The Theater Girl and the Player

You Belong With Me - Part 5

I had already been called a loser to my face, two years ago. Which is probably why this stung really hard.

It was my ex-friends. My friend group told me that insult, straight to my oblivious 13 year old face. The four people that I thought would be my bridesmaids at my wedding chose to humiliate and reject me for no tangible reason. Jane was the only one that stood by my side.

I still remember when they turned their backs on me after only one event. The dumb party.

Christina had gotten us exclusive invites to a party for freshmans kids that we were gonna see at our future high school. The evening we learned her good news, we jumped up and down in excitement. We all undeniably wanted to go. It was going to be the highlight of our entire school year, we were sure about it. Not a lot of 8th graders were summoned to this epic social gathering and the fact that my friend had scored us places there was kind of impressing. 

After a long celebratory dance, we all took upon roles for this night. Jane was going to make us snacks and Ameera assembled fanny pouches for us. In them, there was everything we could ever need. Rosy decided we had to go shopping for new clothes, within a budget her father had provided for us and Heather invited our small gang to sleep over at her house after the party. I was the lift. Well, my uncle was in charge of driving us there. It couldn't have been my parents as they were working, like always.

I was thrilled to go. It was going to be a Friday night, at some rich guy's house. 

I recall how the host was the little brother of a dude called Chevy. He was the one that had passed Christina the invitations. I don't remember his name, though. 

Without any trigger, a few nights before the party,  doubts and insecurities started to bubble up in my mind. What if they pressured us to drink? What if someone got hurt? And so on...

The next morning at school, I gave voice to my hesitations and got laughed at by my friends. "This is our chance to become popular! I'm not missing it, because you'll maybe decide to chicken out at the last minute. You can't do that.", had stated sharply Ameera. The others were also in agreement with her. So, I attempted to stop dwelling on this new source of anxiety, which was hard, but I really thought I had done a great job at forgetting about it completely.

Then came the night. We pulled up to the huge residence. It resembled a castle and we were all gazing at it in awe. When we got out of the car, I was already starting to feel woozy for no reason at all. 

I recall my friends and I advancing towards the front door, I was the one closing the walk. Christina knocked and we entered, as if we belonged there. There were so many students and in my eyes, every single one of them appeared older than me.

In the few seconds it took from me to remark that, my gals were already nowhere to be seen, even Jane. It made me feel so alone. I was only there to please them as well as for them to have a ride to this party and back to Heather's place afterwards. 

I searched for any one of the girls I came with in the huge first floor of the house without any results. I had stopped my hunt and sat down on a big burgundy leather couch to spam our group chat. I hoped to get a response, even though I knew I was pretty much stranded and had to fend for myself in this unknown situation. I was experiencing the party as if it was a big problem. As if I wasn't the one that had brought this up on myself...

Inside of me, I was aware that it shouldn't be this hard, I shouldn't feel this way, this was a bad idea, I was right, I didn't deserve to be here, and did I even desire to be here in the first place or had I just been pressured to go, or even worse been pressured to subconsciously want to go, because this was probably every young teenager's dream?