In every class it’s always the same. There’s one girl who just doesn’t quite fit, like she’s a puzzle piece accidentally thrown in from the wrong box. Even in kindergarten she was the odd one out. When the rest of us drank from glue bottles and bragged about our flexible rulers (which we didn’t know how to use), she sat quietly and concentrated on her coloring. She never colored inside the lines. It was pretty, but not how you were supposed to do it.

By third grade when my classmates and I were just dipping our toes into the concept of growing up, she blossomed like one of those sponge animals that we would grow in water. She had “boobs,” and we didn’t like that at all. The boys teased her and the girls, me included, watched with morbid curiosity as their comments bounced off of the covers of the grown-up books she used as shields to our cruelty. She had confidence, and all the teachers adored her fresh non-conformity.

But different isn’t ok in the world of lip-gloss and judgment, boys and puberty weight. The things that made her different were fine when we were all too little to care, but now we were growing up and knew what we were supposed to be. In middle school she wore political t-shirts and had arguments with teachers. She never wore makeup and her body became soft with growing. She was too smart. We reminded her every day that she wasn’t the same. It took until ninth grade for her to figure it out.

By second semester of freshman year we’d all found our places. We went to class or didn’t, we dyed our hair and went out for sports and tried weed and some of us had sex. But no matter what clique we were in, we knew exactly what we were supposed to look like. Girls passed around Victoria’s Secret catalogues in class, the models’ frosted lips, shiny hair and perfect bodies the epitome of what we wanted to be. She saw them better than we did. Or worse, depending on how one looks at it.

She was smart and she was gifted. She knew from our years of taunting that she would never belong with us, so she stayed alone and found her own “group” in the models she began to idolize. In her isolation she worked to make herself perfect. Every time we passed in the halls her eyes looked more sunken and her cheekbones more prominent. Pictures of Victoria’s angels hung in her locker as a reminder. Despite the fact that she came closer than anybody else to our idea of perfection, we continued to be cruel because we were jealous, and we were afraid of her.

She died in our junior year at seventy-four pounds, or so the story goes. She ended it with the knife, alone in her room, her grown-up books no longer able to protect her from the words that shaped her life. She was always different, and she even died that way.

Now I stand here alone, outside of her locker. I open it up and stare at the women inside. They stare back in all their pouty lipped, dewy eyed beauty. But for the first time, I see what they really are; lost girls, striving for unattainable perfection. Her eyes stare back at me through theirs, sunken and empty. They’re not beautiful, they’re dead. All of them are already dead. In the end she reached her goal. She fit in with them. She was the same.