Perspective

I was reminded this evening of how hard it was to be an almost teenager. Middle school was one of the worst times while I was growing up. My world revolved around school: what happened there, who liked me, who didn't, what I was going to wear while I was there...It was tough for someone like me who didn't really fit in. I got picked on, had few friends and the teachers didn't seem to care too much. If they paid any attention to me at all, it was mostly to yell or embarrass me. I do not look back fondly on that experience and certainly wish it could have been different. But if this was true for me, it was doubly true for Bryan Jackson.

Bryan Jackson was my friend. We had gone to school together since we were in 1st grade. Bryan was kind of geeky, sensitive, never wore the right things. He got picked on....alot. But he was such a nice guy, the kind that couldn't have been mean even if he had tried. We both had a tough time in 7th grade. There were a couple of teachers who seemed to have it in for us equally. The difference was, it was ok for me to cry in public, Bryan wasn't so lucky. Mrs. Laster always singled him out for no apparent reason. I guess he was an easy target. I remember her yelling at him in the hall that day. He was looking at his feet, big tears dripping off his chin. I remember it so well because that was the day he died.

His mother came home to find him bleeding to death on her bedroom floor. He hadn't meant for the gun to go off, but it did. Little Bryan Jackson died at thirteen, leaving a heartbroken family, a baby sister who was too young to remember him, and a few friends who still miss him. Ironically, his funeral was packed. Packed full of people who wouldn't give him the time of day when he was alive....but whose guilt drew them close to him once it was too late for it to matter.

If only he had known that there was a world outside of middle school...that the jocks are pumping gas and the geeks are the ones who made something of themselves. I know because I was one of them.