Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [41]
Milo was holding his breath now, leaning so far forward that he was in danger of toppling headfirst off the couch. Freckles took a deep breath, almost as if she were reminding Milo to do the same, and repositioned the camera a bit, bringing her face closer to the screen. Milo didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain that she was stalling, still debating about whether or not to take the plunge.
For a moment, he feared that she wouldn’t. Then she began speaking again.
I wasn’t a popular kid in school. I wasn’t exactly unpopular, and that was part of the problem. When I was in elementary school, I was in the top group of kids. Back then, we were all sorted by ability, so the smartest kids were in Group One and we all knew it. The teachers even called us Group One. A notch below us were the kids in Group Two, then Group Three, and so on. The bottom group of kids didn’t even get a number. They were the T Group. T stood for transitional, I think, but I never understood what the hell that meant. We used to say that the T stood for ’tards, but it should’ve stood for tough, because that’s the kind of life that most of those kids had.
Anyway, in elementary school, I was friends with most of the kids in my class. We were still little kids, so none of the middle school bullshit had started yet. There were no popular and unpopular kids. Just smart kids and not-so-smart kids. I was with the same twenty or so classmates starting in first grade, and they were all basically my friends. The girls at least, and some of the boys too. All the smartest kids in my grade. All the kids who were going to be popular in high school. All the goddamn prom kings and queens stuffed into one classroom.
But once we hit middle school, things changed. Clothes, makeup, and jewelry started to matter, and my family didn’t have a lot of money. Hell, I didn’t think we had any money. I was wearing worn-out sneakers in January and eating macaroni and cheese for dinner every night. Try walking home in pink Keds through three feet of snow. Not fun, and not easy to hide from the other kids.
I was clueless about a lot of things too, and all of a sudden the right clothes and the right haircut and the right number of jelly bracelets made all the difference in the world. It seemed like overnight I went from a girl with lots of friends to someone on the outside looking in. Probably not true, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I thought the other girls hated me, but the truth was probably worse: They just stopped noticing me. A few of them kept inviting me to birthday parties out of habit, or maybe because their parents forced them to, but to me, things seemed fine until middle school. And the funny thing is, if I hadn’t been in Group One, things might have been different. I could’ve been friends with girls in Group Two or Three. Even some of the T Group kids wouldn’t have been bad. I might’ve been a little smarter than them, but a lot of those girls dressed just like me. Keds and Kmart specials. Funny how our tests scores seemed to almost always match the amount of money our parents made. Except for a handful of kids, like me. For us, life sucked. I was smart enough for Group One but poor enough for Group Three.
But by then, I had the Group One stink about me. The other kids saw us as brains. And at the same time, my friends started seeing me as slightly beneath them. The wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the wrong hairstyle, and a serious lack of makeup. I was caught in the middle, smart enough to be in Group One for the forty-five minutes of class but useless when the bell rang. Me and a couple other girls in my boat, Meghan Phelps, or Phillips, and Kristen Sloane, clung to those Group One friends like our lives depended on it, doing almost anything to remain in their good graces, but by the time we reached eighth grade,