Friendship Turns Bad, sierra farmer [elon musk reading list .TXT] 📗

Have you ever felt alone like you did not have any friends and that you were the laughing stock? I have. I remember when I had no one to talk to. Then one day I met this boy named Barrett Romstone. He was nice and I became good friends with him and I found out he was also bullied. We started talking all the time.

Then there were rumors that spread about us. First it was Sierra likes Barrett. Then it was Barrett likes Sierra. It continued for a while with different rumors and soon enough the rumor started that we were dating. That was hard because then the rumor became that we had sex. It was great for him, he got bullied less. It was horrible for me, it made me be bullied more and more.

People always came up to me and said, “are you going out with Barrett.” Some people asked, “what did you do with Barrett in the hallway”. I kept on having to repeat that we never went out or did anything. It felt like no one was listening. People would not leave me alone. Over the weeks it got worse and worse.

Barrett started getting mad too and began flipping out. He became more and more aggressive towards everyone who asked us if we were together. Then one day when we were outside, these two girls walked by and asked the same questions. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He reached the blowing point, he was very angry. That day he yelled, “I don’t care if you are a girl I still will beat the crap out of you.” The situation was getting out of control. He was about to attack the two girls. I saw him and I got in front of him and held him down. They got away.

Barrett said that he could have gotten away from me. He said: “You are not strong enough, girls are weak”. I said “if you could have gotten out, why didn't you?” He was just annoyed that I was stronger than him. That’s when I realized that he was very competitive with me.

The rumors were still spreading. I could not stop them but I could minimize the affect that it had on me. I just stopped paying attention to them. They did not go away they just got worse. The worse they got the more I had to hold back and control myself because I didn’t want the rumor spreaders to see how they were affecting me.

So that’s when one of the security guards, Ms.Thorne at my junior high heard one of the rumors. Apparently the rumor she heard was that Barrett had humped me at school. Of course that was not true. She came up to me and without even asking me if anything happened, angrily said that she didn’t think I should be friends with Barrett. At that time, I was mad because I thought she had no right to talk to me like that. She never asked me a question and just assumed she knew what was going on, and she wasn’t very nice about it.

One day Barrett told me “hypothetically if I asked you out would you say yes”. That’s when I realized he liked me more than a friend. I said yes because I did not want to hurt his feelings but I just met him and was not ready for a relationship. After that very short conversation we never talked about it again. I was ok with that, I just wanted to friends.

That’s when I met these two boys,- they were twins. Their names were Dennis and Eric. They were very nice and I started hanging out with them. We became a group. It was a cool group with Dennis, Eric, Barrett, and me. We joked and laughed about almost everything. We were very immature, we made everything negative. We were always making up new things about random topics. For a while we got along really well. I felt happier than I had in a long time.

Then something changed. I felt like the twins treated me nice. The twins respected me. They stood up for me and pointed out how other people didn’t treat me well. Barrett always controlled me and made me do things. He made me feel bad about myself. He did that because the worse I felt the more I only spoke to him. He would tell me that I looked ugly. He told me that he was cuter than me. I realized that he was just saying that because he did not like how he looked. I did not realize how badly he treated me until the twins treated me so well and I saw that there was something other than what Barrett was doing. My mom and my family kept telling me that Barrett was not treating me well and that I should put a stop to it, but I couldn’t hear it from them at the time.

Soon after the twins came into my life, I stopped doing everything Barrett told me. I did not hang out with him every minute of everyday.

Barrett started to behave strangely. I didn’t understand it at the time. He started telling me that the twins were trying to split us up. He tried to get them out of my life. I did not budge. I did not stop being friends with the twins. Barrett got more and more jealous although I did not realize it was jealousy until much later. I learned how to ignore his mean comments. Finally I got tired of him saying bad things about the twins and asked the twins if they were trying to split me and Barrett up and of course they said no.

Dennis is skinny and has glasses. He is a goody two shoes because he does nothing bad. His brother Eric is skinny but has some fat on his face. Eric is not scared to break rules. He is less of a goody two shoes but he still follows the rules a lot of the time.

They both listened to me and respected me. They had a good sense of humor. They treated me the way I wanted to be treated. That is what I really liked about them. They were always there for me.

We were pretty content except for Barrett. He seemed different and way too attached to me. He also seemed very agitated. It got worse as the weeks went by. It seemed to me that he was like a whole new person. Or maybe I was a whole new person and was seeing him for the first time.

Barrett became violent towards me. I finally realized he was jealous of me and the twins hanging out. We were all a group so I was confused at why he was jealous of them. I could not understand that a person could be mean to someone he said he Iiked. I thought that it was stupid and that I should just ignore his violent ways.

I got more and more mad at Barrett because of his actions that he continued to do after I asked him repeadedly to stop. He would keep on poking me and doing inappropriate things. I would get really mad at him and he did not seem to care. So I found myself wondering what happened to him and why was he acting like this. Things kept on getting more out of control.

I felt less close to him and more close to the twins and realized Barrett’s faults more. He was mean to me and put me down. He would yell at me and try to control me, and tell me I had to do what he wanted. He acted like I could be controlled and that I was his slave. He actually thought that I would do anything he said. I could not believe the things that came out of his mouth. Everyday he said something that would surprise me. He infuriated me more than you could imagine. He thought I belonged to him and that I was his property. I started having outbursts and began yelling at Barrett and I had meltdowns. I did not like this new side of him at all and distanced myself from him as much as possible.

At the same time that I was having problems with Barrett I had an English teacher who was pushing me hard. I felt like she was out to get me no matter what I did. One day I started to cry about all the stress when Barrett was there. It appeared like Barrett was trying to help me. I trusted him and then I regretted that I did. One day later we were having an argument and he provoked me. I started yelling back and getting emotional and he said sarcastically: “what, now are you going to cry”? I think that’s the meanest thing a person can do: use someone’s emotions against them.

Every outburst I had was funny to the girls at the other table. Every time I started yelling at Barrett the girls at the other table started clapping. They were happy that I was standing up for myself. Even though it seemed they were supporting me I felt like they were egging me on to fight when I really didn’t want to. And it made Barrett even more mad that they were clapping for me.

This situation continued for a while and at the end of the 7th grade I was ready to burst. Barrett and I were not even friends anymore. I started preparing for the worst to happen. For me the worst was a physical fight. That school week brought on 4 big arguments and an outburst. I honestly did not know how far he would take it and how much I could take. My fuse does not blow easy but I had no fuse left at that point; even little things set me off. Each argument was bigger and longer and made me more and more angry.

In one of the big arguments