PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

 

There’s a war inside my head, sometimes I wish that I was dead and broken. Lyrics from a song, that resonates with me all too well. They say that if I tell my story, the pain will lessen each time that it’s told and it will eventually be bearable to be myself again. But I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want people to know my story; because I don’t want to see their pity every time I look into their eyes. I don’t want my story to reshape their opinion of me, and oh how it would.

 

But let us begin.

 

 Part one: Losing J.

 

I could say that my story starts when I was 13, just days away from my 14^th birthday…… At the point in time when my trust in people was irrevocably shattered into a million tiny little pieces, never to be fully put back together again; but when I think back it really starts much earlier. Think grades 5/6, or more precisely the summer between the two. Let us go back a few years and regress, shall we?

 

For as long as I could remember I’d had this friend, my very, very, best friend. We were as close as sisters and nearly inseparable, we did everything together, EVERYTHING. And let’s not forget to mention that we were quite the chubby pairing, fairly plump little girls the both of us, it has everything to do with this part of the story.   

 

Now, we were getting older, and this particular summer, said friend… And I refuse to mention names here, or anywhere in this little ‘story’ actually, as that would be quite detrimental to all of these offenders, not to mention myself. I mean, we don’t want you figuring out who I am either after all, now do we? Because then if you know who I am, people would start figuring out who everybody else is, and it would be this big thing, and I just don’t want that. So if you have a problem with any of that you may as well stop reading right now, this is MY story, MY rules.

 

Anyway, this particular friend, we’ll call her J, decided that this summer was going to be different Instead of our carefree play dates climbing trees, having sleepovers, bicycle adventures or Barbie tree fort shenanigans in her neighbors big oak tree; she took it upon herself to decide that she was tired of us being the ‘fat girls’. So we set off on the glorious adventures of weight loss at a whopping 11 years young. And I say we because of course I agreed to go along with her, we did everything together, remember?

 

Over the course of the summer J had tremendous success at losing weight, I on the other hand, struggled the whole time, and barely managed to make a dent in my size. However, looking back and reflecting now, in my wise, wise adult years; I do realize that that was quite normal. I really wasn’t that big, and I mean we’re talking about a span of a mere 6 or so weeks, but back then it sure felt like an eternity, and I was convinced that I was destined to live out my life as the ‘fat friend’. J was so supportive tho, all summer long. She was convinced that it didn’t matter how much I lost or if I even lost anything at all, because at least I was with her, and I was trying.

 

Nearing the end of summer holidays, days away from returning for what would be our very last year of elementary, we had yet another sleepover. We knew we wouldn’t get much sleep that night though, we were too excited; this was going to be a milestone year. The year that we changed! Oh boy…… did we ever, but I’ll get to that. We stayed up way too late talking, gossiping and going through J’s closet to try and figure out just what we were going to wear the first day, to impress everyone. But that night I discovered J’s secret while I rummaged thru her dresser drawers, I found out just what it was that lead to her spectacular weight loss; Laxatives. Let me repeat that, my best friend was so desperate to lose weight at 11 years old that she had resorted to taking laxatives as a tool to aid her. And I’d had no idea, not one, little, inkling. I was heartbroken, not only because she had kept this a secret from me but because I realized then just how awful she must have felt about herself, to have even considered resorting to that. I confronted her pills in hand and the conversation went well, or so I thought. But that conversation was the beginning of the end.

 

J and I didn’t talk much over the next few days, but I just chalked that up to the busyness of preparing for the start of a new school year; it was always last minute preparations with both of our parents. I walked over to her house on the morning of the first day of school, as usual, and we marched off up the hill together, like every other year since we’d met. But we’d barely stepped one foot onto the grounds and I could sense that things were going to be different this year; it’s as if the air just crackled with it.

 

There was a new girl, she was standing there on the front steps, tall and thin and beautiful in every sense. J was immediately drawn to her, as were the many other students from our class that flocked around her; but no one gazed at her more intently than J. I think she was drawn to her in particular because she was everything that she had ever wanted to be; and I think that I was the only one who hated her immediately. We’re going to refer to new girl as B, not in reference to any part of her name, she was just a big ole’ B-I-T-C-H.

