Creation

Jessie is writing a letter to the admissions officers of their dream college. This is what they had to say:

From the start, I didn’t know where the hell I belonged. ​I probably should delete “hell”. I don’t think the admissions officers would appreciate my steller word choice. From the start, I didn’t know where I belonged. ​Now the sentence is bland, but the officers aren’t allowed to take points off for that. ​I kept walking back and forth over this invisible line from the girls who at that time were all obsessed with colored powder and sticky stuff you put on your lips for fun, which I never understood; and the boys who would do very repulsive things like punch each other until one of them bled, and tackle each other over an oddly shaped ball, (later I found out was a football). I never understood that because if you liked someone and wanted to hang out with them, why would you want them to bleed? Not everyone at my school was like this, but the people that would catch your eye in the hallway did those things and persuaded everyone around them to follow their lead and be part of their clique. To be clear, practically all of my grade was one big clique of people that dressed in clothing I couldn’t afford and acted in a repulsive manner. They just didn’t seem to have any care about the people that didn’t fit their “ideal style”, whatever that meant. I spent most of high school pretending I was talking to some friends on the phone, reading numerous gender studies books, and desperately trying to find clothes that wouldn’t make me look like a girly girl or a jock. In my school at least, there was no in-between. The in-between was something I was trying to create, but no one was joining me because my bet was that they were scared of everything besides the status quo.