Three Strikes

STEPHANIE

In middle school, you live your life with the popular kids as the rulers of it all. You might even be part of that group.

Maybe you have friends who everyone wants to be friends with. Somehow they always end up mixed into some sort of drama. They also tend to know all the drama that is going on since they always somehow end up involved in it. This is the popular group.

You might also have friends who seem to already have found their best friend for life. They are exactly like each other and it is incredibly hard to hang out with them because their group is very secluded.

Then you might have those friends who love to make inappropriate jokes and point out the obvious to everyone. These friends are full of laughter and fun times no matter what. These people are also well known throughout the school and could be part of the popular group as well.

It is also possible you have friends who are sporty. They play sports and do active things. These people can sometimes be known by a quite a few people. Then again, they could be known by only a few people.

There are also friends that you could have that are extreme nerds some of the time. These people you can catch talking about science and math.

We can’t forget the fashionistas who are always in style. They are the girly girls of your school. They are well known and are probably always trying to get a boyfriend. These people are very obsessed with beauty and appearance and calories and fat and whatever else that leads to looking good. The fashionistas are also most likely a snobbish bunch. They will be the students with beauty products with them 99.9% of the time.  

You could also be like me. I am in the middle of a girly girl and a tomboy. I have traits on either side. I love sports. I don't know how to play them, but they’re interesting to me. I also enjoy some of those things that girly girls do.

Middle school is when the clicks start and friends from elementary join one group of friends. Maybe you'll join another and all your talk with them about nothing ever separating you disappears like it never existed. But what if something happened to them? Would you help them or would you walk away?

Would you torture your old friend(s)? What if something happened that brought everyone back together? What if you got a second chance to be yourself, to forget what your new friends say, to be the person you should be, your true self? What would you do? Would you take that chance? Would you?

I’m in a totally unique group. With only myself in it. All of my friends left me.

Cole is in the group of sporty people. He is no longer himself. His once kind personality is gone. He now bullies everyone, even his old friends. He has short, beautiful, shiny, silky, black hair. Cole's eyes are a dark warm brown and he has dark brown skin.

Seth is part of the popular crowd. He doesn't pay attention to any of his old friends. In his mind, we are just losers. His golden blonde hair is cut short and his eyes are a bright blue color. His skin is lightly tanned and has a tendency to glow, which is surprising considering that we all live in Portland, Oregon, where the sun rarely shines.

Ella is part of the nerds. She isn't extreme; Ella just likes math and science and so she has a lot in common with the nerds of our school, even though she will never truly be one. She hates all of her old friends: Cole, Seth, me, and the rest of our old group. Her now hot pink hair is grown down to her shoulders and she has bangs that lay over her left eye. Her eyes are still beautiful--sparkling light green on the right and dark green on the left. Her dark, tanned skin is naturally given to her.

Natasha is in the group that thinks she’s found her true friends. Her group has three people in it including her. Her black hair is cut just at her chin. She has dark shiny hazel colored eyes and pale white skin. She is one of the tallest girls in our grade.

Will is in the group that points out the obvious and are always having a fun time. His eyes have always been full of laughter. He stands at six feet tall already and his red hair is cut short. His skin is pale like the majority of the students at our school. I miss his laughter and his jokes that he would share every day. Will acts like his old group doesn't exist. All the old memories we all had together are gone. He thinks of our past as days that should never have happened.

Stephanie (that's me), misses the good old days when her friends were a group and love was a joke and the idea of our group of friends separating was impossible. My dark brown hair is cut long half way down my back. My eyes are a creamy brown and my skin is lightly tanned. I am in my own group. An outsider or a loner, they could call me.

In fact, that is what they call me. Someone who doesn't belong. Our group had formed in third grade and it had started with just two of us and then it grew as the years passed. We weren’t like a middle school group where we were stuck with one personality or one group. In elementary, we were friends with whomever we wanted, but that didn’t mean they wanted to or had to join our group.

I never meant for this to happen...and truthfully I’m not even really in this story. For reasons I will never understand I had the misfortune to have a series of three devastating events happen to me. I had an ongoing streak of bad luck.

It all started when I was home asleep in my bed. I was always paranoid, so when I thought I heard someone break in I ignored it, deciding I was just being over-paranoid. So when I got up to get a glass of water, you can imagine my surprise to find a man coming down the stairs in my house.

I didn’t even really see his face. All I saw was a scared expression on his face and then I saw his gun. I screamed, but it was too late, he shot me and then ran. I tried to reach my room where my phone was charging, but it was a useless effort. Eventually I heard my neighbor coming toward my house. I doubt it had been long after I was shot, but to me it felt like hours. He had heard the gunshot and had called police. When he looked into the window, he saw his twelve year old neighbor lying on the ground and bleeding. My neighbor is only twenty-four and still quite young. Actually, he had inherited the house he lived in from his parents who had died last summer after they had been hit by a drunk driver.