 

B took an immediate liking to J, I mean who could blame her, J was awesome. However, the more time she spent with B, the less awesome she became. Now you can chalk my feelings towards B up to good ole fashioned jealousy, like the majority of the class did, and I can’t even argue the opposite case here. Some of it was pure spite and loathing that can only come from having your best friend ripped away from you, but a larger portion came from the fact that I hated what she was, and what she was doing to J.

 

 J had always been the sweetest girl I knew, she loved everything and couldn’t hurt a fly. She picked me in Kindergarten and together we had always been the underdogs. Never popular, but not quite picked on, we just….. Flew under the radar. We had our small gathering of outcasts, and that’s all we needed. But not this year, this year she picked B, and together they turned into something awful.

 

At first J tried, she really did, she tried to integrate B into our little group, but B had her own plans, she’d made her own posse, and we were just a group of losers. B alienated J from everyone except me within a few weeks, but oh how she tried her best to get rid of me too.

 

An off handed comment here, a snide remark there. Always in the sweetest voice, always right in front of J. At first J was always so defensive of me, she wouldn’t have any of it! But that didn’t deter B, if anything it just made her more determined. I think she hated me just as much as I in turn loathed her. She wanted to completely mold J into this sick little clone of herself, and she couldn’t finish the project with me around, because I was that little piece of conscience in the back of J’s mind, the little shard of decency she had left.

 

Eventually my influence over J started to wane, and it was in part my own fault I think. She started to spend more and more time with B, one on one and with B’s bitches…. Isn’t that a fun little name I came up with for them?

 

 B was so awful, I just stopped asking to come along, and they in turn stopped mentioning it altogether. She drifted away from us, and the less time we spent together, the less she defended me from B. I was wounded, it was like we went skydiving, but when my parachute didn’t open, and she just let me fall. Sure I still had the gang, but it wasn’t the same….. Losing J didn’t hurt them like it hurt me.

 

 

The gang and I would hang out on the old, small jungle gym at breaks and lunch, it was away from the main playground, it was just us, and it was safe… Until B found us. Once she knew where we were, it became her favourite time to pounce. All of us together and not a teacher in sight. Stealing J from us wasn’t enough, she needed to torment us, and hang it over our heads.

 

At first, when they came around, J would stand there and laugh as they threw insult upon insult at the rest of our friends, but still, much to B’s annoyance, J couldn’t muster the nerve to even crack a smile when it came my turn… Until one day.

 

On that fateful day, it just so happened to be picture day, the one day I always dreaded more than others. I’d play it cool, act like I didn’t care what anyone thought of me, but deep down inside I hated myself, almost as much as J hated herself. My weight was a HUGE insecurity, as was my glasses, and my big, frizzy, awful, mess of a thing you’d call hair; Of course J new all of this about me. I’d always told her that I hated getting my picture taken, that I would break the camera with my face.

 

Come this particular picture taking day I’d gotten mommy dearest to straighten my hair, you know, with an actual iron because hand held straighteners hadn’t been invented yet. Yeah I’m THAT old. I’d purchased a nice new outfit with my newspaper money, I’d even bought some tinted lip gloss to wear. All in all, I wasn’t dreading the day quite as fiercely as I normally would have been. I’d even go so far as to say that I felt kind of… Cute. That feeling didn’t last long.

 

Our class got called down to the gym first, something about oldest getting first dibs, and off we filed down the hallway. I walked with the OC, OC=Original Crew, that’s what I shall refer to them as now. Anyways, OC and I walked together and J followed right behind us, B brought up the rear with her bitches.

 

J was a little closer to us, and a little farther away from them than she’d been all year so far, I got this vague notion that maybe she missed me like I missed her, and I was ready to take her back and go right back to where we were on our walk to school that very first morning. I could hear B and her group whispering and giggling the whole way to the gym, J was silent. That walk seemed to last forever in my mind, as I thought of all of these wonderful possibilities, even if it was at most a minute, maybe 2 if we’re stretching it, trek to the gym.

