Dealing with Mean Girls-Part One

When I was in elementary school, I was friends with every single person in my class of slightly more than 20 children.  I had two friends who I thought of as my best friends, Hannah and Josh.  I wasn't a very social child and I never went over to my friends' houses.  But we played together at recess and we sat next to one another in class.  When I was in 5th grade, I started helping the librarian during lunch time instead of going out and playing with the other children.  I'm not sure why I did this, because one of my fondest memories of elementary school is playing soccer at recess against older kids and always kicking their butts (figuratively, of course.)  I was really good at soccer and liked to play it every chance I could get.  But anyway, the fact is that in 5th grade, I helped out in the library instead of playing.  One other girl helped in the library.  Her name was Shelby.  We became friends.  It is important to note that earlier in the year Hannah and I had promised one another that we would be locker buddies once we started middle school.  In my school, 6th grade was still in elementary school and middle school started in 7th grade.  So we were planning pretty far ahead.  Josh got held back in 5th grade, back in the days before "No Child Left Behind".  Near the end of 6th grade, Shelby asked if I wanted to be her locker buddy once we started middle school.  I told her that I had already promised Hannah, but I would be her locker buddy in 8th grade, if she still wanted me to.  So that was settled, no hard feelings.

7th grade began and Hannah and I were locker buddies.  Life was great for a little bit.  It is important for you to realize that my middle school combined two different elementary schools.  So when 7th grade started, we were going to school with 20 other kids we had never met, besides the 8th graders.  Hannah was really cool until a little bit into our 7th grade school year.  She had been my best friend, so obviously I liked her.  Like me, she was the only girl in her family.  She had three brothers and I had two.  Being the only girl in a family of brothers caused us both to be tomboys.  I liked playing sports and she liked catching snakes.  But in 7th grade everything changed, for her anyway.  She befriended a bunch of kids from the other elementary school that had joined ours.  Before I knew it she was wearing makeup and going to dances.  In elementary school she snuck tee shirts and jeans under her clothes whenever her mother made her wear a dress to school and she would take off the dress when she got to school.  In middle school, she started wearing dresses voluntarily.  All of a sudden, I wasn't cool enough to hang out with anymore.  That was really tough for me, but my mom explained that in middle school, cliques start developing and girls get "catty".  But I made some new friends.  Brooke, Mariah, and Bethany were the outcasts and I didn't exactly fit in with them perfectly, but they accepted me anyway.  After Hannah left my locker to go share a locker with her her new best friend, Shelby left her locker for mine.  We didn't hang out much anymore, but she felt bad for me.  All was well until 8th grade.  Shelby and I shared a locker again.  I had the lower shelf, because I was too short to reach the top shelf.  I bought a magnetic mirror for our locker and I kept it at the height that I could see in it, not that I cared about my appearance.  It was just cool to have a mirror.  Some new friends joined my old group of friends: Jake, Palmer, Levi (who turned out to be pretty much psycho, but dated Bethany for a while), Ashlea (who is my brother's girlfriend's roommate now, but moved to Alaska for high school), and Nicolle.  Nicolle was really cool because she wore guy clothes all the time and didn't care what the "popular" kids said about her.  That year everything was going great until one day Shelby just blew up on me for no reason.  The last comment she made when she was moving all her stuff out of our locker was, "I'll put the mirror down on your level" and she moved the mirror to the very bottom of the door where it was almost touching the floor.  That really hurt.  I didn't do anything at all to deserve it.  To make matters worse, my grandpa had recently died of stomach cancer and I was having trouble dealing with it, which she knew.  My depression started when I was in 8th grade, although I wasn't diagnosed and medicated until my junior year of high school.  I made another friend in 8th grade.  Her name was Amanda and she was really quiet.  The band teacher had me teach her how to play the flute, and I did.  She kept playing in the band through high school and she was really good.  She was the first friend I hung out with at her house.  She's engaged now and getting married next September!  She has been my best female friend and never turned on me like the others I had back then.

Part 2 next week: the later years, high school and college experiences with two-faced females