Somehow I Became the Girl No One Wanted

And sometimes it doesn’t bother me.

Photo by Anil Sharma on Unsplash

I could look back at my teenage years and tell myself I could have lived a different story.

I could blame it on my parents — particularly my overprotective mother whose control of my time became a barrier between my peers and me.

I could say it was all from the marks of poverty I bore — namely the unkempt house with its jungle of a backyard and the peeling paint on the windows, not to mention the out-in-the-open fact that my father borrowed money from anyone who would give it to him.

But the one variable that was constant and ever-present was me.

Senior year was the low point of it all. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but let’s just say my attendance nearly caused me not to graduate. While everyone else in my class went on a trip to the East Coast, I stayed behind that week to do busy work that was the principal’s way of trying to even the score with my lackluster record of coming to school when I was supposed to.

I didn’t exactly mesh with my peers as it was, but I bonded with people who were younger than me because my classmates seemed to resent me for how I could keep up with the curriculum even when I sometimes missed days in a row.