Personal Narrative: Waking Up

Waking up was always easy. The morning freeze painted the walls in my room until even my blanket was insignificant. I crawled out of bed and slipped into my favorite t-shirt and jeans, topping it off with the sweatshirt my father had given me. I grabbed the nearest rubber band I could find and tied my hair up. I, unlike most kids, didn’t care so much about my appearance. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we didn’t own any mirrors in my house. I did, however, always put my hair up. Not that it helped at all with my looks, but it did reduce the number of insults I received at school. While knocking off only a tiny portion of the slander may seem insignificant to most others, my hair, as wild and curly and poofy as it may have been, was the one thing I could control. Other things, like how I wore the same sweatshirt simply because my

I tried to hide, but by the time I began running toward the bushes that lined the creeks edge, they had spotted me. “Amelia? Is that you?” One of the girls laughed. “Ya,” I replied, digging my nail into hand.
Karina, the second of the three, laughed. “Amelia, why on god 's earth are you hanging around that filthy trash infested lake.”
“Must be why she smells so bad,” said Brittany. She had always been the one to start the taunting. I pushed my nail in harder. Breath. Just breath. “Come on up here, Fishy.”
I ran up the hill as fast as I could as the girls laughed at the new nickname I had been given. In the moment, it didn’t even dawn on me that I could have stood my ground, refused to comply. They may have respected me, and finally stopped making fun of me. But I didn’t.
Suddenly, I felt myself falling. Again the girls laughed. I heard yelling, but everything was so cloudy it was hard to make out their words. Before I knew it, the girls were running down the hill to meet me, and Brittany ripped of my shoe and threw it into the