Chapter 0: To Reach For The Top
They say in life all men are created equal. I’m sure we all know that isn’t true. Men aren’t created equal neither are women or animals. Everyone has different personalities that make them unique, but true equality can’t allow for people to be unique. As hard as that is to accept it is the truth. An example of this ringing true is high school.
High school is a wild place from which many memories amerge and shape people into adulthood. In highschool you have the typical nerd has low strength, but intelligence to boot. Because of this the nerd lacks the ability to stand up for themselves unless they have social skills they can use to defend themselves. The nerds are a bit interesting if you get to know them, but usually they are just presumed to be too uncool to hang out with.
There is the highschool bully. This is a special type of character. The bully comes in many forms and many different shapes. There are mental bullies, physical bullies and lastly the scum of the earth type of bullies. The mental bullies like to play mind games with their target using words and taking jabs at them here and there until their target is so worn down that it can no longer think of what it should do next. When that happens the bully moves in much like a shark to finish off its prey. These kind of bullies are usually mediocre in everything, but as their relentless attacks go on they eventually become the strongest as nobody has enough endurance to weather them.
The physical bully is almost always rather stupid. In more ways than one they lack intelligence. They get into fights because they feel that they need to prove themselves and when their pride is wounded instead of maturely handling situations decide to take it out on someone else. They aren’t very witty and often times don’t think about consequences before they act. This usually causes them to get expelled as they don’t even have an excuse ready for when they are interrogated for the facts.
Lastly you have the Scum of the earth bully. They can come in many forms small, large, medium, fat, skinny, tall, short, white, or black etc, etc. The reason they are scum though is because no matter whether or not anyone is ever involved they go out of their way to make your day shitty and ruin it. They don’t just hit you and call you names they make your life hell. It doesn’t stop at simply shoving you into a wall and straight out to your face calling you a pussy. They also continue by going to your friends and either trying to get them to join in, or beating them up as well. The mental bully may be strong and hard to deal with, but the scum of the earth is always supreme in the order of procession. The one thing all three types have in common is that they have either too much pride and no self esteem to back it, or they generally have poor life environments, but even that doesn’t make me feel a shred of sympathy to them.
Then you have the typicals like cheerleader, preps, the outcasts, the non-existents, the book worms, etc. There are many types of cliques that go on. Many habitats each of these animals live in. There are rules each group must abide or they shall be exiled. There is no physical written text of it, but it's pretty much the holy scripture that if you don’t follow your groups code you are kicked out without remorse. In order to be accepted you must first be rejected as I say.
What I mean when I say to be accepted you must first be rejected is that while a clique might accept you because of the rules, you aren’t allowed to do what you want. The clique means you must first reject your true self so that you can be who they want you to be. If you can’t accept that then your better of in the non-existents. These type of people aren’t bullied by anyone or talked to by anyone, but themselves.
Being exiled from a group and ending up in the non-existents is probably worse than praising the dark lord. While you aren’t bullied you don’t get human interaction at least not much. Due to this you will forever torment yourself while in this group regardless of how strong your mental fortuition is. I belong to this group.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
My name is Asher Wright. I’m about 6’1, I have shoulder length long brown hair, a average body build and pretty average looks. I don’t really stand out at all in any particular crowd. I usually wear bland clothing like straight black t-shirts and mostly well taken care of blue jeans that have a bit of fading here and there where I’ve used it them more than I should have. While my jeans may be worn not a single set of them has ever had a hole.
I’m in the non-existents group for a different reason than most. Most people make mistakes and end up there, but I was pretty much born into this group. I started schooling a year earlier than most and I transferred school systems half way through the year. By this point everyone had already figure out who their friends were and who they disliked. Normally people like to see the new transfer student and approach them, but nobody approached me. Hell no body even tried talking to me in the first three weeks. I felt like a ghost.
I wasn’t the most exceptional at making small talk or dealing with new crowds, but even so every time I tried I couldn’t even illicit a remark from anyone. The teacher wouldn’t ever call on me so I felt like a ghost even more. Throughout the rest of elementary school this continued. When we were splitting ways and heading into highschool I thought that my position would change since it was a new school system. I was sorely mistaken about this. I still hadn’t developed any social skills since all of elementary I was ignored.
I was made my own entity which helped because I got the chance to get ahead by studying for tests. By fifth grade I had an eighth grade level of education. I not only knew how to do every single math problem without error, but I could also read all the important passages faster than anyone with a more accurate idea of what the passage was about. I always finished my tests faster than anyone else and I never scored less than a hundred percent on a test.
That was when I started getting recognition. It wasn’t good attention either. Everyone started to hate me because no matter how hard they studied they never scored higher than me or finished before I did. I first started out being ignored, but now I was despised. Some of the nerds who were used to being on top would confront me and always ask me “How did you, place a higher score than me? What is your study method? How do you always get a perfect score?” and the list went on and on.
In order to be as good as I was you had to put everything into studying. You couldn’t simply go home and study for four hours and say it was good enough. You had to be willing to entirely stop speaking to people. Eat only when you needed to. Sleep only when you needed to. When I was in seventh grade I was already training myself on how to do calculus and my reading level was thirteen point four. That means that starting in college I’d be ok if I went in for a semester. At age fourteen I could have pretty much went to college and that would have been fine. It would have been easy to manage.
They were still learning how to set up two step problems and multiply fractions while I was about to start on linear algebra. They couldn’t even hope to compete with me. I was never smug about these kinds of things either it was just a simple kind of thought I had. I’ve always been a strategic kind of person about everything. When I was starting eighth grade I started heavily into gaming and my caretaker Chris Jennings I called him boss, bought me the most expensive rig he could since My grades were good.
My family died in a car accident when I was young and I don’t remember any of them. I don’t remember anything earlier than age four. Chris was a friend of my mother’s and he took me in out of the kindness of his heart. To me he was pretty much my dad and I treated him like it. I never asked for anything not even on my birthday except for higher levels of education. In eighth grade when I felt that I had learned everything possible I could from school including music and sciences I told Chris I wanted to drop out of school. Chris of course asked me why and I told him that I could go into college right now and I’d be fine. I never planned on going into college of course, but I could if I wanted.
However, since I didn’t want to go to college there was no point wasting the next five years of my life which is what I told Chris. Chris said that if I could pass the college entrance exams that he would sign the papers for me to drop out of school. The agreement though required that I attend the senior year of highschool so I could at least get my diploma which I agreed to.
He paid the fine for the test and I took it. I placed second in state on the test because i missed two questions. One of them was about Us history. I missed that question because they were going off what the school taught about World War Two whereas I had learned about it on my own. The second question was about thermal expansion. They had me solve an equation. I solved it correctly, but my writing looked like the six I wrote in a rush was a zero and they doced a point.
Chris was impressed and let me off the hook. He signed the papers and let me drop out. Chris was happy, but I wasn’t. I got second on an exam for once in my life. The person who got first was a girl named Samantha Thatcher. This didn’t piss me off, or anything like that, I was upset, but more than anything I wanted to meet this girl who could best me at something I reigned supreme at. I did want to meet her, but right now was my four years off. I was going to play games and work out.