I Want Someone to Love Me for Who I Am

By the time I was 13 years old, I was used to being tortured by other kids. Every grade has a kid who is picked on excessively. And that kid was me. Ever since I'd started school, people had bullied me. I didn't really see any specific reason why they chose me. Sure, I wore glasses, I had a dorky hair cut, and I was slightly overweight. But what kid was perfect? It wasn't my fault that I looked the way I did. And I was too insecure to try to change myself. I knew that if I did try to change, people would notice and bully me more about how I was trying to be popular but how it would never work. So I put up with it. I didn't let my parents know. I'd managed to always hide it from them and if they wondered why I didn't have any friends coming over at the weekends of after school, they didn't say anything.

There was a group at school who were the worst. They were the 'popular' people. The people who I wished I could be. The people who I was most jealous of. The people who made my life hell. There was about 6 boys and 5 girls in the group. They were the same group who had bullied when I was 5 and in prep school, and they were still bullying me 8 years later.

After the summer holidays, when I got back to school, I saw there was a new kid. It wasn't very often we had new people at school, because not many people moved to this village. It was far from the city and not on many maps. I wondered why he had moved here but I guessed it was something to do with his parents. Whatever the reason, I was glad he'd moved here, because the second my eyes landed on him, my day picked up. The boy had short, wavy brown hair, forest green eyes, pale skin. A feeling I had never felt before crept upon me. I hadn’t noticed until my heart was racing and my palms were sweating. I realised I was staring but I couldn’t look away from this beautiful boy. Suddenly, he glanced over at me, catching me looking at him. And he smiled. At that moment I fell. Completely and utterly, I fell for this boy.

His name was Cameron James. I noticed that he didn't talk very much, but whenever he did, he was always saying something to agree with someone else. He talked to get people to like him. I wasn't sure whether it worked or not. People in my school weren’t very accepting anyway, but a new kid from the city definitely wasn't going to go down well with them. Cameron seemed desperate to become part of the 'popular' crowd. He made several attempts, but always failed, resulting in the 'popular' kids laughing at him. I saw how much this hurt him. After all, I had been subjected to their taunts for years. But this boy was new and wasn't used to it.

About a month after he had arrived at school, I was sitting alone at the back of the classroom. Cameron was trying to talk to one of the girls in the group, but she kept brushing him off. As they got louder, I looked up, watching. I saw one of the boys walk over to Cameron and the girl, whose name was Katie, and told him to back off. Cameron didn't appear to know what to do. But he hesitated just long enough for the boy to get angry. He pulled back his fist and punched Cameron square in the jaw. Cameron immediately fell to the floor. I felt my heart racing in fear of what was going to happen next. I didn't want to see Cameron get hurt. But nothing else happened, because Cameron quickly jumped up and ran out of the classroom.

I immediately followed. Everyone else had gone back to doing what they had been doing before, so no one noticed me running after the new boy.