Parallells

A Fresh Start

       Seventh grade was a very strange mix of feelings for me. Puberty had just begun to kick in, I was starting out somewhere new with no idea what to expect. A social skill I had never really learned was how to make new friends. I had been stuck with the same group of twelve to twenty people in my class for seven years. And here I was, somewhere new, one of the quietest kids in the school, and no idea what the hell I was doing. Rumming Hall School was filled with some of the peppiest kids in the state and beyond.  And I had to make friends here. It all started off fairly well. I got to know kids around me, but I had this air of distance around me. It was if people were put off by the fact that I was new that year, and I was some kid from a town over who just showed up. I didn’t have any connections there, other than one kid who had toured me around the school the previous year. Eventually, though, things began to settle down, and one could see where people’s alliances lay, and who was nicer than the others.

      There was a massive gap between me, the fifteen-out-of-twenty-thousand dollar scholarship kid who’s only hope of staying there were good grades and staying out of fights (which was becoming increasingly difficult with time), and the kids who had been there for years, who’s indulgent parents had raised them together since the day they were born, like some elite club. It sickened me, to an extent, how close-minded many of these people were. Yet life went on, and I became well known throughout the school as the wicked-crazy hilarious kid who could warp his voice into that of the “Hamster Dance” onstage. People thought I was hilarious. Tough times were ahead, though, and they would signal the end of any happiness I was to have at the school.

      The summer passed, and because I had ignored my few true friends’ constant queries about my getting a Facebook, I was almost completely unable to communicate with those I had just spent nine months of my life with. I returned to school exactly where I left off. I was that hilariously mad little seventh-grader whose only strongpoint was his ability to make other’s laugh at him. It was like being a punching bag for everybody’s ego. Punching bags occasionally will hit back, though.

      When puberty hit, it hit hard. My voice got deeper, destroying any hope of contorting my voice ever again. One spectacular thing that might have changed my life forever, was my getting contact lenses for my thirteenth birthday. Everybody was shocked by my suddenly walking into school on the twentieth of October without a pair of glasses on. Then I just began to blend in. I became nobody. I was there when people needed someone to laugh at, but nothing more. My entire life people had known me. It was all very strange, at first. I was no longer an individual. I longed to stand out more than ever before. But oddly enough, the more I tried to stand out, the more I would blend in.

      I had one true friend, Zach. To this day I remember how I would talk to him almost every day. We’d both force our way through the first three periods, then walk down to the cookie line together, and then hang out in study hall. Matthew was also right there with us. The three of us were a great group of buds. I haven’t talked to Malcolm since. After eighth grade, Zach and I always had a certain, standoffish attitude about us. He climbed the social ladder twice as fast as I did, and as a result left me in the dust where he once stood.

      In the wake of the economic crisis, though, my family got hit hard. My mom lost her job because of the fact that she cost the company too much money. She worked too hard for them to pay her. We were always flexible with them, and only a week before, there had been a party in her honor, saying how they would never fire her. That was not the case. With her job being gone, and my father being a self-employed craftsman, we were living off of an unemployment check and the grace of Swedish customers. To top it all off, I had to go to school and listen to people say how awful President Obama was for not cleaning up Bush’s shit, and say how unemployment insurance is socialist and ruining our country. I got into a lot of fights that year.

      The majority of people don’t know what it’s like to have everyone turn their back on you. It’s beyond rough. It’s like having a piece of you torn away. Mental pain is infinitely more powerful than any physical pain. I can handle physical pain, and a lot of it. Mental pain is something you can’t see, you can’t hear, but you can feel. It doesn’t exist, but it is also the most real thing you will ever experience. The worst thing is when those who say they care about you refuse to be whom you turn to. People all have their own problems, but all people also need to help each other if there is any hope of having a relationship, be it family or friends.

      Ninth grade was a living hell. Everyone was gone. The small cliché of friends I had fallen into treated me like a scapegoat for everything, and I was in a constant state of having to defend myself on all fronts, be it at home or at school, in class or on the field. And that was a day in the life. Falling in love with your best friend’s sister doesn’t exactly help either. Halfway through the year, it all fell apart. I realized that my fresh start was gone. It was all over. I had no chance of ever getting it back. I had ruined my three years at that school, and I had to move on to prep school, like all my peers with me. I slowly but surely made amends. I began apologizing to people for things I had said, even if I didn’t mean it at all. I avoided conflict like the plague. I tried my hardest at sports, and did good enough in school to get by. And slowly, piece-by-piece, my plans to end it all for good came into view.

      The senior trip was the crowning jewel of ninth grade. That’s when it all falls into place. You are going to high school the next year. It was in that weekend-long span that I realized what I had been brooding over was actually, visibly happening. It was over. I was done. People saw something was up. I wasn’t the normally very serious and scapegoat kid they were used to. They would ask me how I was feeling, as if they actually cared.

      “You okay?” they would ask.

      “What? Oh, yeah, sorry,” I would lie with a faked smile.

      And that was life.

      It was a week before graduation. I had to tell her before I graduated. We had all summer, right? Or more, even, like the weekends, and breaks… I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms. I told her.

      “No,” she stated. And then she walked away.

      That night was the senior dinner, and we all said our last true goodbyes. People seemed to actually realize what was happening and what had been done. They seemed to regret it. And I hated them for it.

      The next day, at our school track-and-field day, I cleared things up with my crush, stating that she had nothing to worry about. And then I proceeded to remove myself from the rest of the school. I sat by the river, staring into the cold water, wondering what would happen if I were to drown just then. I was lucky enough to have a kind voice appear next to me. She knew me, probably more so than anyone else there. And we talked. It wasn't about much, but it was something. It helped.

      I was the first one to graduate from Rumming Hall's class of 2011.