The Girl Who Sits Alone

The other day was a typical Tuesday night. My cousin Tasha (not her real name, mind you :-P) and I were instant-messaging on AIM. As usual, she was dragging on about something - this time her ramblings were about an obsessively weird girl in her school, Maya. Apparently, this queer little loser does not follow trends, never speaks up in class, and has a perfectly horrendous nose. And - get this - she actually dared to ask Tasha if she could sit with her at lunch! The nerve! Someone call the mental asylum `cause this girl is insane.

Hearing Tasha`s story really brought back some old memories and some new ones. The newest being last year, the oldest being in fourth grade. All of them are pretty much the same story.

Fourth grade was where it all began: The time when we all started to mature. At least, everyone except me. I was a little young for my age, so while everyone was chasing boys, I was playing with Barbies. But let`s save growing up too fast for another blog post, okay? :-P Anyway, on the first day of 4th grade someone decided that Mariah Folker would be popular and that Tatianna Rivera would be the most hated girl in school. I never knew exactly how or why or who, exactly - it just was and that`s the way it would be, the way it was supposed to be. End of story. El fin.

Tatianna was a very, very shy girl. I had only ever known her to have but one friend her entire school career, Emmy Cook, who promptly ditched her for Mariah on that fateful first day. After that, it was rough going for her. Taunts and teases and "accidental" shoves. I remember Mariah whispering questions to the other girls on the playground, including me.


Do you like Tatianna?

I dunno.

Have you see her clothes? They`re thredbare!

Oh my gosh Mariah you`re right! And look at that hair...

And also... she stares at me ALL the time. Lesbo much?


That being said, Mariah didn`t like me much either, as you could imagine. I was always the girl to be like "What`s a lesbian?" or "Isn`t ditching school a bad thing?", and because of this, I was labled "uncool" with the populars. Not lesbian-wanna-be-thred-bare-clothes uncool like Tatianna, but just uncool enough to be excluded from their little clique.

But because of my uncoolness, I got to hanging around Tatianna, who was in a similar situation, if much worse. She was extremely withdrawn and barely talked, but talking doesn`t really count for much in a game of hopscotch, now does it? We played hopscotch for a good portion of the school year. Other low-standing geeks soon caught onto it, and soon we had a whole competition going on. Tatianna was always the best. She smiled so proudly when she was awarded those precious starbursts we had scrounged up to be the grand prize. She smiled rarely.

Later that year we geeks soon got tired of hopscotch. We wanted to do other things, things that Mariah had started! Like jumprope - that was very in in those days. Tatianna wanted to play hopscotch. We left her alone.

I`ve noticed the bullying only gets worse as children get older.

Let`s rewind to last year`s outcast: we`ll call her Tori! Tori was a plump, Spanish girl who could only speak a little English. The girls made fun of her because she kind of had a deformed face and she was extremely over-weight. Oh, and her nails were less than perfect! And not to mention, she sat alone. The girls thought this was sad and that she should quit making the school look bad and find a table already, but is it quite that easy to go find a table when you have girls like those ready to reject you and laugh without a blink of an eye when you try? Preposterous! Tori was so afraid of those girls that she started fearing everything - her other peers, her teachers, her shadow. We all could see it. Almost everyone noticed and yet didn`t notice - it was like she just became apart of the background. Sometimes a really obnoxious kid would crack a joke about her, and we would all laugh, because she doesn`t really have feelings, right? Just a piece of scenery. Take no notice, move along, no need to say excuse me - she doesn`t mind if you bump into her and make her drop her books, oh certainly not! Don`t say hi, go right ahead and talk about how fat she is in front of her - she can`t understand English, after all! Go on, try it! Everyone does it, she doesn`t understand, she`s too stupid and slow and dimwitted! Join the fun.

It`s all "fun" until she starts cutting herself.






Be a friend, not a bully.