Prologue
Dear Reader,
We as teenagers ask many questions. We ask them about ourselves and wonder who we will be. Maybe other teenagers have it more figured out than my friends and me, maybe were the only ones that don’t have our lives together. I think every question we ask as teenagers, though, starts with why.
Why?
The question is most likely going to relate to yourself and personal feelings of society. My questions just happen to relate to both, mainly society and not just the society of high school, but everything and everyone that just happens to be involved. Honestly, I think most of us ask this question because its an easy thing to ask, and a hard thing to answer.
You see most adults will tell you that you can’t fall in love when you’re in high school, you’re too young and don’t understand, but yet we have to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives by the age of 16. I guess I am saying I rather have my heart shattered than sit in an office all day, instead of living my dream.
Why aren’t supposed to do crazy things, or fall in love? We are supposed to stay with the path and stick to school. We are too young to know what love is, and therefore we can’t find it. We aren’t supposed to make mistakes, even though everyone does it, we are supposed to always make the right choices. We are just supposed to plan out our entire lives the moment the teacher hands us the assignment and instructs us.
If we can’t decide we questioned and told we need to make up our minds soon otherwise, we are going to be working at our nearest fast food joint. When you tell everyone your dream job you are judged or your told that it’s not realistic, so you need to pick a new one.
Why do we have to figure it all out now, and why can’t we make mistakes to discover who we truly are? Once we know who we are, then we can start to plan out our lives. For now, we need to be expected to live, to cry, to make mistakes and most importantly to love.
Me?
I have never been in love, I have never had a boyfriend or even had a first kiss. Everyone in my school is honestly just a bunch of pathetic “Eff Boy starter packs” as my friend Erin would call them. I have kinda gotten over the fact that no one likes me, I’m not anything special or magnificent, I’m just Tiny-Little-Goody-Two-Shoes-Julia-Red
I am also not very popular, I have never gone to a party, never gotten drunk, and I never plan to do drugs, I have a total of three friends, no one else. I don’t have any side friends I talk to, I don’t even talk to the kids I had grown up with from elementary school. All I have is my three best friends, Kennedy, Erin, and Luke.
Kennedy and Erin both have boyfriends, in which they both seemed to land at the same time. Kennedy found a guy this summer then two weeks later, BAM instant boyfriend for Erin.
At first, it was hard to believe, we all talked about what it would be like to have boyfriends then they both got on the train and left me alone to find my own ride. Like I said I just eventually stopped caring, I had realized I had no idea on who I even was, who I wanted to be, or what I was meant to be, so why did boys have to be there?
As for Luke?
we grew up together, well, we grew up next to each other, so I guess that’s a little different. We used to be really close, like brother and sister type close but was we grew our relationship changed. Luke was my first friend, and for a while, he was my only friend, when I met Erin and Kennedy, they thought it was weird that my best friend was a boy.
Even though Luke and separated, we didn’t actually stop becoming best friends. We talked when people weren’t looking, and we told each other everything. I told Luke all my family problems and he told me all his. I told him things that I couldn’t tell Erin or Ken, he was different, he is different. He told me the truth all the time, but he was never mean about it.
When High school hit, we decided that we didn’t really care. We started talking at school and hanging out again. Ken and Erin were mad at me for awhile until Erin started talking to Luke. It’s awkward when we hang out, but at least we all hang out sometimes.
This book was originally supposed to be about how much high school utterly sucks and you should avoid it as much as possible, but things just kinda changed. My first three years of high school did suck, don’t get me wrong. The rest of high school turned around, it made the bad days of high school brighter, and the great days, even better. It was all because of the friends I met near the end of high school, and the things we experienced, but got through together.
I learned about something that was incredibly important, something you think last about, something you feel like you already know, and that was myself ... I had never been this scared or this excited, never had these many people to call friends. Never felt this alone yet loved, all things I would’ve missed if I avoided high school.
Of course, I know I am getting too far ahead, how cliche of me. I just want you to know the story, I want it to already have read, I want it to already have been written. I want your hearts and souls to already be affected by the story that’s already being told.
I want you to know how things turned around for me, I want you to know how they fell apart, I want you to know every little detail before it ends. I want you to see the beauty before we are selves are gone, before we turn into adults, or worse. We turn into history.
