Coming From Brey

My Mom enrolled me into a Catholic high school my freshman year. She thought it would be a better experience for me because the public schools I had gone to were doing nothing for me. (If I showed up to class there probably could have been a different outcome, but I guess we will never know, will we.) Moving on. The summer before my Sophomore year, I went to go live with my Dad in Wisconsin. To a little town called Beaver Dam, population 13. Give or take a thousand. Why the hell did my Dad have to move to this place in the middle of nowhere? Why couldn’t he move somewhere cool so when I left my Mom’s in Minnesota and gave her the big F YOU, (more like she actually kicked me out but whatever) I could have made it seem like I was moving on to bigger and better things?

My Dad had a townhouse right across the street from the school, which is geographically undesirable for someone like me, considering I wouldn’t be able to have any excuse to be late. My first day of school I went to the principles office to get my class schedule and figure out where I was supposed to go, since I hadn’t had the chance to go to orientation or check out the school beforehand. (Orientation is for amateurs.) My first friend that I made was this guy with blue eyes and dark hair. (I’m only describing him because I can’t remember his name. No I was not attracted to him. In case you were wondering.) He came up to me at my locker and asked me if I was new, and wanted to help show me where my classes were. I’m sure he wanted to show me something else too, but back then I didn’t even know what a penis was so that’s irrelevant. Some time not long after that, I met this guy named Edgar. He always came to my locker and wanted to walk me to my classes. He was the first guy I liked there, and I know he wanted to be the only guy that was taking me on long romantic walks to sharpen my pencils. He had asked me if I was friends with said-guy-with-blue-eyes and I said yea, he’s the first person that talked to me in school and he’s just really nice. Well, Edgar let me know that this guy had stuck his dick in a vacuum and got it stuck. So, naturally, I had to go to the source and ask him if it was true. Thinking Edgar told me this just so that I would stop being friends with him, I expected it to be untrue. I can’t remember his exact reaction, but I’m pretty sure his answer was somewhere along the lines of “It was a dare!.” As you can imagine, our friendship kind of fizzled after that. Just couldn’t get the “dick in vacuum” image out of my head.

Not too long after starting school, there were rumors swirling around about me. I remember leaving class one day to go to the bathroom, and someone had written my name in the stall along with “IS A SLUT!”. I just stared at it thinking, “WTF!. Who would hate me so much and write this about me?” One of my girlfriends pulled me aside and had told me that everyone in school was talking about me and Edgar, and how I had already had sex with him.  I couldn’t believe it. I was still the new girl in school, I had only been there for maybe a month, and people were going around saying I was a slut? I didn’t even know what sex was, i.e. what is a virgin? My parents were so strict I didn’t have a cable tv channel until I was 15 years old, so I grew up extremely sheltered. (Things got wild, let me tell you.)

Eventually I connected the dots and figured out that it was Edgar himself who had spread the rumor. I remember I went to the movies with a group of my friends, and he kept calling me. I reluctantly answered, with probably a “What do you want?” and he admitted to spreading the rumor. He apologized profusely, saying it was a dick move and he was just trying to sound cool. I remember thinking at that time how horrible it was for people to hear something about someone they know nothing about, and to pass the information along trying to defame me. I’ve never been one to conform to what everyone else is doing, or to chime in and talk badly about someone just because others are doing it. Being a female, I can say that women are the worst when it comes to friendships. Of course this experience happened at the hands of a guy, but so many times in my life I’ve seen women bash their own friends, only to hang out with them right afterwards.

So, my sophomore year of high school I was a virgin, aka a hoebag. I went to a new high school in a different state not knowing a single person in that town. I was just an innocent 15 year old trying to figure things out. I remember telling myself that I would never be a person that takes part in trying to put other people down. I was always friends with different groups of people, I never wanted to try to ‘fit in’ or be a part of anyone’s clique. I remember going to sit next to this girl named Caroline at lunch, because she would sit by herself and it seemed like she didn’t have any friends. People would say she lived in a trailer park, and I always felt bad for her because you can’t control the environment you grow up in. We don’t get to choose our parents. Or the income level that we are raised on. I’m grateful that I didn’t grow up with social media, especially with it being as prolific as it is now in our day and age. So many people jump on the bandwagon of talking badly about other people, or focusing their energy on bringing other people down.

You have to get to know people before you form opinions about them. You have to ignore negativity and gossip. People are always going to have something to say about you. Whether its good, bad, true or not true. Just because you hear something about someone, it doesn’t make it true. Especially in high school, all everyone did was spread rumors about everyone. Where are those people now? Don’t answer that, because no one cares where they are. (At least I don’t.) The most important thing you can do is to just stay true to yourself. You don’t have to follow what everyone else is doing. You don’t have to hate someone or talk badly about someone just because people around you do. I can’t be friends with people that base their conversations around other peoples’ lives’. (Did I put the apostrophes in the right places? FML. OCD. Anyways.)

I learned that people will try to bring you down just for being a big hoe bag in high school (aka a virgin) and you don’t have to let it affect you.

You know why? Because you’re not a hoe. And if you are, that’s your story to tell. Not anyone else’s.