Battered, With Love

Chapter 8 -- The Hot Oct

Aye aye! You ready for dis boii? <-- ghetto fail?

"It's like we try to look at the complexity of life through the mask of simplicity and the simplicity of life through the mask of complexity. Interesting." -- Ash, while walking to Newspaper class musing about the world and why Nicki Minaj is famous.

           The IB social structure is a peculiar thing. Let me break it down for you. Firstly, you should note that IB is nothing like the rest of American public high school. Not even like AP classes (advanced placement, college level classes).

            IB, as aforementioned, stands for International Baccalaureate. So diversity? Yes. Our classrooms are like someone walked the streets ofNew Yorkand picked up twenty random kids from the streets. You know what you’ll get? You’ll get twenty to twenty-five teenagers in one room, all of who are from a different country.

            Each one of my classes always—and I mean always—consists of the brown kids (Bengali, Pakistani, and Indian), the Asian kids (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Thai, all the Southeast Asians), a few white kids, one or two black kids, a couple of Hispanic kids, and the random European kids and any other nationality I forgot to mention.

            That’s what it consists of—racially. Seriously, IB kids are all over the place. I’ve been to a church before for community service, and last year and sophomore year, I went to garba with my Hindu friends (garba is a religious dance). I’ve had non-Muslim friends come to Eid prayer and attempt to pray. The only thing I have left to do? Go to a synagogue. I’ve even got the Hindu temple covered (went there for the youth group’s project to make care packages for the homeless).

            Then there’s the social structure. That’s where Omar and Krish are at the top. The four Mehtas—Krish, Raj, AJ, and Akash—exclusively hang out with the Khans—Omar, Zayd, Amaan, and AZ. Amaan and AZ are the nicest, and so is Raj. I’m closest to them out of everyone in the little octet.

            These eight guys are in high school terms, the s***. Not many people date in IB but flirting? Hell yeah. It’s like a flirt fest. And these eight guys are always the targets.

            After them, a little bit lower, there are their other friends, which would include Drew, Connor, David, Nathan, Hamza, Christian, and any boy that is remotely smart and/or cute.

            Then there’s the most popular girls, the girls that can show up to school with a plain T-shirt and jeans and still look smoking hot. They don’t necessarily date the Hot-Oct (long story as to how that name came to be, involving chemistry), but there’s definitely that friendship and flirtation.

            Girls that are at the same level as the Hot-Oct (I feel pathetic for even referring to them as that, but this is for the sake of time. I don’t want to be listing out all eight of the boys’ names) include Harmony Nguyen and Carmen-Sofia Montez. These are gorgeous girls. Not just pretty or cute. No. These girls are nearly professional dancers with the potential to model if they wanted to.

            Freshman year, Hamza would never be at the caliber of the Hot-Oct in terms of hanging out with the girls that the Hot-Oct hung out with. I mean, Hamza was friends with Omar, Zayd, Amaan, and AZ from the masjid but girls like Harmony wouldn’t look at him like they started to junior year and now, senior year.

            Aside from all those kids, you have all the little subgroups of close friends—the quiet girls, the chem kids, the math geniuses, all that. Then you have people like me, who just float from group to group.