Today I walked up to my locker and no surprise there was a fork sticking out the front. “How original; not like I haven’t seen that a million times. I get forks handed to me all day. On my birthday they are even wrapped huge bow tied to the front. The whole fork joke is kind of getting old, “I mean it’s been 4 years just get over it. I was a kid and I thought she said fork!” The worst part is most of the teachers are in on the joke, making comments in class, all the other kids busting out in laughter. When I go through the lunch line the cook hands me a fork, never a spoon, even if I don’t need a fork I always get one. “Was it really that funny? When will this humiliation end?”
School humiliation is kind of like dominos, one kid falls and is made fun of, it being the joke of the day until the next scandal happens. Then you’re in the clear, into the pool of kids, completely forgotten; it’s a never ending cycle; well, that was before me. I’m the domino you place a little too far away from the next, falling flat, bringing the cycle to a complete stop. Handing me a fork will always be funnier then than the fat kid rolling down the stairs or the boy running into the girls’ bathroom. I guess what I did was even funnier than the girl who walked around all day with her dress tucked into her underwear. What has to happen for me not to be the schools’ joke?

I just wish I could remember what the teacher had really said I should have known that she didn’t say fork; the topic had nothing to do with eating but I was hungry. I thought it was one of those weird teaching methods and it would help the lesson or would somehow fit in at the end and I would be the final piece that ties the lesson together helping everyone understand. I would be the hero. But waking up that day was the death of my reputation. I walked into school happy as ever. The teacher called me up to her desk and asked me that horrible question, the one I would never forget. She called me out in front of the whole class everyone pointing and laughing, it was unbearable. I burst into tears and ran out of the classroom as fast as I could. By recess everyone (I really do mean everyone) knew my humiliating story. The jokes had already started and the day was only half way over and what I didn’t know then was that the embarrassment would never end. And it all started with that one question, the one that haunts me very single day of my miserable life…

“Why are you dressed like a fork?”