Your UnSlut Project

Submitted by @IntrovertedInsomniac, Author of "A Blur of Gray"

When I was in fifth grade my best (and only) friend in my class was a boy. This was because my fourth grade year was full of girl drama and I was sick of it. I'm not a big fan of drama (in real life anyway). I've always been a bit introverted, so he was pretty much the only one I talked to while in school. I'm sure that by now you can see where all of this is going.

The beginning of my harassment was fairly uneventful. It was just a random kissy face made by someone here, an 'Are you two married yet?' there. But then things progressed much farther than they should have from a group of eleven year olds.

I remember one day I had taken my friend's lunch bag, just for something to do. A kid walked up to us and loudly shouted, "You got your hoe carrying your bag for you?" to my friend. I was ten. I'd never been kissed or had a boyfriend and my only crush was on Nevilletormentor from Harry Potter (I just realized that all of those things are still true, wow). But because I was a platonic friend of a male, I was a whore.

At first I thought that the one kid would be our only problem. Sure, he was popular and all, but the other kids never really latched onto the idea. It was just him and a few friends at first. Three or four is better than the whole class, but that doesn't make it less of an issue. I was still being shamed for being a slut, when in all honesty I had never even held hands (in a romantic way, I mean holding hands non-romantically is kind of inevitable) with a boy before.

It is no secret that rumors spread faster than the speed of light. When all the school had to talk about for the last month was how bad the school food was (seriously, they never spoke of anything else), of course any news of my friend and me was a Big Deal. To this day I still don't completely understand why. The other students, including the biggest tormentor, had 'boyfriends' and 'girlfriends'. Perhaps it was because we fought it.

This one girl, the cause of all the girl drama in my life the previous year, finally saw what was going on. I suppose that she thought that it would be a good idea to add fuel to the fire. Picture this, the nice, preppy, smart one spreading rumors about the quiet, kind of dark, nerdy one. Well that girl was so great, right? (Wrong.) She wouldn't say something that wasn't true. (Yes she would.) Now this girl was basically the leader of all the girls in the class, so as soon as she said something my life became a living hell. All the girls, along with most of the boys, thought I was a total slut by this point.

The worst part about it was that the boy and I had the same last name without being related at all. So the person would have to ask us if we were related and the second we said no, they started in. This turned out to be our saving grace, because eventually we just started saying that we were related. If they mentioned that we'd denied it before, we simply said that we didn't want to seem lame, being best friends with our cousin. Surprisingly, this actually worked. I was so lucky because of this, otherwise there's no telling how bad all of that would have gotten.