The Story of Maria
Maria had come to hate school.
She used to love it when she was younger. In elementary school, all of her teachers loved having her in class. It did not matter that she was the only black girl in class. She was the kid they would hope to have on their rosters every fall. She worked hard. She asked questions when she needed help. She got along with everyone in class. She was just an all around “good kid.”
But then came middle school.
She felt like one day she just woke up in a grown woman’s body. Her hormones were through the roof. Her menstrual cramps were often too much to endure. She had more acne than her peers were ready to handle.
And her figure? She was taller than most of the boys in her class. Her hair was harder to manage as she couldn’t quite pull off the little girl pigtails anymore and her mom would not let her dabble in the world of artificial hair just yet.
Her skin was getting darker. She could not wear the clothes in the junior section without showing off too much skin. And she had more curves than the Mississippi river.
It didn’t help that at the same time her mom and dad split. Her dad moved out after thirteen years of marriage. The house that was once filled with four happy (or what she thought were happy) family members dwindled down to two lonely females. Her dad had taken her older brother to live with him.
Since she was now in middle school, seven other fifth grade classes came together to comprise a student body of over 400 sixth graders, a vast difference from the sixty-five she was promoted to middle school with. All of these new faces were not as forgiving as what she had become accustomed to.
And that led to the further demise.
A core group from one of the other schools decided that a full-figured twelve year old black girl with unruly hair and grownup clothes was not the poster child for middle school life.
On a daily basis, she would run out of fingers counting how many times this group called her “whore,” “slut,” “black tramp,” “fat skank.”
And those were the nice names.
The crowd that would watch started small. Over the school year it steadily grew until it eventually included some of her former kindergarten classmates.
She would tell her mom, but she had her own issues working through the legality of the divorce and the emotions of her hurt that she did not have the time or energy to deal with Maria’s issues. And the more that her mother relied on the bottle to soothe her own pain, she decided to not bother her with these “pre-teen issues.”
So she was quickly running out of options. Out of escapes. One Thursday evening, when her mom was at the bar and after seeing the post on social media from that core group, the post alleging that she had performed countless sexual acts on the high school baseball team, she was done. And before anyone had the time to reach out and offer help,
Maria was gone.
Story Prompt: (ad-lib style) Fill in the following blanks:
___(adjective) __(noun), who
___(verb) ___(subject), then
___(related verb) ___(resolution).
An outcast teenager seeks to fit in with the rest of her class then decides that the pain of loneliness is too much to bare.