Scapegoat

When I was in middle school, my mother and I spent a few months living in housing projects while she tried to find a job in our new town. The year before, we had jumped states on a whim of hers--I had a 36 hour notice of the move--and came back to her childhood home with only $1300 and our last 7 years crammed into a tiny hatchback. It was the first moment in my life that I realized something was terribly wrong with my mother, and it would take another decade before I learned the term "manic depression." Instead of using our money to set up a rental house and find a job, she decided to enjoy her new found "freedom" and reverted back to teenage behavior, going to parties while leaving me with people I hardly knew. When she was short a sitter, I'd have to tag along, and we'd usually end up at a river party or a strange house, me sleeping in the car and her staying awake for days at a time. Since we had no address, I couldn't attend school, and I missed half of my fifth grade year.

So the projects were an upgrade of where we'd been. Cruelty manifests itself best in the minds of preteen girls, and is even easier to achieve when the housing projects are built directly across from the school. My classmates would see me walking from the apartments to class every day, and while I wasn't the only kid in school living there, I was the only one not already affiliated with a tough clique to protect me from the other kids. To make matters worse, I had a small inventory of clothing in my closet: three button up shirts, one pair of faded jeans that were a size too big, and a pair of cheap sneakers with holes in the toes and inner soles. Though she wasn't much bigger than I was, my mother made it clear that her closet was off limits.

I was quiet, nerdy, and hiding scars from the recent traumas I had endured. I was an easy target. First, there was the lunch room, every new kid's worst nightmare. Ours was clearly divided into groups: the popular kids took up one table, the brainiacs another, and the middle-of-the-road kids had several in a little group of their own. In the back corner was two tables of students who always dressed in black clothes and dark makeup, and who looked at everyone else with haunting eyes and threatening expressions. They didn't need two tables, but no one questioned them, ever. There were also young gang members--most of these people lived near me, but never spoke to me--who stood at two tables near the darkly dressed kids in a manner that dared you to look them in the eyes. In the middle was a space surrounding the lowest beings of all, the ones without a label who were clearly the "fair" target of every group's anger and meanness. This is where I was told to sit, but even then, there was always at least two spaces between me and the next person. I wasn't even good enough to be with the lowest of the social classes.

My classes were easy and I loved studying, but I hated the class change in between. This is where I would find people pointing at me and whispering, sometimes even laughing or daring to ask "don't you own anything else to wear?" It never helped to answer that question honestly, but instead seem to give many of them the right to push me into lockers, or push my books out of my hands into the ground. I was a tiny girl, much smaller than the rest of the girls my age, and I knew that fighting was not an option. Instead, I learned to stay quiet and endure the whispers and taunts. When I'd tell my mom these things, her answer was to either fight or stop whining. I couldn't win.

These few months have stayed with me the rest of my years. I look back at my later years at different schools, at my high school and college days, and I feel a sense of remorse for all those that I know endured the same treatment. I learned to develop a tough shell and a witty sense of humor so that, when we moved, I deflected this torture and thus managed to escape being a victim. My experience taught me to keep my nose clean, mind my own business, and always be the first to laugh at myself. But I wonder now, how many people like me did that tactic allow me to let down in the end?