By the time secondary school rolled around I was desperate to attend Charters School which was where most of my friends from St Francis were going, but instead my parents enrolled me in the Marist Senior School - an all girls Catholic school. My first day was very nerve racking as nobody from my old school was going there, and as I arrived it seemed that everybody had at least one other person from their primary school to hang around with, and often whole groups of girls stayed huddled together uninviting to anybody who tried to join them.
Fortunately enough for me, we were sat alphabetically in our first class, and I met Felicity Carpenter, who also had nobody from her primary school with her and who subsequently became my best (and only) friend throughout Year 7. We hit it off straight away and I have to say I only have fond memories of my first year at the Marist, despite the fact that for the first time in my life I was both incredibly unpopular and picked on incessantly. I think the reason it didn't really bother me was that Felicity and I knew that we were different but we didn't really give a shit, because we had each other; I remember it getting to the point where we would deliberately act weird and mental (once we announced to the class that we had converted to Buddhism, promptly sat cross-legged on the floor and started meditating and chanting loudly and if anyone came near us we swatted them with the blackboard eraser) just because we could and it was highly entertaining to see the popular girls' perplexed looks.
The main thing that Felicity and I had in common were our huge imaginations (something which I really miss now); most of our time together was spent writing our own books and play scripts and then acting them out together, and it was honestly some of the best fun I've ever had. In our breaks at school we would pore over chapter drafts and scene settings and our character developments in notebooks, and at weekends we could spend all day in the park running around acting a particular scene over and over again until we had it perfect. They were mainly fantasy based stories; we would be witches casting spells on the evil girls at our school, or adventurers on a great quest, or pirates sailing the seven seas, or wise elves destined for greatness but hindered by the wicked trolls of the east... you get the idea. We even wrote a whole novel and an uncompleted sequel which was some wonderful amalgamation of all the things we read and loved; there was the Faraway Tree from Enid Blyton's stories with different lands, I think my character was half pirate and half pixie, all our family members were plucked out of various books (Felicity's character's father was Remus Lupin, for example) and two of the main girls we disliked from school were turned into evil world-conquering monsters that could only be defeated by some kind of magical highlighter pen and the fact that my character could morph into a dog, or something.
Anyway, I digress. Unluckily for me Felicity transferred schools at the end of Year 7; we remained close until the age of 14 or so when unfortunately we seemed to mature at very different rates. Whilst I had started veering towards the world of relationships, make up, drinking, and well, being a teenager, Felicity seemed stuck in our make believe worlds and refused to talk about anything else whenever we met up. I went along with her for as long as I could, but began to find it all a bit childish and difficult to really immerse myself in make believe as I had before, and so our friendship fizzled out.
Year 8 was pretty tough for me; with Felicity gone I was left with approximately 0 friends and a 'weird girl' reputation. I was bullied by a gang of girls in my year who called themselves 'The Pinks'; they would throw my exercise books all over the classroom during break times shouting 'geek!' and take the piss out of my curly hair and braces.
However, after a couple of months luck struck me when a girl called Molly Nye sidled into our classroom one day and asked if I wanted to hang out with her group of friends. And thus, my very own teenage 'clique' was born, and the girls in this group remained my closest friends (give or take a lot of hiccups and drama) pretty much until Year 11. I wouldn't say we were the most unpopular crowd in the year, but we weren't far behind. However, again, I didn't really give a shit about being picked on anymore because I had like-minded friends.
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