 

While we waited in the gym it was the same thing, the OC, me, silent J, and the gossiping B’s all lined up at the back.

 

I was feeling brave that day, I looked cute, and I’d gotten it into my head that J wanted back in, that she wasn’t starting a conversation because she was scared I wouldn’t accept her anymore, and B was far enough away that I thought I could talk to J alone. Boy was that a mistake. I turned, took one step toward J and barely got out a “Hi”, when suddenly there she was in all of her perfectly polished, magnificent, bitchy glory. But I didn’t let that stop me. Oh no I did not! There was definitely an off vibe about J, so I took my chances.

 

I turned my head and gave B the obligatory head nod and “B” greeting, but you know, with her real name.

 

See J, I can be nice to your friend, even if she is the spawn of Satan, I thought, silently, to myself. I don’t think it would have gone over all too well if I’d have actually uttered it aloud. B Just looked at me and laughed.

 

“You look nice today.” I told J.

 

She didn’t, she actually looked quite awful, like she’d had a really rough night. She looked from me to B, like she was seeking some sort of approval to acknowledge me. B just shrugged her shoulders and looked away, all nonchalantly, but she stayed put.

 

“Uh, thanks” she muttered. “So do you...” I smiled, I grinned, a HUGE Cheshire cat grin all over my face. “…I guess.” 

 

My face fell. Rude! I was shocked, even though I shouldn’t have been. B laughed. J stood a bit taller, a bit prouder.

 

“Oh, right. I’ll… talk to you later I guess” I said. I was crest fallen, my intuitions had been dead wrong.

 

I turned to go back to the OC, they were watching me. They saw the whole interaction, and they offered me a supportive, reassuring smile as I started the closing small gap back to them. I don’t think that they were surprised in the least bit, I think that they’d all given up on J a while ago.

 

“_____ wait!” And by _____ I mean my actual name, which I haven’t told you, and I’m not going to. I’ve always like the name Sarah though…. We’re gonna go with Sarah.

 

“Sarah wait!” J blurted out. She sounded torn, so I stopped.

 

“Yeah Sarah, wait” B mocked, in the MOST condescending tone she’d managed so far. “You can’t leave yet, I need to know what shade your lip gloss is”.

 

I turned back around, my face the picture of confusion. Was she being nice? It didn’t really sound like it, but I couldn’t tell with her. J looked at her quizzically as well.

 

“I mean, I’ve seen it before but I just can’t quite but my finger on it. Is it desperate? Pathetic? Oh I know! It’s a nice shade of loser isn’t it?” She smirked at my silence, she knew I wouldn’t retaliate.  “And your hair! I didn’t know that flat and limp was the new style, I really should catch up on my magazines”.

 

The other girls’ attention was peaked now.

 

“At least your hair distracted attention away from your god awful nose when it was puffed out” B was in her glory. There were no teachers to restrain her at the back of the line, and she knew I won’t dare draw their attention. The girls laughed, and J just stood there, as usual.

 

I reached up and touched my nose. My nose? I’d never thought anything of my nose before. What was wrong with my nose?

 

I turned back to the OC, again, I was done with B and her bullshit, let her have her fun, but I wasn’t going to stand there and take it. OC smiled reassuringly again, and I gave them a sort of half smile, it was all I could muster at the time. They all knew how I felt, they were all B’s targets too.

 

“Don’t you think so J?” B asked.

 

We all stood there, time frozen as we waited to see what J would do. B had never egged her on towards me quite so directly before. What would she do? Stay silent? Defend me? (An unlikely option at that point, unfortunately), or would join in on B’s taunting?

 

I’d never dreamed that she would be capable of that last option. I mean it was clear now that we were NOT friends even in the least bit, but to make fun of me deliberately? Never… But I was wrong. What happened next still leaves me crestfallen.

 

 

“Oh stop it B…”

 

HOPE! There was still hope.

 

“Don’t you know she needs it that big so it’ll hold up her four eyes?” J said with a smirk… and I died a little inside at that moment.

