Storymania - A Pretty Girl by Angel Of Hope

A Pretty Girl
Angel Of Hope

As a little girl, I was rather bashful and usually kept to myself. Not to say that I didn’t like to be around people. It was just that I was raised not to disturb others, so I tried my best to stay quiet. My introverted ways took a dramatic fall in 2003. I switched elementary schools in the middle of my fourth grade year due to the agreed-upon fact that my teacher was crazy to the point of insanity when it came to his expectations of his students. At that school, I had my small group of friends so I didn’t have to constantly worry about being an outcast. When I changed schools, though, I had this need to rapidly make friends for I didn’t want to feel alone. I became more social than necessary in order to catch my classmates’ attention and gain friends, and my personality didn’t change back for another year.
One of the first friends I had at my new school was Serafina. She was very nice to me and introduced me to some of her friends. I merged in with her little group as quickly as I could. My impatience with becoming part of a clique turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of my life. I didn’t know it yet, but I had just put myself in a dangerous position. Serafina had shown me her nice side, but her evil twin showed herself a whole year later.
Near the end of my fifth grade year, Serafina started following a girl named Jasmine around like a little puppy dog. This irritated me, because Jasmine had given me the cold shoulder ever since I came to this school. It was a mystery to me why someone as wonderful as Serafina would befriend someone as egotistical as Jasmine. Their sudden friendship affected my life more than they could ever understand. It wouldn’t have if Serafina hadn’t have been as much of a follower as she turned out to be.
I was never with Serafina when she was communicating with Jasmine. The way Jasmine laughed at me and insulted me made me not even want to be near her. Seeing her face made me both scared and extremely angry. She put fear in me, because I was never prepared for the hurtful comments she would say to me. I was never ready for the inconsiderate snickers that would come out of Jasmine’s lips and echo in my little figurative cave of shame. I abhorred her facetious smile, and I despised her arrogant attitude. On the other hand, I admired her for her strength. She was physically strong due to her athleticism and mentally tough due to her confidence. Those were two advantages in life that she had and I lacked. At that moment, envy started to be a familiar concept to me.
It wasn’t long before my desire to be like Jasmine overruled my disliking of her. As ironic as this may seem, I started to ponder over ways to become her friend. These plans became a subconscious obsession of mine and I decided to act upon them. My plan was simple: go up to Jasmine and Serafina while they were in their daily game of four square and quietly ask them if I could join in their fun.
The bright morning of the day after I decided to pursue the most likely arduous “adventure” of confronting Jasmine about possibly building a friendship, I was psyched and kind of excited; I surprised myself with what I was looking forward to doing. There was a problem, though; the sight of the playground held me. The musty sand floated like a ghost across the cracked, gray cement that almost groaned beneath the weight of hundreds of kids. The white monkey bars with the red paint chipped off were built low to the ground and just minutely tilted. The metal on the swings’ handle bars had never been oiled and reeked of blood, dried skin and deteriorated clothing material. The swing seats were bent out of shape and smelled like a silent but deadly “pull-my-finger” fart. It was so strong that it charged aimlessly through the air as if it was never on the crickety swing seat in the first place. The loud, heart wrenching cries of injured children ceaselessly hurt my bleeding ears. Still, with the depressing scene considered, the playground was deceiving; it made me happy.
A while passed before I finally approached the two girls: the two girls that had strangely been sprinting through my mind day in and day out. Suddenly, though, while I was walking toward them, a flashback of my fourth grade class shot into my head. A flashback of the class I studied in and laughed with friends in launched itself into my spinning skull. My old, grumpy, long-haired teacher liked the classroom to be dark, mysterious. His coffee mug stunk up the entire room with the unexplainable scent of beans. Salt lingered on the tables, and the tables lingered on muddy, dangerous, mucky broken tile floors. The students’ fear of him was what colored the room; its red heat gave the humid atmosphere a vibe of unhappiness and a touch of anger. Our silence was deafening and a single sound could send an irrational bellow through the teacher’s cracked lips. The chairs were unstable and sometimes completely broken as an effect of the weight of some overly pudgy children. It wasn’t fair, the gloomy yet aware ways of these young kids.
“Push the morbid thoughts away,” I demanded myself. Slowly, one detail at a time, the memory faded back into just another tear-jerking picture drawn into my heart. I refocused and started heading their way again. One small foot in front of the other, a meter of the playground passing by as a meter between the girls and me was crossed. No lies will I tell, I was scared; I was worried. There was a chance that Jasmine would be stereotypical and not give me a fair chance just because I was the new girl. The smiles on their faces looked fake, like they were cut into their skin as a permanent mask that had not yet been assumed as a cover for their real emotions. Yes, they were playing outside and yes, they were friends, but the way they moved themselves was almost robotic and hard to comprehend. These strange things didn’t matter to me at the time. Fame and friends was what I desperately needed at that point of my life, and Jasmine would be perfect as the one to lead me on the road of getting good company. Before I knew it, I was face to face with Jasmine: I could smell her overwhelmingly minty breath, could see the perfect light brown of her precious eyes, and could almost hear the sweat trickling along her hairline. We were close to each other, and I spoke.
“Can I play with you guys?”
As subtle as that and as unnoticed as possible, that’s what I was aiming for. There were just a few long seconds of silence, and finally the Great Jasmine replied.
“Sure, I guess.”
I was overwhelmed with relief. The worst of the day was done. I skipped into one of the squares on the ground with an extraordinary grin and started to watch the big, red ball bounce to Serafina. Then it bounced to Jasmine. As the game continued, my excitement rose: I had done it; I had really become Jasmine’s friend. But, no, of course not. Within seconds, the red ball was flying toward my stomach with a speed that could not have been accidental. The wind was knocked out of me, and I collapsed to the ground with an excruciatingly painful thud. The sandy, gray sky swirled before my eyes. The world was spinning, my stomach was churning, my heart felt betrayed, and I was crying.
My eyes had a mind of their own, and they closed themselves for a few minutes. Jasmine could be heard in the background, trying with a small amount of effort to stifle her wicked and guilty laughter. With my eyelids covering the passageway to my grimacing soul, I could secretly live in the heart-wrenching moment, the moment that gave me the opportunity to realize that some people just aren’t worth trying to befriend. The life-changing moment I so unwillingly embraced with my already bruising arms was a moment I will never forget no matter how hard I try to delete it from my list of painful memories. With the sweltering orange circle in the sky known as “the great sun” hovering above my body, I finally motivated myself enough to open my eyes and start living in the real world again.
A crowd had gathered to make the moment more embarrassing than necessary for me. Some were asking me if I was okay while others were laughing obnoxiously at the apparently somewhat amusing sight of me lying, breathless, on the floor. Strength had returned to me but pride had not, so I stood up with dried rivers of tears stained against my blushing cheeks. A couple of my good friends stood by me, note that neither of them were Serafina, and they held my arms to see if I was able to walk. They led me away from the mockingly applauding audience, and the movie of a memory ended with a morose textured painting of me sulking as I dragged my fragile body away from a pretty girl named Jasmine.