Project: Bad Girl [COMING SOON]

1 | Project: Nerds and Jerks

TRIPPING PEOPLE IS A TYPICAL PART of life in high school.

I don't know why. Personally, I've never thought that tripping people was much fun. But hey, maybe certain people enjoy watching others fall flat on their face . . . or maybe they just consider the day wasted if they don't trip a so-called 'nerd' by lunchtime. I wouldn't know.

I mean, sure, I guess watching people trip could be quite funny — except, of course, if you're the person being tripped.

And yes, thank you for asking. I am always the one being tripped. I mean, of course I am. Whenever the universe thinks, "hmm, I wonder who I'll pick on today," Alyssa Young is the first name that comes to mind.

So I can tell you from experience that falling flat on your face definitely not fun.

But hey, what can you do about it?

That's what I tell myself every time I get tripped. And I get tripped a lot.

If there was a world record for how many times someone can get tripped in a day, then I definitely would have broken it by now. I mean, there is absolutely no place on the campus of school where I haven't gotten tripped before. I get tripped in corridors. I get tripped walking into class. A few times, I even got tripped in the bathroom — and fell flat on my face into the toilet bowl.

But that's life. Just everyday life — that is, if you're a nerd.

I'm a 'nerd.' And let me tell you, being at the bottom of the food chain in Ridgeway High is not something that you'd enjoy.

It's usually the worst on a Friday, when school ends — the whole school goes up because they are free from school for two days onward, so they think, hey, why don't we go and trip that nerd over there! I didn't like Fridays for lots of reasons, (including the fact that Friday is the day the cafeteria serves the infamous mystery meat,) but the tripping was the worst.

The whole thing happened so often that it was a habit to step over the feet stuck out to trip me. See a foot, step over it — it was like an instinct now. But the occasional skilled tripper still could make me and Cara stumble, and there were so damn many of them that making both of us fall over wasn't that hard of a task.

And sure enough —"OW!" — my best friend Cara fell forward amidst the laughter, spilling the books under her arm and landing on her hands painfully.

I winced out of pity for her, looking around the crowded corridor for the 'tripper' as I bent down to help Cara up. There were a lot of people who tripped nerds for 'sport' here . . . the jerks, the jocks, the jock/jerk-wannabees and the bad boys/girls — or actually, just random people looking for a laugh. Anyone could have done it.

Feeling slightly angry, I threw a dirty look at the giggling crowd in general.

"C'mon," Cara muttered as she dragged me away, probably because she was scared I would start something. Not that I would be stupid enough to do that — even though I was bolder than Cara in terms of starting fights as I got angry much more than she did, I've only picked one fight with the gang of 'trippers' and it had ended badly. For me, at least.

Still, I tried to put up a fight.

"They drive me absolutely insane," I fumed to Cara as we walked towards the school entrance, fast and discreetly in the way that we had learnt didn't attract attention.

"I know," Cara was remarkably calm, which just showed that she had much, much more self-control than I did. "They drive me absolutely insane too. But we can't do anything about it, so —"