Total pages in book: 160
Estimated words: 153268 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 766(@200wpm)___ 613(@250wpm)___ 511(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 153268 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 766(@200wpm)___ 613(@250wpm)___ 511(@300wpm)
His face told me he wasn’t kidding.
My heart told me he was a safe person to open up to.
“I was bullied at school.” The words rolled off my tongue without prior consent from my brain. Like Row’s heartbeat next to mine was enough to squeeze the truth out of me. “Actually, it started in preschool. That’s when kids realized not only was I an odd bird but I also came from an eccentric nest. My parents would send me out with socked feet and sandals in the summers. I looked ridiculous, and ridiculous makes five-year-olds laugh.” It was silly for my throat to clog up about something that had happened almost two decades ago. “But what my peers found amusing in kindergarten, they found worthy of antagonizing me in elementary school. I dressed odd, I spoke odd, I lived odd. I had my eye tic every time I was nervous, which made me shy away from all the plays, parties, and major school events. To rub salt on a corroding wound, my parents were thrifty, so instead of eating at the school cafeteria, they sent me with cold meat sandwiches. They’d buy liver sausages and pork tongue at a deli and tuck them in my sandwiches. My lunches smelled from miles away and I’d be teased for it mercilessly.”
“Why didn’t you tell your folks sandals and socks don’t go together? That you prefer jelly and sunflower butter on your sandwich?” Row’s thick eyebrows slammed together angrily.
I pressed my lips together. “Because what people saw as quirks were actually my parents’ upbringing. They grew up in Russia. It was the makeup of their DNA. The way they’d been brought up. I didn’t want them to think they weren’t doing a good job or that I was ashamed of what we are, of who we are…” My nose stung, and I held back tears. It was all so silly. Water under the bridge. Then, why did thinking about it make me feel like I was drowning? “I think…I think being an immigrant can go two different ways. You either preserve, or you hide. My parents chose to wear their heritage like a badge of honor, and so, their legacy became mine. Every day I was taunted, I kept reminding myself of how lucky I was. I had two languages. Two cultures. Two worlds to enjoy. I could read Tolstoy in his native tongue. How lucky was I?”
Row’s sunset eyes were glowing embers in the dark. He stared at me wordlessly, and in that moment, it did feel like I was unloading my baggage onto his broad shoulders. “You chose to get hurt so your parents wouldn’t. I get it.”
The bullies were gone now, but the scars they’d left lingered. “Anyway,” I sniffed. “Kids didn’t like me. Other than Dylan.”
Dylan had had total main character energy from the get-go. She had been there to shoo the bullies away. To snitch on those who’d pulled the chair from under my butt. She had chosen to sit with me at lunch unfailingly, and one day was even brave enough to try my tea sandwich with the liver, even though it had smelled like a whey protein fart. She stood up for what she believed in, and she believed in kindness.
Row nodded in my periphery. “How many people are we talking about?”
“Like, sixty percent of my grade?” I let out a snort. “It made it worse that I didn’t want to fit in. I didn’t try to dress, look, and talk like everyone else. I had the audacity to like my baked milk cookies and pork stew lard and Hypnotic Poison.” I still wore the latter as a perfume.
“People always tell you to be your true self, but when you’re unapologetically you, it pisses them off,” Row grumbled.
“It’s the chicken-and-the-egg situation,” I sighed. “I’m not sure what came first—me having social anxiety and being bullied for it, or being bullied to the point I developed a fear of interacting with humans.”
“You don’t fear interacting with humans. You interact with them all the time—you moved to New York, got a degree, work in hospitality. It’s the fact you don’t bend to boring social norms that makes you stand out.” Row elevated an eyebrow. “I’m here to tell you, don’t ever change.”
“Why?”
“Because your quirkiness is one of your best fucking features.”
A delicious sensation of pride and warmth washed over my entire body.
He rubbed his palms over his legs to gather heat. “Anyway, back to your story.”
“In high school, the bullying got worse. Before, I was weird but meaningless enough not to warrant any special attention. But now, I’d started taking up space. Boys began noticing me. I joined the track team. I was an award-winning mathlete. A lot of people decided to overlook my weirdness and befriend me. They all wanted something from me, but I was so hungry for positive attention, I was happy to give it to them. That’s when the lying began. When I realized I could mold myself to be whatever people wanted me to be, and that made them stay, at least for a while. For the first time in my life, I actually had friends who weren’t Dylan. My stock went up, and that’s when shit went down.”