During my freshman orientation, I had an upperclassman as my tour guide, who became my very first high school friend. He wanted to date me, and around two months into my high school career, he molested me. I told my mother and my father’s parents that I wanted to be taken out of school. When I told them why, they forced me to report to the police. I was laughed at by school administrators because there was no real ‘evidence’, despite my abuse happening in a public place. It wasn’t penile penetration, so my case was treated like a joke. People at my school called me a lying insert the s and w slurs here because it keeps deleting my post over them. shaved off all my hair and decided that I was going to be a boy from then on, because I would always be abused as a woman. I was withdrawn from school and placed into a Christian homeschool program until my junior year.
The next two years were the hardest times of my life. I had no guidance or teaching, so my once perfect grades has slipped. I didn’t get to choose my classes, and they were all online. I had no one to interact with besides my dad’s family that screamed at me and scolded me all the time. They made fun of me for liking anime and playing video games. They called me the r word. My aunt and my gran both had Bipolar Disorder, and they got into screaming matches that lasted for days. They even hit each other. They screamed at me and threw and broke things in the same fashion that my father would. I wasn’t allowed to go outside or have any friends for over a year because, “I might go get raped again.” My aunt whom I cared for tried to kill herself, and my gran and gramps said it was my fault. They complained because they had to buy food for me. They would box up my belongings and throw them outside every time I would try to visit my other grandparents and my baby brother and sister.
It wasn’t until the summer before my junior year that one of my friends from middle school and her parents stepped in, saying they would provide me a home if my family would let me go back to school. They did not know that I had been raped. But at this point, my rapist had graduated, and I was allowed to return to high school. I took an aptitude test before I returned, and the proctor told me that I needed to be taking college courses. That I was ready to go to college then and there if only I had enough credits to graduate. My school did not have a lot of classes because we lived in such a rural, poor location, and all of our funding went into sports. Still, I took the most rigorous course load possible. We were allowed only 4 classes, and my junior year, I took 3 AP classes and one graduation requirement per semester. Senior year, I took 2 AP classes, two honors classes, and two grad requirements. I had taken every single AP at my school except for one by the time I graduated.
I enjoyed living with my friend, even though I was unaware that her parents were trying to steal money from the social security check that I got once my father died. They began demanding money every single month, and I was forced to pay out unless I wanted to go back to my abusive home. I had always lived in poverty, but her family was even poorer than mine. I didn’t eat a lot of food, and I never got any new clothes. Her parents spend the money that they were supposed to be caring for me with on luxury items rather than necessities. I tried to tell my friend this but she would take her parent’s side and say that they needed the money. Some nights I would go to bed starving because of this.
I did not have a better time at school than at home either. People remembered that I had been molested, and they held it over my head. Teachers didn’t treat me the same. I had the second highest ACT/SAT score in my entire school, beat only by a transfer student, but I was still treated like an idiot. In my AP US history class, my homework and essay responses would be nearly identical to my peers’, but I got consistently lower grades. One time we had to do a timeline drawing assignment, and the teacher counted off 15 points because she said she didn’t like my handwriting or the colors that I used. I scored higher on the AP test than anyone else in the class. She gave me a failing grade on a research paper that had been reviewed my other faculty members and students, because she didn’t like how I formatted my sources page. Another teacher gave me a low grade on a gay rights essay because she said the subject matter was not a real issue.
I knew I was not stupid, but I was getting lower grades than my classmates, and it was frustrating. I also began suffering from severe depression, anxiety, and fatigue during my first year of high school, and had lots of doctors appointments trying to figure out what was wrong. Every day that I missed, my teachers gave me a 0. But I knew I was capable of so much more that. My ap us teacher would take me into her office and berate me for being sick and missing days, which made my anxiety so much worse. My last semester of senior year, I got walking pneumonia and missed 1 month of school. I got 3 B’s and a C because my teachers said I was lazy and wanted to skip school even though I had documentation from the ER and my therapist. One of the teachers was friends with my rapist. After I showed the school documentation of my autism diagnosis, I was treated even worse and given no IEP or assistance.
Before my senior year, I took an online class so that I could graduate on time. I saw that the program offered computer science courses. Before school started, I went to the principal and asked if I could take one of those courses, because our school offered 0 computer courses and I wanted to major in comp sci. He said, “Sweetheart we can’t make special exceptions for you. If you don’t do your work, you’ll fail the class and we have to be held responsible. We have no faculty here that could assist you, and you’d have to pay us to hire someone to supervise the course. It’s not happening.” I got a 100 in my online class, so this was insulting when he told me that I did not do my work. I find out a few weeks later that a girl in my class has been taking computer science courses online, paid for by the school. And I was just heartbroken.
My second semester of senior year, I also left my friend’s home and was temporarily homeless. I couldn’t take the mistreatment, and the way they took everything I had from me. They even let one of my pets die because they said it was a waste of money to take my cat to the vet. I briefly got into a bad crowd, because the only home I could find was with a girl in alternative school, who promptly kicked me out a month before graduation and left me scrambling for a home again.