That the new school would be nothing like the last one. At the new school I would have lots of friends again, and I wouldn't be an empty space. But no. When I came to the new school, I was subjected to what today is called bullying.
I did literally nothing, my classmates just chose me as a victim.  I think because of my experiences in the previous school, I was such an easy victim for them.
Of course bullying didn't start from day one, but the fact that my classmates didn't like me was felt from day one. I just didn't want to see or believe it. That was the first time I used my parents' money to get friends. Expensive gifts, tickets to exclusive events-all you had to do was be my friend. Or rather,to pretend that you were my friend"

Taylor caught herself chewing her lip again, so she tried to stop. Although the attempt failed, Joe gently took her hand afterwards. His hand was large and warm, and his thumb gently stroked Taylor's knuckles.It gave her the strength to tell the story she'd forbidden herself to think about.

"And one fall day one of them invited me to her birthday party. I was very happy, I thought that finally they wanted to be friends with me. I bought her a beautiful, large gift, wore my most fashionable dress, even did my makeup-all to impress them. To make a long story short, I ended up with sweet soda poured all over my dress to the loud laughter of my classmates and the clicks of the camera, which of course filmed it all.
My mom picked me up from that party in tears. And from that day on, they were all over me. They made sure that no one in the class was friends with me. They told me how stupid and uncool I was every fucking day, over and over again. A loser.
I was never invited to school parties, it was always:" Hey guys, everyone EXCEPT that ugly Taylor is going to the coolest party of the year!".
I even tried to make friends with kids from other classes, but they all knew I wasn't liked in mine, so they avoided me.Do I have to say those were my worst years?"

"Not really " answered Joe

"When I came to our school I knew from the beginning that no one else would dare to do that to me again. That was my biggest fear of being the loser no one wanted to be friends with again. So from day one I started acting like that, choosing my friends, being the best. Being the queen. It was only because I kept remembering how I cried into my pillow at night because no one wanted to know me. And you know, no huge group of friends when I was 25 could erase the memory of sitting alone in the school cafeteria and trying to make friends with someone under the laughter of others"