The Old Ditson, a an old elementary school falling apart at the seams that the town transformed into a sherif academy. ACADEMY. This was once the spot that I would with my friends after school days freshmen year. My first year of high school was a roller coaster of emotions and life lessons that I will forever carry with me. With all the factors that go into adolescence peer pressure is relevant because it ultimately affects where the rest of our lives will take us.

I went into freshman year with my four best friends; Tiana, Melissa, Jess, and Casey, Although we always found ourselves butting heads, we were inspirable. Melissa has been my best friend since third grade, Casey since seventh, and Jess and Tiana I became close with eighth grade. Melissa, Casey, and I were a lot alike, coming from great families with no major problems, and a town that’s ranked one of the best in Massachusetts. Jess came from a problem family, divorced parents, and being forced to live with her grandmother because both the mother and father were unfit for the job. Tiana on the other hand was different.

She had grown up in Cambridge, a city outside of Boston, a completely different place than Billerica. She talked, dressed, and even had a different relationship with her parents than we did. My friends and I would wear Hollister, Abercrombie, and preppy, cute clothes, Tiana would wear high neck t-shirts with belts, short shorts, and tight, revealing clothes. She talked with sort of an accent. It’s hard to explain, but it was something we have never heard of before. Her language included different swears, and a sharp tongue. She spoke to her parents rudely, and swore towards them. Still to this day, I have never sworn in front of my parents, so that was a huge shock to me. Not saying that this made her a bad person, but it ended up influencing us, and not in a positive way. I began to pick up some of the negative habits she had, like swearing, not focusing on school work and becoming caught up in drama. Little did we know, she was about to become toxic to our town, and lives.

Tiana was so different than what everyone in Billerica knew. Growing up in this small close knit community everyone was always the same, same clothes, voice, and friends. She was something fresh, bringing something brand new and exciting into our school. I remember thinking to myself ‘I have to be friends with her’. Something about the friendship was seductive, it was dragging me in. I felt different than everyone else while being friends with her, and for the first time people were actually wanting to be like us. The things we did together were exhilarating and gave me a feeling that i’ve never felt before.
        

Walking into Freshman year,a nerve wrecking, awkward time in everyone’s life. Wondering “Where am I going to sit for lunch?” who were my teachers, where were my classes going to be?! I felt on top of the world walking in with my friends, but there were still a lot of things that could go wrong. My days consisted of 5 classes, including my least favorite subjects Math and English. My English teacher turned out to be pretty cool, and the class was filled with a few close friends of mine. But Math, that’s always been a difficult subject for me, and it didn’t make it any easier that the teacher was a total b****.
        

Everyday after school, we’d meet up at the Old Ditson and invite our new friends to join, even the older ones. This was a disaster waiting to happen. More and more people began to hear about the new hangout spot, which attracted not the best crowd. People began to use this spot to smoke, drink and even fist fight, and with me constantly being around it, I started to pick up some of these habits, such as starting fights. Peer pressure is real, it can vary from people asking you to join in on the activities, or you slowly start picking them up. I have never in my life been in a fist fight, but I recall a specific memory where I started one between two girls. They were both my friends, Jess, and Gabby. One of them was talking badly about the other to me, so I took it upon myself to tell the other. Obviously sticking my nose into place where it didn’t belong. It ultimately started a fist fight between Jess and Gabby. Even though I never got into a physical altercation my attitude and outlook on life caused verbal ones between myself and others. All I could ever think about was that last bell ringing and rushing down to the Old Ditson to hangout with familiar faces and school work becoming the last thing on my mind.
        

Throughout the next few months, nothing in my life was going well. My relationship with my parents was bad. I stopped listening to anything they said and was constantly in an argument with them, and my grades began to decline, especially in Math and English. I wasn’t thinking about my future, and the goals I wanted to achieve.When i was with my friends after school we wouldn’t discuss the homework we had to do that night, but rather the drama that happened outside of the classroom.

I will never forget this one day where I didn’t come home from school and my mom immediately knew where I was. She drove right over to Tiana's and made me come home. I spent every single day there so she just figured that’s where I was, and she was right. While we were driving down my street we started to have a screaming match in the car. I was so angry and embarrassed of what she had just done, that I could have sworn I was never going to speak to her again. However, it turned out to be the best thing she could have possibly done for me. My mom has always played a huge role in my life, she was a single mother for the majority of it, i’ve seen her struggle and be stressed. So when she finally had a serious conversation with me about what I had been doing it made me realize I need to change who I was becoming. I had done a complete 180 from the person I previously was and it was ruining all the relationships I had. She brought up old memories, how well I used to do in school, and reminded me of the goals I set for myself over the years. My mother made me remember who I truly was and not who I had become over the past few months. Corrie Pikul’s article title says it all “Bad Influences? Advice For Parents Who Think Their Kid’s Friends Are Weird, Dirty Or Troublemakers” and more parents should read the article to be able to reach their children better in this situation.

I was approaching the end of my freshmen year, and my grades in English and Math had gotten so low that there was no other option for me besides summer school. The feeling of failing two classes was gut wrenching, as Alfie Kohn says in his article “The Case Against Grades” he explains that “grades tend to diminish students” This is when I began to realize that the friends I had were terrible, besides Melissa and Casey. They were the only good friends I had because they also realized that they weren’t like Jess and Tiana, and that they also needed to get their life on track. The results of peer pressure and wanting to fit in can do great amounts of damage. If there’s one life lesson I learned from that time in my life is just to be yourself, and if people don’t accept you for that they’re not your real friends.


Works Cited
Lehman, James. "Toxic Friends | Hanging out with the Wrong Crowd | Empowering Parents." Empowering Parents. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

Lyness, D'Arcy. "Peer Pressure." KidsHealth - the Web's Most Visited Site about Children's Health. The Nemours Foundation, July 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

Angelo, Jason St. "Bad Influences? Advice For Parents Who Think Their Kid's Friends Are Weird, Dirty Or Troublemakers." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 30 Sept. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

Kohn, Alfie. "The Case Against Grades (##) - Alfie Kohn." Alfie Kohn. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.