I don't know where to start.
There was this girl in my 8th grade class, who I became friends with on the first day. I'm going to call her Lea. I didn't know anything about her, but she was just sitting on the bench alone. I decided to go and talk to her, and we quickly became friends.
I wish I had never done that.
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Now I was homeschooled for 6th & 7th grade, so I had no idea what the last year of middle school was like. I've heard middle school was worse than high school (which I still don't know the answer to because I've never been to an actual public high school).
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I made another friend, who I'll call Abby. Abby told me that Lea was in her class last year, and that she was really...complicated. I had no idea what she was talking about. But as weeks passed, I began to see what Lea was truly like. She despised school, and she made sure all the teachers knew it. There was one teacher she especially despised so much, that she did something that got her expelled.
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She hated the teacher because she (Lea) had recently come out, and the teacher refused to call her by her new pronouns.
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I understood her reaction and frustration, but then here's what happened. She made a hate page of the teacher on Instagram, which quickly gained a hundred followers. She posted about thirty pictures of the teacher, transphobic memes, and offensive posts about her kids.
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I literally have no idea how she took a picture of the teacher at Walmart and the gas station.
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Anyway, I ignored it, because everyone else in the school thought it was hilarious. I read the comments on one of her posts, saying how it violated the teacher's privacy. Lea and a bunch of other people told them to "f*ck off," and "learn to take a joke." So I just kept ignoring it.
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Then Lea asked me to help her, with the hate page. I soon learned she had a lot of people basically stalk the teacher and take pictures of her wherever she went. I refused, and she said that was fine. The truth is, I didn't tell any adult about what they were doing, because I was scared of Lea.
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The next day, we were giving presentations about either Oregon, California, or Michigan. Lea did a presentation on Oregon, and she basically talked about all the different kinds of homophobic churches that burnt gay people. People laughed. Seriously.
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I went back to check on the hate page. There was a string of comments and replies in one post. Someone and Lea were arguing, and their responses were both angry and long. That someone remained anonymous, but she was later revealed to be someone from our class. Lea or one of her friends made a hate page about her too. They posted a leaked photo of her and her family, followed by really, really terrible comments.
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The girl and her family reported it to the principal and the police. The original decision was to suspend her for a month, but later it was decided she was going to be expelled. It turns out, her parents admitted her to a mental hospital. I have no idea what else happened to her or her friends.
I wish I had done something earlier so a girl and her family wouldn't have been been in this situation.
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Do you know what's the worst? Students didn't give a sh*t about a family who was put in danger on social media. They just protested and called the police homophobic slurs.
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That's when I knew I didn't ever want to go to a school again.
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It's been years since this happened. She randomly texted me today, asking if I was coming to school this year. I thought I blocked her years ago.365Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjgAHwamFjY
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