The Salad Dressing and Other Disasters

School friends

For your information, I was alone, always alone, those first weeks of school, with no friends apart from Stephanie Monteforte. Stephanie was the result of a total lack of suitable friend candidates. An initial census of the form-class had revealed a cacophony of awful people. There were rough, nicotine addicted 12 year olds, pale, frail, silent geeks, or hard core petty criminals. 

This dearth of options lead me straight to Stephanie who didn't smoke or steal and initially seemed sort of fun in a loud way; and impulsive, and sort of normal despite having drawn a swirly biro pattern all over her face, a bold move for day 1.

By the second day, I didn't really like her much at all, especially when she tripped me up in the corridor and I went flying on my face in front of the 6th year boys; but despite this I told myself that I couldn't 'have no friends'. This was an impossible scenario as it would make me a total loser, and I just needed to wait because me and Stephanie Reynolds were 'going to get on like a house on fire'. 

Even as I said this, I knew that she was probably the most annoying girl I've ever met. But then Stephanie with her loud, biro-face and tripping up tendencies left the second week. So that was that. 

That she had even looked like the only viable friend option was absolutely terrifying. Among other things she had microwaved her own hamster. She probably should have been sectioned.

They say you can get used to anything, even high security prison; and in the same way you get used to high school. You don't even notice, really. The absence of choice when you're 12 (especially in 1994) was so profound that you don't have the capacity to think you will ever have an alternative life. You're sucked into this one like a piece of fluff through a hoover. Then you have to co-exist in a sort of ignorant, smelly darkness inside, with the other pieces of insignificant fluff.

And y'all had similar rights to fluff. Enslaved to other people, all day long, you had to try to generate approval - from teachers and other pupils and lunch ladies and the bus driver. From the woman who's red glasses clashed with her orange hair as she rang rubbishy nineties energy drinks through the garage till, and from Madge the cleaner - a woman with a smoker's croak and anger management problems, who threatened to report you for sitting on the blue pipe at lunchtime.  All day long- that's what you had to do - win approval. 

It was exhausting. Some friends would have helped. 

I didn't have friends (that reached my personal coolness targets) for five straight years. I was allocated as we've half mentioned, to a class of fools and petty criminals. Grammar schools 'were often a mixed bag' people said and it's perfectly true that one kid was expelled for wielding a screw driver at a bus stop. Another was kicked out for having a stash of soft drugs in the front pocket of his school bag. And there was the one who was caught trying to get high through sniffing deodorant in the boys toilets (that can't have even worked very well.)

Out of necessity I eventually made one actual friend at school. I sat behind her in form and took a passing interest in / criticism of the way she did her hair - one small side plait on the right, joining a dominant central plait in the middle. I knew I had to get past things like that if I was going to ever have anyone to talk to, and I soon discovered that - unusual hair aside - she was the cleverest person I had ever met, extremely sarcastic, and from Moscow which was revolutionary to me as I had barely even met anyone from Ballynahinch, (a town that was roughly 20 miles away.) 

I mean up until then I was taking it for granted that I would simply meet a string of cool friends, nice, funny, but also fashionable - (which meant 'knew about choker necklaces and shopped for Ananya or White Musk in the Body Shop.') But the reality was, this didn't seem to exist apart from in the girl's school down the road that I was apparently too stupid to get into.