It is at this age that we went back to college. It is at this age that everything began. It is much too early, 11 years to be destroyed.
First time in an unknown world. A lot of people. That was the first thing that marked me that day. Yet there were only 500 of them. It did change 16 students in my elementary school.
Everyone was gathered in a kind of outdoor amphitheatre, we were each called class by class. Line up two by two, waiting for a teacher to come pick us up.
It was a new beginning for me, the few friends I could have had chosen another college. So I discovered new classmates. A girl sat beside me. Crista. She was my size, her blond hair hid half her face. His large, round, black glasses almost enhanced his beautiful blue eyes.
There was nothing that could have told me what was going to happen this year. I found myself in this unknown place, but I met a familiar face. A face that had rocked my heart a few months earlier during the summer. This childhood friend I had seen grow up and grow up to be a man was in the same college as me. I could not believe it. I came forward to greet him, as friends do.
"Go play somewhere else kid, " he said coldly, without even a look. So he had never been my friend, for him I had always been nothing but a chore. The kid had to watch out when the parents were busy.
Children we played a lot together. He was a year older than me, he had always protected me from unhealthy jokes and rude remarks from the boys around us. This is the character I had fallen in love with. But here he had become like the others. It broke my heart but did not prevent me from loving him for three years.
It was this Jules, who had destroyed my heart, piece by piece. Like Penelope undoing her embroidery thread by thread while waiting for Ulysses' return.
Rainy day, March day. I've always been told that you don't go to school to look pretty. The rain for me, a girl from the countryside rhymed with rain boots.
Like a lone wolf I wandered in the yard a book in hand.A group of boys approached me like predators sniffing their prey. I was no longer a wolf but a trapped mule.To laugh like we do at that age, they asked me to walk in the puddle next to us. In a spirit of rebellion, as if my will mattered to them, I refused. I didn't want to be their sheep who obediently followed the shepherd's orders.
And that's where it really all started. At first it was only these boys, when I had the misfortune to meet them, they were bleating, calling me their little sheep.
You cannot imagine the shame I could feel, they had won, as the shepherd buys a dog to scare the flock, shame and fear held me.Then it spread to the whole college, and everyone was on my side. For a hypersensitive like me this year was very hard, I felt everything multiplied by ten. Every insult, every glance still resonated in me in the evening in my bed. Questioning me every day on the legitimacy of these.
Photographic memory has its advantages as its disadvantages Without any effort I could be the first in the class. It was therefore up to me to ask for the answers to the controls, it was up to me to draft drafts other than mine. Fear always taking over like a slave I bowed my head and obeyed.
I was pushed down the hallways, looked at sideways, isolated, harassed. Every morning with fear in my stomach I would go to college, every morning I would hide in the bathroom to avoid them. Every morning I wanted to run away.
Despite all this, Crista my little ray of sunshine still supported me. But the more time passed, the more distant it became. I did not understand her behaviour. She avoided me, she spoke to me less and less, it did not put next to me.
"I don't want to be friends anymore, you're hurting my reputation," she says without looking at me. I remained speechless, she had been gone for at least five minutes that I was still in the same place, almost forgetting to breathe. I was now alone. More alone than ever, my best and only friend had just let go of me, she had just passed over to the other side. She ended up doing like the others, she who was the eternal resistant, me who thought that she did not care to follow the group, of its famous "reputation". I made a mistake.
How wrong I was about that life. It wasn't going that well. Thus this sixth year ended in an intense relief and tears by the thousands.