CHAPTER TWO

First year was calm for me after that, the bullying became a distant dream. So the terms passed in a blur with me striving and succeeding every time in coming first in my class. I literally lived for school work. What I didn’t know at the time was that showing so much enthusiasm for school was considered ‘not cool’. As I look back on it now I realize that my obsession with coming first all the time hindered me from making new friends, learning the lunch time games or destroying one object on school property. For me at the end of every term my teacher at that time usually held a class celebration of some sought and with me being so uncool and always misinformed on such things I thought that the end of my first year class party was a dress up sought of thing and waltzed into class in full six year old party gear. Bubble gum lip gloss, hair clips of every shape and color, jeans jumper, my cleanest sneaker and a friggin fluorescent pink jersey. I was so embarrassed I didn’t make eye contact with anyone for the entire day. What made it even more worse was that the teacher thought it a good idea to hand out gifts for doing such good work. When everyone was getting one gift and a peck on the cheek I got five plus a book about dinosaurs. I was the class nerd and teacher’s pet and didn’t even know it until then.

Kids avoided me the first few days at the start of second year term. Nerds and the teacher’s pets were categorized as snitches back in the day so no one wanted to hang around the girl who would probably run screaming to the teacher if they decided to pull a prank or steal something from the stock room, which I wouldn’t have done if they had tried to get to know me better.

 So I was left alone to my own devices. Sitting in class practicing my penmanship or hanging out in the computer lab room playing tetris. Until I saw him one afternoon. Can’t remember his name now so let’s call him Melvin. Melvin was weird. Calling him creepy is too much so let’s go with weird. When you take time and look back on your school days you would see that you had that one kid in your class you only noticed for the first time when you had nothing else to do, nothing on your mind, no one in class and that person made a noise. When I first saw him he was sitting, hunched over his desk, turning something in his hand and mumbling to himself. I was immediately intrigued. The other kids had nothing about them that merited me being interested in hearing what they had to say ergo my friend dilemma, but this boy who apparently I went to pre-school with, just appeared before me and I couldn’t seem to stop staring. At first it was just an unstable sought of interest I had in him, things like, did he speak, did he eat, what was it he kept twirling and mumbling in his hand and why didn’t he leave his desk until home time? All those questions had kept twirling around my head while I had kept stealing glances at him in the corner back of the classroom during class time. So after about a week I decided it was time to take action. First I bribed the kid who usually sat next to him for his seat. That was hardest pack of marbles I ever had to give away, I felt like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. 

The irony is though I never played marble pitch, I had just liked to cheat the other kids out of them and keep them at home like trophies. Anyway, after I took the seat it wasn’t enough though, even if I made him cry the need to hear his voice was over whelming so I started having one-sided conversations with him. With years of experience in talking to myself I knew he was no match for me so within a day he cracked and said, "Shut up, shut up, shut up," and went back to hunching over and staring at his desk. Triumphant and ecstatic are the words I will use to describe how I felt that day, something to cross off the book I had on him while observing.

Gradually I pulled him out of his bullet proof shell. Three words turned into sentences after a term and just as easily he turned into my friend other than a test subject and in our second term he magically became my boyfriend. You all must be saying "WTF!" by now because you want to know what a seven year old girl is doing with a boyfriend. Absolutely nothing. You all are thinking about the grown up definition of a boyfriend. A kid’s definition of a boyfriend in 1999 was a boy who would follow you all over the school at lunchtime, buy you snacks, fight through the mob to get you a box lunch with a big piece of chicken and climb the old woman’s plumb tree next to the school when she and her pit bull are out of sight. We were inseparable. But like all good things, it must come to an end. Ours came when I woke up one morning after finally getting my own room but I couldn’t sleep in it because I kept seeing shadows moving every time I took off the light, so I snuck into my parent’s room and proceeded to take over the bed. My mother decided my father was an idiot somewhere between that time and when she woke up and moved us to the country. This is where things get a little more exciting. 

That was sarcasm by the way.