Finally, in about grade 10, I realized the power of sarcasm, and started giving back as good as I got. The bullies, surprised, started leaving me alone and treating me with respect. Being smart and reading a lot suddenly became an asset.

Since I was so wrapped up in myself, being painful and neurotic, I completely missed any signals from interested boys. I didn’t date until I was 19, and that’s probably a good thing. Of course, this only added fuel to the ‘lesbian’ speculation (Rural Prairie school, so nobody in the town or surrounding area had come out, and being gay was a Very Bad Thing, somewhat akin to being a child molester. I’m not kidding.)

Style? Oh god. I had two tie-dyed shirts that I loved (uh, this was 1997-2002), I wore a lot of track pants (tearaways, anyone?) and Nike shirts. I was not a jock at all (I was too self-conscious to be any good at sports) but dressed like one, oddly enough. I still love my red Nike sneakers that I got in grade 8.

Then we moved. Right before Christmas. To a very upper-middle-class (even predominantly rich) suburb thousands of miles away where I had a huge case of class anxiety, because although we were not poor, and were probably even slightly upper-middle, we were nowhere near most of these people money-wise. During the first week there, a girl actually told me that “everyone here buys their jeans at X store” – a place where the cheapest jeans started at 150 dollars – with an undertone of “and I’d advise you start doing the same”. Whereas everyone at my old school had worn Old Navy, in New School I didn’t have a prayer of keeping up.

I was the only new kid (it being winter and all) and had a horrible case of homesickness – I distinctly remember turning down an invitation to go over to someone’s house with the thought that I didn’t want new friends, I wanted my old friends back. Needless to say, that didn’t work out too well. In retrospect, I think I was probably depressed.

Things got a better in high school, where things were more mixed (a few different suburbs fed into it, so there was more diversity, at least wealth-wise) and I found friends, but I hated that suburb and was incredibly glad to leave it for university.

cimorene, it is so funny to me that you too were formally invited into popularity. who ARE these people???

But then in 7th grade, all those girls decided my belief that “popularity” is ridiculous and that the “popular” kids were only popular because everybody thought they were popular (clearly I was into the social construction of identity at a young age) was a good thing, and literally invited me into their group. Then for some reason only 4 people were allowed to be part of this group, and the group was defined by buying matching necklace charms at claire’s at the mall on the weekends. So one day I came in wearing a smiley face or a flower or something, as did 3 other girls, and the girl who I had replaced realized she had been replaced. She had been the leader of the picking-on-me for the previous two years, and I hated her, so I relished in her newfound outsider status. I distinctly remember dancing in a circle at a dance, and stepping in front of her to cut her out of our little group of dancing friends, and she just stopped dancing and walked away, clearly crushed. I still feel guilty, even though she taught me what it meant to be a meangirl by being cruel to me for two years. I spent most of my senior year of high school apologizing for that act of meangirlness, and I think at our reunion when I got drunk kept apologizing again. It’s horrible to think about mean, cruel things that you’ve done and accept that you’ve been a real bastard.

Of course, by 8th grade, boys had become important. I was not interested in boys. I thought they were boring, at first, and wasn’t interested in kissing them. Then one boy came to our small class from another school and introduced sexual harassment to the rest of the boys. He was very popular, and therefore it was expected that he and I would be friends, inasmuch as 8th graders can be friends with members of the opposite sex when sex becomes an issue. I did not take well to his harassment and dumb jokes and constantly talking about masturbation, which made all the girls uncomfortable. I fucking hate that kid still. Anyway, over the second half of 8th and then 9th grade I was phased out, or phased myself out. Not sure. At any rate, that kid became my enemy in high school and used to call me a dyke and an ice queen and get me in trouble by quietly and constantly harassing me in class until I flipped out. Then his girlfriend told me that he had a crush on me, or thought I was hot or sexy or something, and I realized that he is a loathsome creature who hates himself. And was either interested in fucking me because he hates me and wanted to hate-fuck me because he thinks sex is a weapon and wanted to put me in my place, or he hated himself so much that he was attracted to someone who hated him and was the only person in the grade who consistently stood up to him and attempted to crush his soul.

I was a total geek, but cute enough that the popular kids were nice to me. I never went to their parties, but we could gossip in class.

My biggest middle school problem was that my then-best friend’s mom constantly asked her why she couldn’t be more like me. It pretty much doomed us.

My biggest shame is that my socks, shirt, and scrunci (it was the early 90s!) were always the same color. I matched perfectly every single day. I would only confess that anonymously.

Speaking of facebook, two of the popular boys who liked me in junior high but I inexplicably ran from, some of the nicer ones who I actually have always regretted being too prude to “date” in 6th grade (one was a transfer from SPAIN and called soccer football, be still my beating heart) JUST facebooked me a couple weeks ago to tell me they got together and were TALKING ABOUT ME and MISSED ME and THOUGHT I WAS AWESOME and literally invited me to a popular kids party in my old town, THEY STILL ARE ALL FRIENDS AND HAVE POPULAR KID PARTIES, WTF, and I seriously freaked out and called my old best friend and had to obsess about it for way, way too long. It satisfied some deep, sick, pathetic insecurity in me. But I still didn’t go to the party, inexplicably! Some things never change. And some people are just not emotionally equipped to be popular.

I finally made my really good friends in grade 10, after I came back from private school. By that time I was starting to get really depressed, too, so…

Yeah. Junior high and high school were horrible for me. Early on I was awkward and lonely. Later there were hospitalizations, constant crippling depression, and the angst that comes with teenagers being teenagers, backstabbing, stealing boyfriends… all that.

People talk about missing high school… I do not miss it for a second.

It was high school that really sucked for me. My home life descended into hell, my then-best friend moved three hours away, and all of my other friends lived across town so they were assigned to the other high school. I had to start over again as far as at-school friends go. I was lucky in the sense that I still was never picked on, or bullied. I was just sort of invisible, and it didn’t help that things at home were so bad. That was one of my greatest social inhibitors: when you feel like you an never invite anyone over, or can’t explain why you’re upset or worried, it’s just easier to keep people at arm’s length. Graduation was the happiest day of my high school life because I knew I’d be leaving for college soon. To this day, I get the heebie-jeebies in suburbs because they evoke in me some emotional connection to those years.

I still have one really good friend from my high school days. She’s in contact with other people from that time, but I have no real desire to be.

Style-wise: Dickies, Painter Pants, Button down shirts, Levis, braces, chlorine-soaked slimy hair. Think “The Official Preppy Handbook” but Midwestern style.