a bizarre adventure

By Jonathan M

2015.

I was eight years old in 3rd grade, and I noticed that everyone started to “change,” but I thought it didn't matter. I stayed the same, and once I got into 4th grade, I had a group of friends. One of them was named Michael and the other Isaac. We started getting picked on and that was the first time and i didn’t let it bother me but then it constantly kept happening day by day and people started to noticed that i got bullied and honestly no one tried to help me at all and instead saw me as a easy person to pick on and take advantage of and a few more people started making fun of me for my appearance and the things i do and like and it kept going on for the whole year and i had like 4 friends that were in the same situation that i was in and we would talk about what happen and a few days after one of my friends named “isaac” an immigrant and couldn’t speak english we went to lunch and he got a hotdog with a lot of mustard and ketchup and the kids from the table saw it and they started telling him “EWWWW THAT LOOKS LIKE SH*T GUYS LOOK WHAT HE'S EATING” and they started laughing at him and i stood up for him and told them “you wouldn't like it if i made fun of your food would you?” in a scared voice and they all laughed at me and said “SHUT THE F**K UP MICHUA” and I just stayed quiet and told him it's alright they are all like that,he later moved schools and never came back, after a few weeks my friend “michael” moved after 4th grade ended and I was by myself in 5th grade surrounded with people that bullied me.

5th Grade.

I was by myself and I had no friends I was struggling to make friends because i was antisocial and i really didn’t know how to communicate with new people so i was by myself for a few months sitting by myself and eating lunch by myself and i realized that i had to become more “open” and social to get more friends so after i started making jokes out loud to get the smallest bit of attention and i kept doing it and i had one guy laugh at my joke and he called me funny and i smiled and that period was the only period i looked forward to again and once i came back again i did the same thing and then we started talking and he told me his name was “Ayden” and i would only talk to him but i didn’t hang out with him i still had the same routines sitting by myself and eating lunch myself but after a few weeks of talking in that one class we had lunch after that class and he told me to sit with him during lunch and i followed him to the tables and when i was about to sit down i saw that he had A TON of friends almost the whole boys from our grade and i didn’t know where to sit down and i sat down in the group of table he was in and i noticed that one of the kids i was sitting next to was my bully, he looked at me with this disgusted face and said “what the fu** Is michua doing here? Why is he sitting with us get the fu** away” and he kept pushing me to get away from the table and i didn’t say anything and i was holding back tears and eventually my friend told him to stop and he rolled his eyes and stopped and later i left the group when we had to go to the playground and i sat by myself again.

A few months later, I only talked to him in class, and I didn’t go back to his group during lunch with his friends because I thought the same thing would happen again, and I told Ayden about what happened and why I didn’t want to go back into his friend group, and he told me that it was good and he could introduce me to them instead just adding me to the group without knowing anything about me, so we went back to his group, and he told everyone about me, and they were all talking to me, and I was telling them my name and stuff and some people didn’t bother to talk to me, but some did, and later I became friends with some of them, and it stayed like that for a bit.

6th grade.

I became friends with a lot of the people in the group, and I had a ton of friends, and I wasn’t as socially awkward around them anymore because they accepted me and treated me as a real friend, and we all spent time laughing in class, and it was honestly a lot of fun, and I had a HUGE change on myself appearance and personality-wise, and I just stayed like that, and it was honestly a golden experience.

It was the end of 6th grade, and I saw that someone named “mikamika” texted one of my friends, and I didn’t know who it was, and I asked them, and they told me that it was “michael,” and he was going to come back to school three years after he left.

7th grade.

Michael came back, and I told him everything that happened within those three years, and he was telling me all the changes that I had and told me that my voice was deep and I still had a small lisp and my appearance was different, and we talked a lot that day, and Michael and I are still best friends till this day.

For the Warrior Times, this is Jonathan Michua.