I don't really remember much after that. I remember bits of pieces of him breaking the door down, of being loaded into the ambulance, of waking up still in the ambulance and being told I had died, of the doctors standing over me in the hospital as they worked as fast as they could. The next solid memory I have is waking up to see my parents next to me. Both their heads popped right up and they had their parental looks on when they saw me awake.

They called the doctor in and I was informed of my condition. It wasn't good. I had been hit with four bullets. That's right, I had been shot four times. Crazy, right? They said it was miracle I was still alive. That wasn’t even the worst part. While in the hospital they had discovered something else. Almost as bad, but maybe a little worse. I haven’t exactly decided yet.

Anyway, back to what they had found. If being shot with four bullets wasn’t bad enough, it turns out I have cancer. Yeah, you heard me right. I have CANCER. Leukemia, to be exact. To be absolutely precise, I have acute lymphocytic leukemia.

It’s a cancer that starts in the bone marrow, which is where all our blood is made. Luckily we caught it early, everyone kept saying. I still don’t know if getting shot and then finding out you had cancer was lucky. One person brought up maybe it was lucky I had gotten shot. If I hadn't gotten shot they wouldn’t have ever noticed I had cancer. I still don’t want to think of any of this as lucky.

The saddest part was that I had no friends. The only visitors I had were my family. I mean, it isn't that I wasn't happy my family was there, it’s just that sometimes you need a strong support system that only your closest friends can provide. I was times like these that it showed the most. All I wanted was for my old friends to come and visit me

I was in the hospital for a while. I don’t really remember how long. I remember my parents bringing my homework to me so I could keep up. While I was in the hospital, the doctors started coming up with a treatment plan for me which they would start immediately as soon as I was strong enough.

I don’t really remember the treatment plan either. I know it involved chemotherapy but that’s really all I understood. They said if we were lucky, they hoped I would be cancer free within nine months.

And it was a nine long, tiring months at that.

The only good part about those nine months was that they passed extremely fast. I lost my hair and ended up wearing a wig or hat whenever I went out. The wigs were absolutely unbearable so I tended to stick with the hat instead.

It took longer than nine months for me to be cancer free. Fifteen months and nine days to be exact, but who's counting?

By the time I was cancer free, I was halfway through eighth grade year. School life was torturous. I was shoved around, had my locker broken into about a dozen times a month. It didn’t matter how many times I changed lockers or combinations, and believe me I tried that a LOT. I wore a wig to school due to my lack of hair and even though it was now slowly coming back, I still looked bald.

I didn’t need any jokes on my lack of hair. No one knew I had had cancer. I had wanted it that way. My teachers knew as did most the staff, but none of the students did. It was the one thing I felt I could control.

I passed my old friends everyday in the hall and all I wanted to do was talk to them. The medical bills were piling up. Between being shot and having cancer, we had a lot of bills. Yeah, our insurance covered some of it, but not enough. My parents were stressed and tried not to show it. They started to argue all the time. My dad now works two jobs and so does my mom. I hardly ever see them anymore.

The guy who shot me still has not been caught. He’s out there somewhere. I often still have nightmares of that night. My parents really want me to go see a therapist, but I refuse. I have many reasons as to why I do not want to. One of them is I simply do not want to talk to some stranger about how I feel and what is going on and what has happened. Another reason is that I think it’s a waste of money. Money that we really need right now.

I’ll have to keep my eye out for any sign that my cancer is back. That’s what everyone keeps telling me. They say they doubt it will, but that I should still be cautious.

I read every day whenever I’m not doing anything else. I have read 100 books within the last 6 months. Yeah, that’s right, 100 books in six months.

I really need to get a life. A life requires friends, though. Of which I of course have none. Everything was great until the fateful day when the I once again had bad luck. It was the third strike. The first strike was me getting shot, then the second strike was when I had cancer, and then the third strike happened on July 1st, 2015.

I decided to treat myself to some ice cream and a new book. Of course that meant leaving my house. The grocery store was only about a 10 minute walk from my house and then the locally owned bookstore ‘Freedom’ was a five minute walk from there. The owners of ‘Freedom’ were a husband and wife, Wesley and Lily Groves. They had four children and Lily was currently pregnant with another. They are honestly so sweet.

I got my ice cream, a small container of death by chocolate, my favorite flavor, and then I headed toward the bookstore. I was crossing the street to get to the store when I heard the screams of a couple across the street. I turned to look and they were yelling and pointing toward something. I turned to look at what they were pointing at.

By then it was too late. The car was speeding toward me and there was no way it could stop in time. I had no chance. It was a blur of gray and then everything was black. This is where the story begins... at the third strike.