Random Stories (from wattpad prompts)

Pressure

Image is everything. In this superficial school nobody looks at what one person has inside, they stop at what you show outside.
That's not the only problem.

The other is: what is normal? What is right?
Most people think that normal is what the majority does, and normal is by default right.
I don't agree with that.

I don't know statistics, I was never a bright girl, so I have no idea how many good or bad people there are in this world, but looking around me I see a lot of petty, vain girls who think only of themselves.

I don't think that's normal, and I don't think it's right.
And yet those same girls are part of my own group. I pretended to be like them so they'd accept me, because they are popular and being friends with them has made my life in school easier.

They have money, they have status, and that grants them power over us commoners. The way I see it, their parents have both those things, these girls have never done anything at all but they act like they own the world.

What I did was taking advantage of their vanity, showering them with compliments, acting as vain as they are, everyday is another series of 'how pretty you are' and 'how clever you are'.  This is the only reason they like me, I fuel their ego.

Pretending wasn't difficult, I got used to it pretty quickly, and I would automatically shift to fake-me as soon as I stepped out of my house, but lately things have changed.

July is a new student in our class who doesn't seem to care about status at all. She was never rude but she always keeps her distance, she never sucks up to them, she tends to ignore that they exist and 'my friends' can't tolerate such a thing.
They started bullying her.

At first it was merely bad glances and series of 'who does she think she is?', then it slowly evolved in little pranks more and more frequent.

They would bump into her on purpose, making her drop her stuff so they could walk over it giggling, they hid her bag, stole her textbooks, tore apart her maths notes, one day they threw a full glass of coke on her without even faking an excuse and she had to wear a stained shirt during classes.

I never took part in any of this, but I didn't stop them either. The only thing I did was secretly trying to make her look good in their eyes, telling them that I heard her say how pretty they were, how she feels inadequate to even say a word to them and stuff like that, hoping that it would work again.

It had worked with me, saying how pretty, elegant, smart they were was my  way to be accepted. But this time it didn't work, they already hated her and dismissed all my attempts with a humph.

July was just one girl, the only one acting that way, minding her own business and paying them no attention at all.

Just one girl. The only one.

Did that mean that she was the strange one? That she was wrong?

In my eyes she was the only normal girl of the entire school.

I don't know how long could I stand that, I don't know what she felt everytime they harassed her, but things have now reached a point of no return.

When she wasn't looking they put stuff in her bag, their wallets and phones, and then called out to the professor calling her a lurid thief.

They made a big scene, the professor tried to calm them down but they listened to no reason. They demanded her bag to be inspected and their stuff returned.

July was confused at first, her innocence showed clearly on her face, but when she willingly opened her bag and found those things inside, she had a hard time claiming that she didn't take them.