Disclaimer: The prose’s mine; so don’t steal it. (Why would you, anyway?) And this goes out to Katie W. :)

It’s the first day of sophomore year. Time for me to go back to that wretched place, the haven for everyone else, except me.

I stand outside the double glass doors that’s the main entrance (for students anyway) to the school.

Right away I notice the silent jeers, smirks and whispers that everyone’s throwing at me. Only they don’t know that they’re doing it.

I had changed myself so completely that nobody could recognize me at all. They still thought of me as the quiet one who never made her presence known at school, but was always friendly with everybody. Everyone immediately shunned me after that. Sure, there were one or two people who proved to me that they were true friends, but it still hurt all the same.

Just because I was different – completely different – from everyone else, they made fun of me and who I’d become.

Nearly all of my classmates treated me as if I were a rotting leaf that they wanted to, for the fun of it, crush underneath the soles of their feet. They made sure that I felt like a nobody, a loser. That was their goal. They pretended to ignore me and were silent whenever I walked by them in the hallway, but I could hear the giggles and the whispers all the same. If their goal indeed was to make me feel like a nobody, then I was sorry to say that they had succeeded.

That had all happened last year. Since it was a new year, time for me to get a fresh start and outlook on life, right? Yet I knew, deep inside, it was going to be the old year once again.

And nothing, absolutely nothing was going to change that.