The first day of my high school life goes down in the records as the worst-way-I-have-ever-started-school-ever. Because you and I love abbreviations, we can refer to it as… WWIHESSE.

Backtrack. Rephrase.

Because you and I love abbreviations that make sense and sound cool when you say them, and I have never had a talent for those in my life, let’s skip abbreviations altogether and just recount the events, shall we?

But first: Status Check.

Name: Julie. Don’t ever call me Julia or I will hurt you.

Age: 15- Young and energetic and halfway to either the most exciting or the dullest portion of my life.

Breathing: Normal

Heart rate: Average

Number of phalanges: Twenty, five per hand and foot

Memory: Can recite the alphabet forwards and a few letters back, but has trouble remembering breakfast. Probably because it didn’t happen.

Hair: Natural brown, still going with the funky purple/green streak thing

Organs: Hopefully functioning normally, although it feels like my bowels are dissolving from the inside out. Might be coeliac or something.

Anaemia: Not bad at the moment. However it reminds me that I’m still probably physically incapable of hurting you.

Species: Homo Sapien Sapien (Still…)

Gender: Double X chromosomes, but does that matter?

Right.

Now I wouldn’t call this your average Hollywood Disney Channel high school experiences, mostly because more often than not your first day of high school is more of an introductory thing and not a find-the-hottest-guy-you-can-and-decide-to-pursue-him-for-the-rest-of-the-semester-until-he-turns-out-to-be-dumb-and-not-care-about-the-person-you-are-inside-and-you-realize-your-mistake-and-become-a-better-person fest. See, this is why I don’t bother with abbreviations. Anyway, I’m not that kind of girl, I would say. Plus I’m not too interested in the creatures that I have to share my family, genus, species, etcetera with, opposite gender or not. They’re just so…

Never mind. I’ll continue my quest for the perfect adjective later.

Now, I know we live in a society in which normal people such as you or I might fall victim to brainwashing, such as the type of thinking that everyone has something wrong with them and we must carefully observe and criticise them and place them into a category or slap a condition on their heads, but you and I can safely say we’re beyond that thinking right? (Otherwise I’d probably want to stop having this conversation) Anyway, if I were to believe that my ‘immaturity’ and way of thinking in combination with my verbal communication skills and lack of social experience were a result of a condition called “ADD”, would you believe I had it?

Okay, high school.

Oh, believe me, the classes were fine, most of the teachers were nice, and I didn’t even bother getting to know the students (My brother Zach and I prefer to let people gravitate towards us, that way we can test to see if they’re really interested in us or not) but the day wasn’t very spectacular on the whole. In fact it was rather boring.

Remember that time you were in grade six, and your teachers were making the hugest deal about you leaving and how much harder it was going to be for you at the junior high a few blocks over? How that you were babied all through your elementary ‘career’ and that if you couldn’t grasp the basics of studying you were totally doomed? And then of course you get there and everything’s tense for like a couple days and then you get used to it and it’s exactly the same? The teachers don’t attack you for not doing your homework and you’re not constantly late and getting shoved into lockers by older kids like you expected, right?

It’s exactly the same for high school- only almost even less exciting. Except for the fact that these are the last three years you’ll ever have to be in school before your new job at McDonalds and before you get married and spawn offspring and shove them into the school system or whatever.

You see, the reason it’s such a disappointment almost is because nothing happened. In elementary school when we first moved here, for example, about grade four or five, maybe, we made an impression. That was the first year I started dying my hair. It wasn’t permanent or anything, just the wash-out kind, but it made me different. You may be wondering why?

That was all for my twin brother. That was about the time he started making tin-foil hats and wearing them to school. I don’t think I’m totally at liberty to tell you all of the details, but his teacher was all “No hats in class!” and Zach was like “But the aliens will get me!” Of course the teacher thinks he’s joking around and gets mad and tries taking it from him, some scratching and biting, a phone call home and a few psychiatrist notes later he’s wearing it full time. School, home, sleeping, shower…

So little kids are jerks. Some are curious, some are silent admirers, but some are just jerks. I ended up as his only friend. People seemed to like me because I was ‘the normal twin’, some were still cautious, but I couldn’t always keep friends because of him, a constant shadow of weirdness.

I was tired of people trying to keep me normal for his sake, I was tired of trying to be normal for having them as friends, I was almost tired of having to come to his and my own defence all the time because of stupid misconceptions. So I dyed my hair blue.

And I told them I was proud of who I was, who he was, who we were together, and that we were who we were and couldn’t be changed by anyone. We invited people to get to know us, and some did.

Junior high was cool because it was finally a whole new group of people for us to impress upon. I came for my first day in silver moon boots and green streaked hair, throwing out a few “Greetings, fellow Earthlings!” here and there. It was great when we got lost because I’d drag him up to a nearby administrator and say something like “Hello! My companion and I are lost, might you point a couple weary galaxy trekkers in the direction of room 206?”

Yeah, but this year was lame. There was no time to make a decent impression on anyone. At least we met up with a few old friends and enemies.