14 Years Old

I felt a wave of relief when we arrived back in the United States. We had to travel separately from father again because he had a different flight schedule, but it wasn’t that bad on the way back because I was looking forward to playing WoW again.

I only had one free day before I had to start school. When I got back to mother’s house, I gave her a big hug... That was the longest time I had been away from mother. After that, I immediately asked if I can go on her computer and play my game. I logged onto my character, which was just the way I left it two months ago. I said hi to all of my online friends and tried to catch up on everything.

The dreaded day arrived all too soon. I had to start High School. School had already begun while I was still in Morocco, so I would be the “new kid” again. That made it so much worse. My father drove me there on the first day. When we got there, I was intimidated by all the huge high school boys, and I cried in the car for a few minutes, telling my father that I was too scared to get out.

I had to go, and eventually I did. We walked to the main office where I ran into Brice Miller. We greeted each other before I was led up to join my first class of the day. Alfred Graham was in that class, and he helped me settle in.

During lunchtime, Alfred showed me around the whole school. I started to feel a lot more comfortable. He introduced me to some of the other freshmen. In the courtyard, I met Pascal and his clique of friends. I immediately took a disliking to them. Pascal was cocky and popular, so I felt intimidated. He was like the Crespi equivalent of Robert Morgan. As I met a few more people, I ran into Keaton Webber! I didn’t expect to find any more people I knew at Crespi. It really took me by surprise. I hadn’t seen Keaton since he left Topanga Elementary at the end of Fourth Grade. Keaton was still the arrogant jerk he always was at Topanga, and he had his own clique of skateboarder friends, such as Andy Moussa and Aaron Amman.

As I expected, I failed to make any new friends. I was so overwhelmed by the brutality of the world that I just didn’t care anymore. On the very first week, I had my first experience of true bullying, not just the teasing I had at Pinecrest. Some horrible Twelfth Graders saw me as a target because I looked like a ten year old and I was physically weak. They threw food at me during lunchtime and after school. It enraged me, but I was too scared to do anything about it. What kind of horrible, depraved people would poke fun at a boy younger than them who has just entered high school? I thought to myself.

After the first few weeks of high school, I concluded that my time at Crespi would not be pleasant at all. I withdrew further into the World of Warcraft, neglecting my homework and spending all of my free time playing it.

As a late birthday present, father bought me a new laptop that was able to run WoW. It wasn’t a very powerful laptop, but it performed adequately. This enabled me to have more time playing my game. During father’s week, Soumaya was always on my back about how much time I spent on WoW, but since my room was on the bottom floor, secluded from the rest of the house, I was able to sneak as much time on it as I could.

While I was playing WoW after dinner at mother’s house once, I heard my sister watching the new show Avatar: The Last Airbender on the television. I decided to check it out. I soon found myself really enjoying it. It was a magnificent story set in a fantasy world where people can control the power of the elements. Once I watched the first episode, I was hooked on the story. Prince Zuko was my favorite character; he was a banished prince who was trying to regain his rightful place in the world. I always related to him. Avatar: The Last Airbender became my favorite T.V. show.

My mother informed me that she was just on the phone to Arte Ellis, and he told her that James now played World of Warcraft. I was very pleased to hear this. I could now share my greatest interest in the world with my good friend... my only friend. I then went over to James’s house for a sleepover, which I hadn’t done for a while. He showed me his WoW character, who was only level 20. We weren’t on the same server, so we couldn’t play it together. The only way would be for one of us to start over, and we were too immersed in our characters to do that. I was fine with that. James was really fascinated by my level 60 character, and most of the time he would just watch me play, anyway. We also played a lot of Halo 2 together.

Having these common interests with James reminded me of the good old days when we were children; when we were both interested in skateboarding, and before that, Pokemon. This nostalgic experience provided a small respite from my sufferings at school.

My life at Crespi got even worse. Alfred and Brice apparently told everyone how weird I was at Pinecrest, and people in my own grade started to tease me. They found out that I didn’t like being called a skateboarder, and it was true. Because I failed to become good at skateboarding, I developed a hatred for the sport, and whenever someone called me a skateboarder, it reminded me of my failure and I got very angry. The whole school started calling me it just to anger me, along with other insulting names. They teased me because I was scared of girls, calling me names like “faggot”. People also liked to steal my belongings and run away in an attempt to get me to chase after them. And I did chase after them in a furious rage, but I was so little and weak that they thought it was comical. I hated everyone at that school so much.