I was never going to be a rebellious teenager, or a goth, or a jock, or anything like that. My parents talked about it, joked about it with me, but we both knew that I would stay on the outside, A kid with no anything, like the gray right in between black and white, not traveling towards lightness, not traveling towards darkness. I could never do anything without an questioning it, observing it from the third person. In the weight room, amidst grunts, screams and flexing muscles I, with my ten pound dumbbells could not help but chuckle, watching boys transform into men, in that mirrored room, with spongy testosterone-saturated floors, and signs that said things like “failure to prepare is preparing to fail”’.

The other boys could tell that I hadn’t their levels of manliness. They could smell it on me like pirañas sensing blood. I had no fear of them, but at the same time I had no way of protecting myself, so I would avoid the locker room, and keep my head down in the halls, where even the platinum barbies looked down on me. That is, they would have, had they looked.

It was they who scared me, more than any bully, more than the threat of getting stuffed in a locker with the gym shorts. They were cold and vindictive, but so vacant that they were “cool”, and a little b**chy. Boys loved them, and they made no pretense about their love for boys, and how they would show it. They would play dumb, mispronouncing words in spanish, mocking the teacher by adding “o” to the end of every word. “May-o I-o go-o to-o the-o bathroom-o?”. The teacher would just sigh and nod, and watch the girl walk out of class, fully aware that she planned to skip the rest of school, and go to the mall.

There were the racists, and the stoners, and the posers, but you’ve heard about them. They just fit around the outside of everyone else, reminding us that everyone is ignorant, that no nerd, is better than no jock, is better than no emo. Yet it is the emos who receive the most hatred; they seem to live on it. Emos have created a way for everyone to hate them. Used to be you could be one simply by dressing like it and listening to the music. Now you’ve gotta be bisexual, and have fetishes, when you aren’t even sexual in the first place. You’ve gotta know someone who’s committed suicide, and eat because you hate your body. People think you are insecure, but you feel like you’ve finally found firm footing in a group that justifies not caring what anyon else thinks.

But much of the time I’m left questioning whether or not anyone else thinks, whether right now, there is a nerd, or a jock, or an emo writing about me. It is unfathomable that these kids will grow up to be the “normal” adults I see every day, that they will outgrow bisexuality, and vacancy, and cruelty. They shall, for they have for years and generations before. But not completely, still a select few will see their childishness when a mother tells her kids mean things about their friends’ moms, when a father yells at his son for not focusing on the game, for spending too much time watching the other players, for not fitting it. Yes this is my fate, the perpetual observer, with nothing to outgrow, and nothing to grow into. This is the fate of the transparent kid.