Stereotype
Page 13
“What d’you think, Abi?” he asks me. His eyes meet mine for a moment. Nothing. I’m over him.
“It’s cool,” I nod in agreement.
We walk back to the school. I’m quiet. Thinking. Thinking about what Emily said, mostly. I still feel like I am one of those people, one of the self-absorbed brats like Graham and Declan. I want to shock people. Isn’t that why I kissed Emily? Isn’t that why I told Karen about it? I want to be outrageous. Nothing more outrageous than that in an all-girls school.
But it’s not who I am. I shouldn’t have done it. I know I shouldn’t have, I knew two minutes later that I shouldn’t have.
And then there’s another part of me that did it to feel wanted. That’s what happened with Graham, too. I think of him and it makes me feel almost physically sick. I imagine kissing him – oh, oh. What was I thinking? The guy repulses me.
I need to stop doing that, need to stop using people to make myself feel better. That’s not who I am, who I want to be. And cutter Abi isn’t me, either. I don’t want to be one of “them”. I never have.
I don’t really know who I am anymore. I used to be an anti-social misfit. Now I’m – well, hardly the queen of the school, but I feel like I fit in somewhere. What people in my class think of me really doesn’t bother me. I have my friends. They’re the important ones. I feel – not normal, but happy. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Content, then.
I contemplate whether becoming a happy teenager means fitting into another stereotype. No longer the moody whiny adolescent, but the mature, well-adjusted young adult.
That’s before I realise that I really don’t think anyone in their right mind would describe me as “well-adjusted”. Unless someone was holding a gun to their head and forcing them to say that, but since I can’t foresee any circumstances in which someone would want to do that . . .
I still don’t want to fit into any box, be easily defined as any one thing. Maybe it’s not a matter of working at being different. Maybe you just have to just be yourself, and everything falls into place after that. I don’t know. I guess the only way to find out is to try. Maybe make mistakes along the way, but in the end, you get to where you want to be. I hope . . .