Everybody has an experience of what we call the teenage years. It should be filled with enjoyment and happiness as you grow from a child into a teenager. And when you come to the end of that, you will realize that you are no longer a baby who always needs help from your parents. You need to stand up for yourself.
Especially when you enter a new senior high school that is famous in the city, you hope it will be a new beginning. You hope to have many more friends, learn new things, and make good memories.
My senior high school was well known in the city. Many of the students came from wealthy families. Not all of them were arrogant. I had good friends there too. I thought I would have a good time there.
I was wrong.
I called those years the darkest time of my life.
That morning, I went to school with my friends. We went separate ways since they were not in the same class with me.
My classroom was on the second floor, two rooms from the stairs and one room before the toilets. It was an ordinary place. Nothing special about it.
I came early, as usual.
The hallway was still quiet. The school gate was not even closed yet.
But the classroom near the stairs was already noisy.
Those students were known as the wild ones. They were troublesome, and most students tried to stay away from them.
So did I.
I tried to walk past their classroom without looking at them.
Then I noticed something.
They were standing on both sides of the hallway.
Like they were waiting for me.
I stopped for a second.
I wanted to turn around.
But I was already there.
I looked at them one by one.
Some of them were boys, and some were girls. They were looking at me with strange smiles on their faces.
I still did not understand why they were standing there.
Then someone laughed.
Another one said something to the others, and they laughed again. I started to feel uncomfortable.
I wanted to get away from them. So I tried to walk between them. That was when the first coin hit me.
Then another one.
And another.
They started throwing 500-rupiah coins at me.
“Look at yourself!”
“Do you really think you deserve him?”
“Hahaha… look at you!”
“Ugly!”
“Poor girl!”
“Disgusting!”
“Black and ugly!”
Their voices came from everywhere.
I tried to cover my face with my hands, but they kept laughing and throwing the coins at me. Some of them came closer. I could feel their spit on my hair and my arms.
“Look at yourself!”
“Do you really think you are worthy?”
“Who do you think you are?”
Those words have stayed in my ears for years.
Even now, I can still hear them.
I was confused.
What had I done?
Why were they doing this to me?
“You think you deserve him?”
I froze.
When they finally stopped, I ran to the toilet. I locked the door and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was messy. My uniform was dirty. There was dirt all over my body.
I started washing myself.
I washed my face, my arms, my hair, and my uniform as much as I could. I kept rubbing my skin, trying to clean everything they had thrown at me.
But the words stayed.
Ugly.
Poor.
Disgusting.
Do you really think you deserve him?
When I finally finished cleaning myself, I went back to my classroom.
Everyone looked at me.
I could feel their eyes following me as I walked to my seat.
I sat down.
And I cried.
Outside the classroom, I could still hear people talking.
“There was a girl from 1-11. Devon’s gang just messed with her.”
They were talking about me.
I lowered my head and cried harder.
Not long after that, the girl who had asked me before about Ivan, one of the students from the noisy class near the stairs, came to me.
She looked different this time.
She looked guilty.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I looked at her without saying anything.
She had only asked me if I thought Ivan was handsome. Then she asked if I liked him. And I had answered honestly.
“Yes. He is handsome. I like him.”
That was it.
But somehow, my simple answer was twisted into something else.
She admitted that she had told her friend Mia, who was in the same class as Ivan, that I liked him.
I never told her that I wanted to be with him. I never asked her to tell anyone.
Mia was one of the girls in Ivan’s group of friends, and Ivan was the boy they were talking about. They were the same people who had just thrown coins at me.
They were the kind of people who judged others by their appearance and social status. They thought I was not good enough to be part of their group because I was poor and, in their eyes, ugly.
My simple answer that he was handsome became a reason for them to humiliate me.
She said she never thought they would do something like that to me.
But they did.
And I was the one who had to carry the shame.
After that day, school became a test of endurance. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart raced.
My hands shook.
Cold sweat covered my body.
Sometimes, I even had difficulty breathing.
I was afraid that I would meet them again.
I never told my parents about what had happened. I did not want them to worry about me.
So I learned to survive quietly.
Every afternoon, after school, I cried.
But slowly, something changed.
The pain was still there, but I started telling myself that their words could not decide who I was.
If I only had one weapon, it would be something they could never take away from me.
My future.
So I studied harder.
I held on longer.
Little by little, the fear became softer.
I found kind classmates who made my days easier. I started laughing again, at first only a little, then more freely. The place I once feared became a place I could endure. And eventually, I could stand there without shaking.
That morning never really left me.
But it did not end me.
Sometimes strength is not loud.
Sometimes courage is simply choosing to stay.
Time moved on.
In my second year of high school, I enrolled in a well-known English language institute.
I thought it would simply be a place to learn and to rebuild myself quietly.
One afternoon, I saw a familiar face.
The girl who greeted me warmly, smiling and reaching out to embrace me, was someone I knew well. She spoke to me with ease and kindness, as if respect had always been natural to her.
Behind her stood a man who did not move.
I recognized him instantly.
It was Devon.
The same boy who had once been the reason people called me disgusting now avoided my eyes.
His body became stiff, as if he suddenly remembered something from the past.
I did not need to ask why.
Time passed again.
On another ordinary day, while arranging copies of my thesis near one of the country's most respected universities, I recognized another face from my past.
It was Mia.
She was standing beside the counter, filling out registration forms for a private campus nearby.
It had been three years since we graduated.
We looked at each other for a moment.
Nothing more was needed.
I walked back to my own path, carrying drafts of a future I had earned.
I did not rise because they fell.
I rose because I kept walking—
even when they told me I did not belong.
THE END
