The Fleeting Happy

One

     Several Months Earlier

      Most kids, when they transfer to a different high school, do so because their parents forced them to. I've heard countless sob stories about how some poor, well-adjusted teenager was suddenly yanked from the life they'd always known to some foreign new town where they were forced to become the dreaded New Kid at the local high school.

      In my case, I begged my parents to let me transfer schools. No one was moving or anything, and I certainly wasn't new to the small town of Severn Valley.

      Spring of 9th grade was when I first got the idea to transfer. At the time, the idea seemed brilliant. Not only was it teeming with mystery and grandeur, it offered me the one thing I'd been yearning for since I first stepped foot in the cesspool of chronic misery known as high school:

      Escape.

      Okay, not quite. It wasn't like I was leaving high school altogether. Stupidly, I'd turned on my laptop, blown up a map of my school district, pointed my finger at the absolute farthest school from my own and declared, "that one."

      Severn Valley High School just so happened to be the school I'd pointed to. I didn't know much about it, just that it was three times the size of McAdams (my old school) and was located at the opposite end of town.

      I know it was an impulsive decision to make. Mom says I'm an impulsive person. I don't know why I do things like that. I don't know why I just do things without thinking about them. Sometimes, I wonder if I'm crazy.

     Like for example, over the summer before I was due to start sophomore year at Severn Valley High, I just started crying for no reason and cutting my hair. It used to be long, but now it doesn't even reach my shoulders. And since I cut it myself mid-meltdown, I didn't do the smoothest job in terms of evenness. I couldn't even stand that it was black, so I bleached it twice and dyed it blue.

     Anyways, I was happy that I was going to leave. I didn't tell anybody, of course. I don't suspect many people would have noticed, anyway, and that was just fine by me; I wanted to disappear. I'd been around the same people for over 10 years, and the environment had festered into something quite toxic. I mean, you understand. Right? There are times when you just need to leave.

      Those people... those lifestyles... those mindsets... It was all overwhelming me. They didn't like me because I was unhappy, and I was unhappy because they didn't like me. (Among other things).

      But I'll spare you the pitiful details and will attempt to summarize my old school's situation for you.

      Basically, it was your typical Western-cultured high school, except with a much more tight-knit community and so few students that literally everybody knew everybody.

      At that school, the cliques weren't exactly jocks, nerds, goths, stoners et cetera-- it was a lot harder to see, but they were definitely there. They weren't even conventional clique types, either. For example, we had the Discount Rastafarians. The Walking Nike Advertisements. The Anime Porn Junkies. The Broadway Hecklers. The Faul McCartney Conspiracy Theorists.

      As for myself, I belonged to the clique I had personally dubbed Sisterhood of the Traveling Girl Scouts.

      Don't get the wrong idea-- I'd only been in that clique because of longtime standing. I met those girls back in elementary school and at the time, we'd certainly had a lot in common.

      Little did I know, they'd stay spiritually in elementary school forever and I would find myself feeling alienated and out of place with them.