Your UnSlut Project

Submitted by Anonymous

So at the end of the school year this year, I was in eighth grade. I am smart, normal looking, with smart friends. I was dubbed "Loud, Talkative, Nice, Smart, Exuberant," but sometimes "obnoxious." But honestly, as long as I could laugh so loud it echoed down the hallway, or talk so loud people asked if I was deaf, I was fine with whatever people thought about me, really. I had friends, who I knew genuinely liked me, and I genuinely liked. My life was pretty perfect.

My school on the other hand, was interesting. We had cliques that were less obvious, and meanness was a lot different than in most cliche movies. Most rumors took at least a couple of days to spread, and most of the time they were 70% true with some embellishments, overreactions, or slight errors, since our teachers gossiped just as much as we did.

Still, our school was filled half with middle and upper class kids, and half with kids who were living in government assisted living, so you'll always have the girls with their Abercrombie and Fitch clothes looking down upon the girls with the slightly revealing clothes from Kohls and Rainbow.

A new girl from the inner city came to our school. Not much was thought of it at first. (I mean she was the 4th student to come to our grade alone from a poverty stricken city.) But just 2 weeks later, word broke out that she had had sex with one of the boys in our grade, and someone had caught it on video, and another kid was watching it in math class and had been caught.

I didn't know who it was at the time, and the rumor hadn't even reached my friends or me yet. So when a new girl had already been transfered into our gym class, I figured as none of the people who normally jumped to welcome the girl to a group, it was my job. Plus, I only had 3 friends in my gym class, and none of them I was particularly close with.

She was pretty nice. We talked about things to do in our city, and the kids in our grade. (Nothing stood out to me, she seemed pretty normal and nice.) We laughed together when a kid who was known for his dramatic dives in gym class during dodgeball finally got what was coming to him, and took his arrogance down a notch, dove to "save" the ball, (even though a girl who was the softball captain could've easily caught the ball). And since he had dove for the ball instead of tried to catch it like a normal person, it hit him in the face.

So to be honest the next day, Friday, a week from the day the rumor got out, I was stunned when the popular girl who sits next to me in math told me the new girl had had sex with a kid in our grade and it had been texted to many of the popular kids.

I liked that popular girl honestly, but when she started spewing about how much of a bitch this girl was, and how much of a slut, and how gross she was, I felt my insides churn.

Now, I know that the popular girl had never even really done more than a pretty innocent kiss, but I thought it was so unfair. I mean the girl hadn't consented for her sex life to be videotaped, and I knew plenty of kids who had had sex in our grade. (I was lucky enough to get a locker next to a kid last year who seemed to know about every single person in eighth grade who had sex, though I'm pretty sure the number stayed under 20, so it probably wasn't that hard of a job.) And I also knew none of them sat at a table by themselves in a corner, and that people didn't trip them, or snicker at them.

The worst I had ever seen at my school were off-hand comments that were taken too seriously, or maybe pretty mean comments. The offense was rarely repeated, and if it was, it was always reciprocated, if not by the person then by other people in the grade. The arguments or fights in our grade weren't pretty but both parties almost always came out equally guilty.

But this was different, because little did I know, while I was just learning about this, in the other eighth grade math class that was going on at the exact same time, second to last period on a friday, two kids were watching the WHOLE video, and they were caught by the math teacher.

That Monday in gym class, the new girl was nowhere to be found. I sat back down with my friends and managed to hit the whiffle ball on the first try, something that, given my lack of hand-stick coordination, was quite a feat.

I had no other classes with the new girl, and the rest of my week was normal, except for the fact that the new girl didn't show up for a single gym class. The next day on Monday she showed up. I saw her and walked up to her.

"Where have you been?" I asked worriedly, but also slightly curiously. I mean she'd been gone for a whole week of school, and she didn't have a cast, she didn't carry around a box off tissues, and she looked relatively well.

When she didn't answer, I realized the whole locker room was silent, and she lifted her head from her locker and looked at me. She slowly rolled her eyes and snorted, turning back to her locker.

"Sheesh." I muttered under my breath, before walking back to my locker. I opened the thing up and dressed like I did every other day, and walked and sat with my friends. The gym class was buzzing, the normally drowsy eighth graders drudging through first period on Monday were gone, and their eyes shone with excitement.

"What the hell is their problem?" I whispered to one of my friends, who looked at me before shrugging.

"She's such a whore, she got suspended for fucking (I'm leaving out the name) and they videotaped it." A popular girl exclaimed, happy to supply gossip. I cringed at her rude explanation, I opened my mouth to say something, but the gym slowly and miraculously quieted. It was eerily silent when she walked in. She moved to the end of the line and sat down criss-cross apple sauce.

No one said anything for a minute, before settling into stiff conversations that seemed to skirt around what everyone really wanted to know.

It was the way the school handled it that stuck with me until the last day of school. Everyone seemed to think the best way to handle it was to pretend to ignore it completely, even though we all know that it was what everyone was thinking. Two teachers accidentally confirmed what we were all thinking: she and a couple other kids had been suspended because of it.

My friend group was the second "prudiest" (the first "prudiest" being the friend group that literally assembled because they prided the fact that they claimed that they wouldn't even kiss a guy till their wedding day). It was an all-girl group.

I personally think we were all dubbed this, due to the fact that we thought middle school relationships were stupid. I mean, it's just a label, and permission to hold hands. Like hell, if I want to hold hands with some kid, I'll hold hands with him. I don't need the whole school buzzing with the information in a week.

But even we were talking about it. In a way that I'm pretty sure only we could.

"I think it's so stupid, she's ruining her life," Sally said.

"I don't think it was entirely her fault," I defended.

"So she just fell onto his dick," Grace retorted.

"No, I'm just saying, it's not like she asked for the video to be taken," I said.

"Dan said she looked straight into the camera," Caroline stated.

"And is Dan a reliable source?" Jack asked.

"No." Caroline admitted.

"And it's not like she's the only one in our grade who's had sex, but we're not talking about how they ruined their lives," I argued.

"So you're saying that if you decided you wanted to have sex, we aren't allowed to come to school the next day and huff about how you ruined your life?" Sally rationalized. "I mean if we didn't, we wouldn't be good friends, would we?"

"But what's so bad about having sex?" I demanded. "I mean hell, we're all going to have it at one point! Does it really effect her character if she decided that she's ready for sex?!"

"Yes! It's an obvious judge of character. It shows she's impulsive and probably has another reason, because no one really feels ready when their in eighth grade." Grace calmly said.

"How would you know? Are you in every eighth grader's brain? No. Maybe she does feel ready."

"Can we just call it a truce?" Jack asked, and I only nodded after Grace did.

And for the first time, I don't think we all came out of a lunch argument not having taken something personally.

We only had half a week until the last day of school, and after the new girl graduated, she didn't come back, and I'm not sure if she's staying or if she moved.