Free Write 5/13/17

Brian and Derek

I have many memories of homeroom in freshman year.  The first day of class we sat in a circle and got to know each other a little bit.  I remember being mean to a boy, I think I remember it being about him wearing contacts or glasses.  My fourteen-year-old self didn’t have yet the intuition to not be mean to guys that you have just met.  The boy I made fun of just kind of took it, it looked like he was trying to be nice, but also like he didn’t know what to do at the same time. 

One of my friends, Brenda, had the same homeroom as me.  I have memories/a memory of her asking me to copy someone’s homework for her.  She took someone else’s homework, and asked me to make a copy of it so that she could hand in the copy for her class.  It was math homework, and I did it without a doubt.  I think I did it because I wanted her to be my friend.  Even though it seemed like she already was.  If I could go back in time, I think I would still do it, but I’d tell her she could get into a lot of trouble, because something could happen, like the teacher could recognize that it wasn’t her writing, or the teacher in homeroom could have seen what was going on, so that we would be detention (Justice Under God) bound.  Those were the days when I didn’t care about being pushed around, when I did whatever people that I wanted to like me told me to do. 

Sophomore year, when I got back from vacation, Brenda wasn’t at school.  I asked a kid from homeroom, Brian (the kid with curly black hair that I have written about before), about it and he told me that she transferred.  I guess she got sent to a prep school, the strict kind- I think it was the kind where you live at, an all-girl school.  When I asked Brian, he responded with an air of slight annoyance, and looking back it makes me feel like I was the reason that Brenda transferred, even though this is a highly irrational conclusion, on my part.  I remember wanting to know why Brian responded like he did, but I think it was one of those times where I just shook it off. 

Brian was friends with other people in homeroom.  One person, who I think was his best friend, was named Derek.  He had brown hair and I think he was English.  I remember him having the same type of attitude about him, as did Brian, whenever he spoke to people around me (I don’t remember an instance when he was talking directly to me), it was like he was kind of stuck up, but that might have just been their response to me.  Looking back, I think people, throughout high school, saw me as stuck up, but I think that was because I hardly knew anyone when I first got there.  I started going to high school freshman year with two boys from my middle school that I didn’t know that well, and after things started to roll and people found their cliques, I didn’t hang out with those two people. 

The diary in the back of my mind (the thing in my mind that remembers 1% of what happened before I lost everything to depression) says that I used to be in love with Derek, the English kid with brown hair in my homeroom.  I don’t remember any of it, what made me be in love with him, but I remember what type of person he was- how he used to hold things down (according to my memory) with things that happened throughout school.  I haven’t seen Derek in a long time, and I wonder what type of person he is now, but even more I wonder what type of person he was, during high school.  He was in honors classes and hung out with certain people, according to my memory.  The thing that doesn’t sit with me, though, is how I have this intuition in my memories that he acted kind of stuck up around me, kind of towards me.  But that might just have been because of me.  Maybe I was the one who was stuck up in the first place.  Maybe that’s how everyone saw me, but Brian and Derek were some of the only ones brave enough to show it.