The struggle of fitting in

If there’s one place in the world I hated being it would’ve been middle school. It’s like the hormone breeding ground for pre pubescent teenagers and the awkward right before high school stages. Like in every early coming of age teen movie I’ve seen there are always cliques. You’ve got the popular girls, the jocks, the brainiacs and then there’s me. I was an outcast. Never really fit in anywhere and always the new kid. It sucked. I’d attended a summer camp before the school year had started. That’s when I saw him. A boy shrouded with a group of girls. I’d never thought I’d see him again; oh boy was I wrong. Not only did I see him again but we had classes together. Remember that for later on. His name was Jack. When I saw Jack for the first time it was at Scicon but it was brief and I had an instant crush on him kind of like how you see someone in an airport or on a bus but you never see them again. We had the same PE period and teacher so naturally I ran into him often and I was always flustered. One day for pe we had to play soccer. Back then I really wanted to be on the soccer team so I thought I was a prodigy. We were divided onto teams and started our game. One of his teammates passed him the ball and I ran to get the ball so I could score a goal. I almost had it but we ended up going different directions so I kicked him on the shin directly above the part of the lower leg where his leg and foot connected. After the game was over and before we had to go back to the locker room to change he confronted me about it in front of the whole team. I saw a huge red mark from where I kicked him and I apologized. Embarrassed, I dredged back to the locker room with my head hung low in shame to change my clothes for next period. In my defense the shoes I had on were not running shoes. I sat in my next class replaying what had happened and got embarrassed all over again. After the period was over I met my friend for lunch and told her about it. She was the only friend I had. She was shocked because we all had the same pe period but we were on different teams. She didn’t laugh at me and knew I liked him so she just made sure I was ok. After I told her we had a good laugh about it. The last period of the day was english. This was the only other period where he and I had the same class. It was english and we were sitting at the same group of four desks with two other people. I was still embarrassed about what happened a few hours prior so I couldn’t look up at him. When we finally acknowledged each other and I apologized for kicking him he kind of laughed it off and said it was ok. I had never spoken to him before that encounter. He was actually really nice. We talked about the writing assignment we had to do for class to kind of break the ice. He was surprised to see that I was almost done with my paper in its entirety despite having a blank piece of paper at the start of the period. Writing fiction stories was the only thing I was good at. I remember the whole day in great detail and smiling like an idiot the whole walk home.