Chapter 1 (post two)

Pre-note: Hey! This is the next section to chapter one, enjoy!

Chapter One, Post 2:

My artistic side sparked at the age of eight. It was grade two, a year when boys have “cooties,” and the closest thing you can get to being popular is when you bring the latest Britney Spears CD to school and everyone wants to borrow your portable CD player. Back then, it was “cool” to be good at drawing pictures. One day I was drawing horses in class and someone noticed. They pointed it out, someone heard, and the next thing I knew the whole class wanted one of my drawings. I complied. A pinto here, a palomino there, and everyone in the class was sticking horse pictures to their desk. From then on, I was known for my drawings. People appreciated them back then; I wasn’t weird until grade seven.

That’s a year when popularity is more than a CD and boys have anything but cooties. My best friend at the time was Diana Hughes. She and I weren’t anything alike and yet the friendship worked because we filled in each other’s gaps. She was talkative; I was quiet and good at listening. She was boy-crazy; I wasn’t, so I could allow her to like every boy in our small class without there ever being competition.

The grade seven teacher, Mr. Cadette, was a newbie; he’d only been teaching for a year or two, and was young and, I admit, good-looking.

When Diana and I were walking about the downstairs at recess, trying not to be caught by a teacher and sent back out into the cold, she admitted to me her latest crush.

“Space Cadette?! Really?!” Was my response.

That was the end of our conversation that recess because the bell went off at that moment, yet I’ll never forget it.

My sketches were about people that year. I was practicing the human figure by pulling pictures from magazines and trying to recreate them in pencil in my sketch book. I blame Cosmo in some ways, because it just so happened that the guy whose picture I pulled one day resembled our teacher an awful lot.

Diana was the queen of gossip at our school. One day after spending the weekend hanging out with her at my house, I came to school and she wouldn’t talk to me. Everyone was watching me, laughing behind my back. It wasn’t until half way through lunch that one of the less popular girls took pity on me and told me what Diana had said.

Diana Hughes held power in our grade seven class of twenty-eight people. Without her by my side, I lost what little popularity I’d had. The fact that my jeans weren’t brand name and my hair always in a ponytail suddenly mattered to the popular group, and I had no chance of getting near their clique again. Maybe if I’d noticed why they judged me then, perhaps I could’ve changed in time to fit their idea of a friend. ‘But why,’ I thought at the time, ‘should I have to change myself so anyone likes me? Shouldn’t they accept me for who I am?’

It would take me until the end of grade eight to realize that, even though they should, it wasn’t the way it worked. I slowly adapted, and began to like the changes. I got bangs, brand name clothes, wore eye shadow and concealer; by the time I started high school I blended in with the upper class student body that was the majority of my downtown high school. Beth was in my grade nine academic science class. We dissected a frog together and had been best friends ever since.