"And Hell Yeah, I'm The Mothuhf**king Princess"

Ima gonna tell y'all a little storeh.

Picture it... all-girls high school, 1997-1998.

My final year in a school that had grown increasingly inadequate, in other words, it was getting too small, literally and figuratively. I yearned to breathe the fresher air of some other place, to meet other people and no longer have the same 70 girls I've known for four years around me. I was tired of the fug that I breathed day in and day out.

The feeling was mutual. There was a dramatic shift in our final year together. Cliques and best friends no longer spoke to one another and it was a year for outcasts. Many new islands formed at lunch, with girls who were ousted and suddenly found themselves breaking bread with nerds, a rejected 'princess', smellies, cheerleaders... There was also an outbreak of wars between people who had been sewed at the hip to one another the last three years. That year, Ebony and Erin had a screaming match during homeroom. Ebony was seen running down the hallway and was followed by the clatter of a desk as it crashed against the walls. Melissa and Annmarie didn't speak, didn't look at one another, except to glare and whisper some lie or truth about the other. And both sets of twins were out for the other set.

All around me hell had broken loose. It seemed that our tight bonds were succumbing to the pressure of the ever-increasing crush from a school that was shrinking. People wondered if we would make it to graduation day or would we eat eachother alive.

I see now that many of the friendships were made in self-defense. These people would hardly have been best friends in the outside world but forced to do so in such a small environment. Given a glimpse of a freedom our eyes finally saw what we hid from ourselves the past three years. These people sucked! Why did I ever listen to one thing she said? She's just so stupid!

I think back and wonder if maybe it wouldn't have escalated so far if we were a bigger school, a school of hundreds in one graduating class rather than 70.

At this time my friendships had started to pull apart, there were no screaming matches or knives in backs, there were still phone calls and shared lunch tables and gossip. But this was the time I met Rich and so I drew apart, often watching what was going around me in disinterest. It was surreal. I didn't get caught up in all the politics, and a part of me had foreseen this the first days of freshman year, when everyone began to form, and so I wasn't surprised when it did happen. The feeling was almost "didn't I read this somewhere?" or "wasn't there a movie made about this?"

In the end we picked up the broken pieces, trying to hold everything together with some invisible tape but the cracks were showing, the damage was obvious. Some people managed to forgive one another "for the sake of what once was" and the rest of us held together with the attitude of "grin and bear it, it's almost over." So we made it to graduation, without a hitch, but once I said 'goodbye' to everyone, I never looked back.


Fin.

Me.

Oh yeah, my ten year reunion is coming up.