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Drugs

Reality Strikes a Cheerleader

After college started, I lost contact with everyone from high school except for a couple of punks—at least until I ran into a cheerleader on the train, and she decided to apologize to me for bullying people throughout our teen years.

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I don’t remember high school fondly, because I was low in the social hierarchy. Being foreign, Muslim, and generally unconventional made me an outcast. I was neither smart enough to mingle with the nerds nor athletic enough to forge friendships with the jocks. Instead, I hung out with the kids who had no prerequisites for hanging out—the punks. They were a diverse group of rejects who smoked pot and cigarettes, put forth a rebellious facade, and wore patched-up black hoodies. I fit in immediately.

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My troublemaking with the punk squad kept me entertained, but for the first three years of high school, part of me felt rejected. It was hard to see other kids receive positive attention from both teachers and students, while I only received an accusation that I had started a fire in the upstairs bathroom. No one expected much from our punk crew, so we acted accordingly. (I maintain that I did not set that fire, but I'll admit I did a number of other things to deserve many Saturday detentions.) The injustice was that the popular kids were up to the same activities, and teachers never gave them shit. The jocks and cheerleaders got away with murder; the punks served endless detentions. I would never have admitted this then, but the inequality gave me a sense of inferiority that I never wanted to feel again.

Thanks to psychedelic experiences between grades 11 and 12, I had a brand new perspective when I walked into school on the first day of my senior year. I looked around at all the kids clumping up into little factions, eyeballing each other’s clothes and trying so hard to be cool. I realized their goal was to impress their peer group—the random sample of kids their age that happened to live in the same district. The high school social scene was a cruel experiment, and these were its willing participants, dedicating their lives to the meaningless reward of being perceived as cool by the idiots around them. Knowing this liberated me. I promised myself that I would leave this place and these people, and never see any of them again. There was only one problem: Throughout high school, I had occupied my time with petty vandalism and smoking sessions in the woods.

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If I wanted to escape, I’d have to get my grades up. I did this by asking stupid questions one after the other. Previously, I was embarrassed to ask too many questions in class, because I worried I’d reveal that I was a moron. Because I no longer cared about my classmates’ opinions about me, I did whatever I could to understand my studies, asking every stupid question that popped into my mind. My teachers obliged me, but my classmates scorned me. Frequently, I saw them smirking as I asked a teacher repeated questions.

In my classmates’ defense, I was the most obvious pothead in the school. When the popular kids made light of me, they used my smoking habits to scorn me. If I was younger, I would have taken their insults to heart, but that year I became proud of their jokes, because I knew it was hypocritical for these kids to smoke all weekend and then make fun of me for being a stoner on Monday morning.

I lost all care for my appearance, wore the same blue sweatpants to school every day, and kept my head in the books. By the spring, I was accepted to college in Philadelphia. After college started, I lost contact with everyone from high school except for a couple of the punks. When I returned home the following summer, I took every opportunity to escape my suburban town—I took the NJ Transit train to the city and partied with my older brother, Bhai, and his homies. On one of these train rides, I ran into a popular girl from high school who had ridiculed me for asking too many questions in our math class.

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Stoned, I sat on the train wearing big headphones. The girl—lets call her call Lana—sat down across the aisle from me. I looked at her, and our eyes met. We recognized each other, and then I turned around. She tapped me on the shoulder. I took off my headphones, and she said, “Hey, do you remember me? We went to high school together.” I nodded. “We didn’t really know each other back then, but I wanted to introduce myself.” This confused me, but I humored her for a minute anyway. After some small talk, she launched into her story.

“I go to college not too far from here,” she said. “My first year was kind of hard. I don’t know if you remember, but I was a cheerleader in high school. I had a lot of friends in high school, and I guess you could say I was popular. I think it made me a certain way. I wasn’t nice to people. Maybe I wasn’t nice to you or some of your friends. Anyway, in my first month of college, I was out at a party with my roommate when some guy tried to talk to us. He wasn’t being gross or anything; he was just not cool, I guess. I acted mean—I treated him the way I’d always treated people I didn’t think were cool. I said something like, ‘As if we’d even talk to you.’ I’ll never say that to another person, because he really changed my perspective. He said, ‘There are lots of people like you. You got all the love and praise in high school, and it went to your head. You think you’re better than everyone, but guess what? You’re not there anymore. Nobody cares that you were cool in high school. No one knows you were popular, no one knows you dated the quarterback, and no one would care if you told them. Because here, in the real world, you are just another person, and acting like that makes you a shitty person.’”

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This knowledge shattered Lana’s worldview. She went straight back to her dorm room and cried her eyes out. She hated herself for months and vowed that she would change. “That’s why I wanted to say, ‘Hi,’” she said. “I hope that’s OK.” She sat there staring at me and smiling, eagerly awaiting my acknowledgement of her attempt at redemption.

I was still incredibly high, so this whole rant caught me by surprise. I paused to consider how I should respond. I found it obnoxious that Lana hadn’t specifically mentioned her cruelty to me and assumed I would participate in her therapy session. At the same time she was reflecting on herself and trying to be a better person. How could I knock that?

So, I said, “Good for you, Lana. Glad to hear you’re…” I didn’t know how to say “becoming a better person” without insinuating that she had been a shitty person, though she admitted she had been a jerk. “Glad you’re seeing the world differently.” There, I thought to myself. That was pretty good, Kid. For some reason, she looked disappointed, like she was hoping for something more enlightening. I scrambled for a clean, easy end to the conversation. What does she want? I thought. This girl made fun of me in math class, and now I have to redeem all her sins with one calculated sentence? With the intonation of a question, I said, “I forgive you?”

Suddenly, she smiled. I had exonerated Lana of her guilt on behalf of every kid she had bullied. As I slid my headphones back on, I wondered if I had freed Lana of a weight on her shoulders or fed her ego. I would never know. I never saw Lana again, but I hope she has a great life and her kids are nerds.

@ImYourKid

Previously - There's Something About Bill