Chapter 3: Acne

My face got really greasy and my first acne emerged the day before 6th grade. Derek was kind enough to inform me (“Ewwwww, what are those big red dots on your face”) before I felt around my face until my finger met a little bump. Then another, and another, all on my forehead. I wished my hair was longer so it could have hidden my ugliness.

So, with fresh oil covering my face, I got on my bus for the first day of middle school. At the next stop I heard a thump as Ryan sat down next to me.

“I’m so nervous,” he said. “Are you?”

“I guess. I’m always nervous,” I confessed, feeling my sunglasses beginning to slide down my nose. I pushed them up again self-consciously.

“You look really… cool… in those sunglasses,” Ryan told me. It sounded like he was almost going to say you look good but stopped himself. I wondered why.

“By the way, where were you before you moved here?” I was dying to know where that amazing accent came from.

“Oh, we lived in Indiana since I was 7 but I was born in the Philippines.”

“Are you a citizen?”

“Yeah, my mom’s from the US.”

I nodded.

“Where’d you come from? I’ve seen your parents at PTA meetings. They don’t resemble you.” The bus bumped and his voice lurched with it.

“I lived near here all my life, but my parents were Indian. They couldn’t take care of me so my grandma raised me until..” The knot in my throat was threatening to undo itself. I forced my tears back down.

“Oh,” he said. “My grandma died too. When I was 7. That’s why we moved back here, because my grandma didn’t leave the house to us in the will even though we were living with her.”

The bus stopped and I heard the scuffling of feet.

“You need help getting out or anything?” Ryan asked, the uncertainty back in his voice.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m fine on my own.”

English class seemed useless from the beginning. Our teacher was an old woman with a flat voice, and the classroom smelled ever-so-slightly of expired yogurt. I didn’t get the point of taking English when we grew up learning it. It wasn’t like a foreign language or anything.

The good thing is that I had most of my classes with Ryan. I wanted to see him so desperately with my own eyes; if only they functioned correctly. He had peanut butter and jelly for lunch, and tore off his crust. I tried to hide my disgust at that, I had always considered it a waste of time to rip off the crust. Everyone seemed to do it and I had no idea why.

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Throughout that year we grew into a little friend group of 6 people: Me, Ryan, Mark, Jeffrey, Lamar, James. We all talked about crazy things and did some weird stuff but we were good kids (and nerdy, I’ll admit). I learned to laugh and have fun and just relax that year, learned the fizz of the coke and the sound of Lamar’s skateboard rolling up and down the track when we’d go to the park.

As far as home life, things weren’t going so well. Daria was diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome and my ‘parents’ simply didn’t know how to deal with her. Derek would always beg me to play with him because he was lonely and no one else was there to play with him. Something had happened at his school which lowered his popularity significantly. He refused to tell me what it was, but I remembered hearing my parents say something about him wetting his pants. Even for a 7-year-old, that was pure humiliation. I didn’t let him know that I also found it incredibly funny.