Read Online The Sunset Strip Diaries by Amy Asbury - Free Book Online Page B

fact. The entire three grades of Middleton Junior High had taken place solely on the second floor of one office building! My whole junior high experience consisted of only three classrooms! I couldn’t believe I had been set loose in this colossal institution with no one to tell me where to go and what to do. I wanted to run back to my house and cry for ten days straight.
     
    Not only was I scared, alone, and ignorant of where anything was, but I had gone completely overboard on my “look.” I thought, Okay, this is high school. I need to walk through the doors looking like a hot babe! So I put on something really skimpy, because I thought that is what high school kids looked like.  I had never been so wrong.
     
    I barreled through the doors in an off-the-shoulders black shirt, a really short skirt and very high heels. The entire place looked at me as if I was insane. I was floored. I thought, Isn’t this what I’m supposed to look like, who I’m supposed to be? I was wayyyyy overdressed for a student, and way overdressed for a teenager in general. People started laughing at me. Guys talked shit under their breath; girls giggled. I could hear people whispering that I was a hooker. I wanted to die. I teetered around in my high heels, trying to walk on cracked cement with my new books in hand and a cigarette hanging off my lips. I could barely make it up the stairs without falling. I looked around at the other girls and they were dressed in regular clothes, like the girls at Middleton. Almost all of them looked completely innocent. I looked like I was about to hit the stage at The Spearmint Rhino. I couldn’t believe I was so off the mark with my look. What an idiot! No one wanted to be my friend. I would only embarrass the shit out of anyone who stood next to me. I was so humiliated that I stared at the ground all day- I couldn’t look anyone in the eye.
     
    I ran into Jeff Hunter a few times at school and he wouldn’t give me the time of day. He had distanced himself from me and it was clear I was not to try to hang around him. He had quickly started dating a senior named Shannon, and she was already his girlfriend. He told her he had hooked up with me over the summer and she was not very happy about that. She took to yelling “SLUT!” at me in the halls, in front of everyone. This was only in September and I had three more years of high school to go. My reputation was completely ruined by the first month of school and, even though that girl would graduate in June, that rep stuck by me and ruined me for the rest of high school. I was still a virgin and I was already being called a whore.
     
    But back to this scraggly, hesher bitch, Shannon. She was pretty ballsy, now that I think about it, because she was about half the size of me. I should’ve kicked her ass but I didn’t know that I could at that point.
     
    I remember being pissed that I spent all of that time becoming the Ultimate Rock Chick and then looking at who Jeff Hunter chose over me. She wore flannel shirts and those knee-high, suede moccasin boots with fringe. She had huge bags under her eyes, wore no makeup, and had thin, short, feathered hair with a roach clip fastened into it. She had no tits, no hips, and no lips. Come on! I thought.
     
    But I was too much of everything and I was displaying it all at the same time; I was too embarrassing for any boy to get near. I remember wondering why all of the girls in the locker room were staring at me when I changed for P.E. Must have been the fact that I was in a red lace Fredrick’s of Hollywood matching bra and panty set while they were wearing Sears cotton undies. I wore full-on lingerie under my clothes! I mean, how did I even get that stuff?
     
    So anyway, after a month or so, I did the only thing someone in my situation could do. I found the misfit crowd who hung out in the smoking section. They were the rejects of all of the cliques. Anyone who didn’t fit in to the popular crowds went