Your UnSlut Project

Submitted by @clarinetnerd, Author of "I Am the Future of Jupiter"

Hi, I am Maci Hebert, and people make me feel like I have a problem.

I guess it probably stemmed from an event around the middle of the fifth grade. I had somehow acquired a boyfriend through no action of my own. One of my 'friends' (I use that term extremely loosely in light of the type of people who I was friends with at this point) asked a friend of his if he wanted to go out with me. Somehow, those friends decided that me and Andrew were in love with each other.

They first told the whole school, and then turned around and told us that we were dating. Told us. Anyone who wanted to know in the entire world probably heard that we were completely infatuated before we were INFORMED that we were boyfriend/girlfriend. We decided to just let people assume and carry on with our daily business. We were really good friends at that point, so it was kind of like our own personal inside joke.

After that, people would constantly tell me things about myself I never knew. Don't you just love the rumor mill? From it, I found out that he was gay, I was gay, he was a chick, that I got a boob job for him (sure did, I'll give y'all the number: 1-800-PUB-ERTY), he was dating two other girls (what happened to him being gay?), he was an Atheist and Radical Islamic, and that I was pro-abortion (I'm not even sure how that got thrown anywhere near the mix).

Eventually, those rumors became about our intimate life. Being as we were only in sixth grade at this point, the accusations were rather minor. I was asked if it was true if we gone to the movie together, kissed, hugged, etc. It shouldn't have bothered me in the least, but it did. It wasn't these people's business. I hated it so much, and on April Fools Day, we decided we were going to break up, as a final hurrah to our inside joke. Little did we know, that would make it so much worse.

It was April 1st, 2013, and we broke up, a little over a year since our little fling began. After people figured out that we weren't joking (which was very amusing to hear, by the way - they would have full out arguments and bets and things about it while we sat back and laughed), we were full on harassed to get back together. I was actually threatened on several occasions that if I didn't get back with him I would be physically harmed.

That stopped, thank God, because the third or fourth time that happened I told that girl to stick a pencil up her ass. That reverberates with me, though, even now. I've got a bit more perspective on people lately, but it still makes no sense why some girl whose name I don't even remember would threaten to physically harm me if I didn't go out with Andrew. He said he had never even talked to the girl.

I can't even tell you how bad that made me feel. My stomach sunk to my toes. I realized that I was just cheap entertainment to these people. My relationships and intimate life where being used by other people for their own personal enjoyment. I wallowed in that all summer. I'd fight with my brain to eat and keep it down and to stay away from the knives and razors that all of the sudden seemed to be everywhere in my life suddenly.

One instance has me nearly in tears even over a year later. My dad is a police officer, and he likes knowing that I know how to shoot a gun, so he brought me for target practice. I wasn't too worried at that point about handling a potentially deadly weapon, because I couldn't hurt myself with a rifle (which is what he usually brings me to practice shooting) without him having enough time to notice and stop me.

When we got there, he took the pistol out of the case and started walking in the opposite direction. He loaded it and set me up at five yards. The whole time, I couldn't help but think how easily I could put it under my chin and pull the trigger. Dad wouldn't be able to react fast enough, and I would be dead.

I realized that if that happened, everyone would know that I had offed myself. I needed to do this strategically so that no one could degrade me after I died. My plan was to fire off twelve shots, meaning only one bullet would be left in the gun, pretend to think I had done all thirteen and swing it, carelessly looking, to the side of my head, and fire. I fired off the twelve, swung it to the side, fired, and swung it back down.