Dear Diary, I'm a Disaster

Diary 1

So, I suppose I ought to be studying for APs now. They're this week. I'm taking AP Bio and AP Stats, and I've taken neither of those classes in high school. I've taken both intro bio and intro stats, but that was over a year ago.

The cataclysmic event that has lead to me starting to write a diary rather than starting to study is a call from the deans today. I should inform you that I go to the #1 high school in the United States. It's been my dream since I was 5, and by some miracle, despite not getting in at any other school, I got in here.

You may be wondering why my parents got a call from the deans... I'll just tell it to you straight: possession of alcohol. They've been cleaning out our rooms, and of course they won't kick anyone out for drugs or alcohol because then we'd be seeing off a third of the school. Ha! Imagine how bad that would look. Now, while alcohol is perfectly normal for most high schoolers, I may be the one idiot to take three miniature hotel alcohol bottles to school and actually leave them in my desk, despite having the foresight to bring all my textbooks home in my one red suitcase at the beginning of spring break. I'm telling everyone I never drank any of it. After all, that's what fits with my image. Type A. Straight-edged. For someone who's been dreaming of high school and college since they were 5, you can probably see why I fit the "studious, put together" label.

In reality, I have drunk that alcohol. And no, I don't think that's a big deal, and I don't expect you to. But my problem goes deeper than that. I just want to relate to other kids. I suffer from acute social anxiety and have Asperger's Syndrome, which means I'm on the autistic spectrum. Of course, I'm very high-functioning and no one can ever tell the difference because we're all a little odd, right? We've all got our own quirks. I'm also aro/ace. I started to realize this in prep (what our school calls freshmen) year when the girls in my dorm hung out, for lack of wider social circles at this point. We played cards in Agora (the main hangout place in the student center), ate meals together, explored our small and dainty town together, and shared our cultures with each other.

Aahh... I still remember the first meal we'd shared at Pine Garden. We walked 40 minutes in the blistering sun to get to the one decent Chinese restaurant. They sat the five - or was it six? - of us down at a round table, and those of us who spoke Chinese quickly spouted off our orders after we'd decided. They said that if you ordered in Chinese, the food was always better, more authentic, more like home. Home... for us that was many places. East coast, west coast, and one girl even had a thick foreign accent layering her words, setting her apart and making her stand out. She was real pretty, too. A classic beauty. They said the international students were always the wealthiest, never receiving the financial aid I so depend on... When our food arrived, steaming lamb skewers tantalizing us with their smell, we all stared. One girl's stomach grumbled softly, and another licked her lips. Sorry I can't provide too much description here for the sake of anonymity. Finally, the international girl broke the silence, asking, "Do you not share food here in America?" and reached out to pluck one of those glistening skewers of meat from the center of the table. The tension had broken down under the force of our laughter, and we all realized what we'd been waiting for. Although we were from such different cultures, we hadn't realized how similar we truly were.

Anyways, I'm getting off-topic, aren't I? I have many more stories about these initial friends and our adventures. Perhaps I shall share these gems with you another day. That first night together, we'd all been in my dorm room. Of course, the eight of us preps had the biggest dorm rooms so that we would feel more welcome. The walls in our dorm were painted a lovely eggshell blue, and my parents had put much care into decorating my side of my room. I had a pastel quilt of a stunning flower above my bed, and I had a golden sticker of my name in cursive as well as a life-size sticker of my sister's fluffy gray kitten. There was yet another sticker that seemed to be a window straight to a serene beach, and there was a money tree for fortune at the window along with a small water fountain. Above it hung a yin and yang sun spinner with glow in the dark gems. All my decorations have stories, too, but that's for another time. If it were my choice, my decorations would be pure glitter and nothing else.