For the first time since I was fifteen, I realise the benefits of actually having a phone. Often staying alone, I never seemed to find a need for using something that was meant for communication or something related to that purpose. My teachers would have never dared of giving their numbers away freely just for the students to ask questions because rumours go that one teacher did that before and ended up getting her house location found out by some geek who was bribed by some kids to help the stalk the teacher.
Needless to say, she quit and moved out of the town (or maybe even country) entirely.
Furthermore, with no friends and my mother being a housewife, there was not really a reason for me to own a phone besides when I'm too lazy to use the computer and need to search something up or when my mother would be out and she needed me to text her the grocery list because she couldn't remember the shopping list.
Besides those reasons, I never really used my phone. It was just one very expensive time-telling device where I failed to wear a watch because I never really found any need to keep one. I was quite fine without it.
At least, that was until I realised that Connor and Derek had somehow found my number out and told almost everyone they knew. They told the soccer team at school that the number belonged to some "really hot chick" in which they had both met at a party and befriended. I didn't seem to share the joke with them, but nonetheless, it was fun reading how the guys wanted to pick me up.
The two crazy boys had given me a heads-up. They seemed to enjoy slowly breaking the news to me. <Hey Miranda! Connor here! How often do you use your phone?>
<Hey Connor! Not very often, why?>
<That's kind of sad, but hey, I and Derek helped you get a whole lot of messages from the guys at the soccer team!>
<What?>
Then, as if on cue, it seemed as though several messages came in at once, leaving me very confused when I read them. I then proceeded to call Connor.
"Connor, what's going on?" I asked him.
I could hear some laughter at the other end of the line. I presumed that to be Derek from the raucous laughter. I only knew one person who laughed like that. "Miranda," Connor gasped between breaths, "Derek and I told the whole soccer team that you were some kind of hot chick we picked up on the weekend at some random party!" He broke for a while where he started to wheeze. "We had a bet with Terrence that we couldn't get you to have more than seven people text you today!"
I was horrified. What exactly had the two jokers done?
"But what if one of them calls me?" I asked him, my voice squeaking. A 'hot chick'?
I could almost hear the shrug in his voice. "Don't answer then."
I winced. He seemed so carefree. "But my voicemail clearly says that my name is Miranda!"
He burst out laughing again. "That's gonna be a sight to see! Oh wait, someone is calling you now! I gotta go, reject the call. I'm gonna hang up now, but we'll take a video for you. Bye!"
With that, I heard the monotonous tone of the line going dead. What exactly had the two jokers gotten me into?
As soon as my phone rang, I stared at it dubiously. Should I answer it, or should I simply hang up? If I answer it, I could simply hang up immediately after that. I mean, and then the line would just go dead. If I hung up, the voicemail in my rather unattractive voice would play and this guy would give me a hard time most probably.
"What the heck," I muttered to myself and accepted the phone call. As I was going to hang up, an idea formed in my mind. I grinned to myself as I did a quick recap of my drama lessons I used to take when I was much younger.
"Imagine you are at the scene and that you really are doing what you're supposed to do!" My acting teacher, Mdm. Tilly told me. "If I ask you to wash some dishes for me, think of what you'll do. Then once you're done thinking, show me that you're washing dishes1"
When I did that, it was the first time Mdm. Tilly actually praised me for doing something. Then remembering my former drama teacher's advice, I imagined I was an old woman. I imagined that I had aged sixty years, and that I was getting annoyed at these random calls from boys who just had too much testosterone.
"Who is it!" I called in a voice as grumpy as shrill as I could muster.
"Hey sweetheart, I heard that you-"
"Oh you heard didn't ya! Well hear this! One more text telling me of how hot I am I might actually have to go over there and chop your bits off! The less you have the better, so that no more of your testosterone can get into calling an old lady like me asking for sex!"
"Uh, y- yes ma'am!" He stuttered before abruptly hanging up. I howled with laughter up in my attic where I was sure that no one would have been able to hear me. He sounded so afraid. Soon, I got a call coming from Connor.
I answered it, "So old lady," he said, and I could hear a smile in his tone. "You sure wouldn't cut my testicles off would you? I'm only as sweet as they come," he said, sounding all sugary and sweet on the phone."
"Oh, for you Connor boy, I wouldn't think so!"
