I clearly remember my first day of high school. My mum made my sister and I stand in the driveway, while she took pictures of us standing cute and smug with our new school bags. When I think back to those early days, I feel like I was on autopilot. I feel like I don’t remember much until when I turned 14 or 15, and the real fun began. In year 3, when I was seven my family moved to the south coast of New South Wales. At school I unknowingly met 2 of the most influential people in my life. One was tall with long white blonde hair. She was the most outgoing and rebellious person I had ever met. She was fun, mischievous and talented in so many ways. I don’t even remember how we met. I just remember sitting next to her in school as teachers threw chalkboard erasers at her and standing next to her on the oval while she kicked footballs and kissed boys behind the stump in the playground. We were seven, and she made me laugh like I never had before.
The other was small for her age, and continued to be all throughout adulthood. She was energetic and bright eyed, with long curly brown hair, olive-edged skin and freckles. She had a wide smile, and had frequent and loud bursts of energy and excitement all of the time. She made me feel adventurous, and a little bit crazy. And although I didn’t notice it at the time, she was also one of the shrewdest and most intelligent people I’ve ever known; which is not something people notice about her all the time. I remember how I met her, we bumped heads while rolling down a hill in a big group of our friends, pretending to be blind dogs; which is ridiculous but so much fun.
For six months we went to school together and then after my stepfather died I moved to a different primary school. I was eight, and I remember wishing I was a witch all of the time, and constantly embarrassing myself. Many people think high school is where young people are the worst- but primary school was much worse for me. I think I was emotionally immature or something, I never quite understood what was going on around me, and why it wasn’t a good thing to be myself, or be different. I was bullied for things I didn’t understand, people thought I was weird, and as I grew into myself I went through stages where that really hurt me, and stages where I didn’t really care. It was the most confusing time, in so many ways. It made it harder that I couldn’t find anyone to connect with like I had with the girls at my old school.
Anyway, in years five and six I started to grow a lot more confident and started recognising the fact that just because people didn’t understand me, it didn’t make me a bad person. I started making friends a lot easier, and because I still lived in the same town I always had, I started talking to the brown-haired pocket-rocket again. She lived right around the corner from me, and I knew her best friend from the surf group I’d joined a year earlier. We’d play dolls and conspire against our imaginary enemies together. Watch horror movies and tell stories and go swimming and camping in the back yard. We’d watch tv and just be comfortable. I’d never had a friend like that.
So, it might have been her 12th birthday, or 11th. And all her friends from school came over and we set up camp in her backyard, I fell back into the old crowd easily, especially since I’d been surfing with half of them for the past two or three years. We stared up at the sky in amazement as it looked like spaceships were flying ahead of us, fighting each other. I swear, we all thought we had witnessed something incredible and other-worldly at that moment. Then we fell asleep to the sounds of the waves crashing nearby and another friend singing along to ‘sexy back’ on her iPod.
I don’t regret a thing.