 

B beamed with pride, she grinned like I’d never seen anyone grin before. The Cheshire cat had nothing on her, and it only seemed to make J bolder.

 

“And what’s with the shirt Sarah? Needed a bigger size to make it look like you’re not still fat anymore?”

 

The girls thought she was hysterical, laughing their stupid hyena laughs at me. B looked delighted, like a new mother just given birth. She’d given birth alright, she’d created the mother effin anti-Christ.

 

Now while it’s true, I was still a chub, I had managed to continue to lose weight gradually up until then. I’d lost a decent enough amount that I HAD needed a new size, one size down, but I no longer felt proud of my small accomplishment, I felt awful. So awful in fact, that I could feel myself feeling like I was going to cry, and I HATED that I was going to cry. My face must have really reflected it too, because when I turned back to the OC, yet again, you could see it in their faces.

 

And that was all it took to set off A-rod. He’d become my new closest friend out of the OC, I mean, we’d always been close, but without J our bond had gotten a lot stronger. You could see the rage in his eyes. I’d never seen him angry, but he was now.

 

“You shut your mouth! You shut it right now J! Sarah’s worked really hard this year. She’s worked her butt off AND kept her friends” He huffed, he was just getting himself really worked up.

 

“She didn’t go off and fraternize with the biggest group of *insert insane amount of extremely inappropriate expletives here*”

 

Now, he didn’t just say this mind you, he screamed it. He screamed it so loud that he got the whole gym’s attention.

 

“And at least she didn’t shit all of her fat out!”

 

And with that sentence the last and final thread between J and I broke forever. You could see her heart break as her secret was exposed to everyone. She stared at me, speechless, and no matter what she had done to me, no matter what she had said, I felt a mountain of guilt settle on me. I’d told her secret. I’d done the one thing that I had promised I would never do.

 

The night that I found her secret and confronted her, I’d told her that she had a problem and that we needed to tell her parents. She’d cried and begged me not to. Promised that she’d only taken a few and realized what a bad idea it was. She’d never take them again she said, but I had to promise not to tell a soul. I’d believed her, so I obliged. But over the course of the preceding months, as I’d watched her from afar, as I saw her continue to get smaller and smaller, and start to waste away. I got worried, and had confided my summer discovery to A-rod.

 

I was brought out of my thoughts, and back to the then present by B’s voice. She was hugging J.

 

“It’s going to be okay. Nothing to worry about. No need to be ashamed” She gave J reassuring back pats as she smirked at me over J’s shoulder. “But I told you she’d tell someone”.

 

J crying, the whole class laughing, and Mrs. R giving A-rod a good talking to… It was all just a blur after that. A blur that changed everything, and it was all my fault.

 

A-rod got suspended for 2 weeks for his ‘little’ outburst, a paltry punishment in this day and age, but a pretty substantial one back in the day. And he always claimed, until the day he died (I’ll get back to that later), that it was worth it.

 

When he came back to school after his suspension, we found that his star had raised, people wanted to be his friend. He never did forget about us though, we were the OC, our stars were lifted a little too. You’d think that would have made life at school more bearable right? Well, you’d be wrong to assume that. A-rods outburst against J just seemed to spark a new hatred for me within B’s group of bitches. They were meaner than they’d ever been, relentless even, and with J second in command she used all the knowledge she had from our years of friendship against me. She used it to hurt and humiliate me, and it worked.

 

Grade 6 went from being our milestone year, to painful but bearable at the start, to downright traumatizing for the rest of the year. I can’t even count how many days I missed the rest of the school year, just because I didn’t have it in me to fight the battles on those particular days. The only light I had was the promise of a new school the next year, and the ability to avoid B’s bitches.

 

So as you can see, my dear, dear readers, the wonderful people who have stuck it out so far, there are reasons that I say my ‘story’ may have started here. Sure, what happened to me here isn’t all that significant, the same kind of stuff happens to many girls in adolescence, but the difference here is that many of those girls have done alright since. While my wounds, while they may not be fresh, run deep and still itch from time to time.