We both laughed together, and Connor told me that he had videoed the whole conversation between me and the poor unfortunate kid had. He congratulated me for just making the boldest boy in the entire soccer team stutter. I found that rather funny and comforting. It made me feel great about myself because it wasn't every day I could put jerks like that guy in their position without getting beaten up for it.
"Okay, I gotta go now! I'm getting chased because I had lied about you being a hot chick and that guy wants his revenge now! Bye!"
He hung up just to hear me protest about me not being a hot chick. I mean, sure, I wasn't a baby chicken, but it was pretty warm in the attic. Jokes!
Anyway, it didn't really matter much to me, because after that, I was feeling pretty much in a good mood, and not in the way I felt after knowing something that I probably shouldn't know from spying - excuse me, watching - on the neighbours. Like which house had the kid smoking pot and maybe growing something in the backyard.
This happy was the kind that I was satisfied, as in, that I didn't feel the lonely emptiness that I usually did when I was in the attic. Whenever I watched the people, I always put myself in their shoes and imagined what it was like to be them. For the kid at the end of the corner, I always imagined myself in his shoes, forever looking out for my parents or nosy neighbours (like me) who might tell on his addiction and get him a record. Or maybe like the party girl, who obviously had a lot of friends, seeing how she seemed to always come home with a group of other kids in the Lexus.
I did that because imagining being in other people's shoes was always more interesting than what I went through on a daily basis: waking up to go to school, tolerating whatever people did to put me down more than I already was put down - not that I really cared - and come back home to have a shower and then spend the whole day in an attic with a book of some sort as my companion.
Lonely? Yes. But what more was I able to do? I could never have much of a social life no matter how much I might have liked one. The last party that I had attended offered me nothing but a bunch of bad memories.
Long story short, I was humiliated. I was humiliated so much that I had left right there and then without waiting for Terrence and had just walked all the way home, too-short dress, too-high heels and all. Not wanting to deal with my parents who were probably in the living room watching TV, I climbed up to my own room, ditching the heels by the doorstep. It was a perfectly quiet night, so I highly doubted anyone saw it when the dress kind of tore as I climbed.
To today, the fear of the humiliation whenever I went to parties always stayed, making me afraid of parties, thus destroying my only form of social gathering and eventually my social life altogether. That, took away any chance of me finding a friend and having social interaction, because in school, no one actually talked to me civilly enough for me to consider a friend. It made me feel too lonely.
In books, there are always stories where the out-casted loner always somehow gets back at life. But I know that it was never happening to me. Those stories were meant to give loners like me hope in life, but they never quite told us what to do; advise us on what we were supposed to do. We were always silently suffering, unable to tell anyone.
And to be honest, many of the - excuse me - bitchy girls in my literature class all claim that they know what it really feels like to be those kind of outcasts and loners. Girls like Kelly Morgan. They are the ones who practically run the school, are part of the most dominating clique, players who always still get hot boyfriends anyway. They go on about how they would never bully those smaller than them and in less power, but they don't really.
Kelly Morgan is my - in a way - my arch nemesis. She goes out of her way to make me feel miserable in my life, yet she seems to get all the favour of the school, staff included. She's a 'good girl' in the eyes of the teachers, in the way she runs for so many charities and her family happens to be pretty damned rich compared to mine. But she's a closet bully. The way her subtle gossip about me seems to go unnoticed by the people in my school is totally beyond me.
Or maybe everyone just doesn't like me. Although that was really no reason to be mean about it, she seems to make sure that I suffer a hell for a life in school when I was younger and more sensitive. Well, if it makes her any better, inside right now, she's left me broken and uncertain about myself.
Maybe that was why my last best friend left me the moment she got a boyfriend.
No one really knows why I'm so lonely or that I have no friends because I'm secretly insecure of people judging me, primarily because of my hair and secondarily because of what I've been through (when I was thirteen, rumour went that I was gay and to today, people are still unsure). Whenever I am told that I shouldn't let my emotions bottle up inside me, I consult my diary.
Yes, I am eighteen and I have a diary.
But now, I'm starting to feel happy inside, with some friends. People like Connor and Derek who would sit with me in lunch just because I looked lonely sitting - well - alone. And then people like Daniel and Cody who would stick up for me even when it meant they could get shunned for life in school. It was people and things like this which made me feel happy, and today - I am sure - is just the beginning of better things like friendships and a new found social life that are all to come.
Maybe Terrence can really make me into less of the loser that I am!
Word count: 2076
Total count: 7443 [previous miscalculation]