For four years I went to school with a bunch of fakes. Everything about them was totally unreal. Their personalities were fake. Their looks were fake. Their friends were fake. Their families were fake. I was just living in a fake world.
I would love to say that I was the only real human being there. In fact, maybe I was. In the yearbook I was labeled as “to real”. What did that even mean?
In their minds it meant that I did not belong. I was an outsider who just happened to be there. It was not my fault I wanted to not become a real life Barbie or Ken doll. All I wanted was to be myself, and no one else.
That meant I was the one with real hair; a real nose that had been broken, so it was bent slightly to one side; wearing little to no makeup to cover up any flaws that I had; and I was honest with people. That had to be a downfall right from the start. No one there wanted to hear anything other than praise.
Freshmen year I had tried to find friends. The problem was that no one wanted to be friends with a girl who was not like them. I did not have the fake boobs, hair extensions, wear twenty pounds of makeup, and get plastic surgery every time I did not like a part of my body.
Due to that I went my entire first year of high school with anyone to help me. I could have asked my parents to send me to a different school, but they wanted me to go to the same school they went to. Of course back then maybe not every person was made of plastic.
As I entered my sophomore year I thought things might get better. A new wave of students were coming in, this meant there might be someone like me. A person was not fixed on the idea of being phony to fit in.
No matter how many times I prayed or wished on a star, I was still stuck with just myself. It was a pretty sad existence that I lived. The only thing I had to look forward to was going home to get away from them all. Oh, and of course my grades
Even if I did not have any friends I knew that I would go off to college and meet new people, actual human beings. Not aliens from another planet.
That is why I gave 110% into every single project, test or class. The rest of the school population could care less about the grades. Their parents would just buy them a spot in college. After all every single person had the money to waste on their looks, so it made sense that they had the money to go to college without any scholarship. I on the other hand needed every scholarship I could get my hands on.
My junior year of high school came quicker than I thought. I was so close to finishing up my high school career. This was also the year I really started to work like crazy. I now had a part-time job at a boutique in town. Often I would work and see the plastic people come in and buy anything their hearts desired. It must have been nice not to worry about spending thousands of dollars on things they did not really need, and then going back and being able to afford anything that they also needed.
Me; well I need the discount that I got for working there. That was the only way I could ever buy clothes or accessories that those people bought. When I did wear a new shirt or necklace to school the comments I got were real, but their voices made them sound like insults. Often I would hear “I have that exact same shirt” or “That piece of metal really makes your skin look tan”. In a way any of those could have been insults, yet I decided that I would just pretend that they were telling me that I looked decent.
Those moments were the times when I thought about if I happened to be one of them that I would have friends. I knew that no one in school was really friends. They all just acted like friends, because their entire lives were all about them. Those self-conceded fakes thought that they were the sun and the world revolved around them. That had to be due to parenting techniques.
