Once upon a time, there was a girl. This isn't a particular achievement — lots of people are girls. In fact, if you were to ask this girl to describe herself, "girl" might not even make it on the list.
Whether or not this girl is still a girl at the end of the story is an interesting question, but one we'll have to set aside for the moment.
So. Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was in seventh grade. Those of you who are familiar with the Canadian school system may recognize this as being a time of much development, both physically and mentally.
Actually, fuck this. Seventh grade doesn't deserve this much of your valuable bandwidth. There are other, more important things you could be using your internet for. For instance, reading a random article on wikipedia. Or anything else.
So, let's cut this prologue short. Once upon a time, there was a girl. In seventh grade, her friend group fell into two halves. There were no arguments, no grudges, just a simple understanding that the things one half did for fun were not as interesting to the other half. Both halves rebuilt and found new people to round out their numbers.
The half she was in found two new people. One of them had a lot of problems. We can call them Hades. Mental health issues. Physical health issues. Dysfunctional family. Financial instability. History of abuse. Neurodevelopmental disorders. Some people could face all of these problems and work through them, finding healthy ways to deal with all the things trying to make their life worse. Hades was not one of them. Hades was crushed beneath the weight of it all and try as they might, you can't simply force yourself to be healthy when your entire life seems designed to make you unhealthy.
The other one also had problems, but far fewer. Let's stick with the theme of Greek mythology and call this one Medea. Some mental and physical health concerns, an occasionally dysfunctional family. Some people would take inventory of their problems, see that one of their friends had more on their plate, and work towards making that friendship a space where both of them could rest and escape from all of these problems.
It is worth mentioning that the three who had first been half of a friend group were not without their problems. Dysfunctional families of their own. Mental health concerns of their own, particularly for Seanna. In Ruth's case, a religion that isn't quite not a cult. As a whole, this new group of friends was not doing particularly well for themselves, but that's okay. They had each other. Supposedly.
As you can probably guess by now, Medea did not do their best to make the friend group a place where their friends could relax. No, it became a competition. Who can live the least stable life — mental health, physical health, familial relationships, finances. Everything. In grade eight, when Hades finally received help in the capacity they deserve, it became another competition. Oh, they've started working through their past, uncovering a tangled mess of traumas which can now be treated? They've finally reached a point at which they can take inventory of their issues and start giving them names — ADHD, PTSD, BPD, gender dysphoria, depression, anxiety, endometriosis, bulimia nervosa?
Well.
Suddenly it became a question not of "How can we support Hades as they learn how to live life?" but of "Why aren't you focusing your attention on Medea?" Self-diagnosis is rarely a bad thing, but every problem Hades or the others had, Medea had worse, and it was everybody else's fault for not knowing. Sure, Medea deserved compassion for the problems they had. But it's awfully difficult to use a new name and pronoun set if they never tell you they're changing their name and pronouns. It's awfully difficult to talk someone down from the ledge and then be faced with someone else saying "Sorry I ghosted you, I just got so hyperfixated on other people that I forgot you existed, lol."
But still, throughout all this, there was enough fun that when the girl went to a different high school in ninth grade, she stayed in touch with Medea. And the other three, of course, but they were less of a surprise.
So. Let's get started. The story will begin when you are ready.
My name is Nora Avery Jin Persson. I am a transracial adoptee, picked up from China at eleven months old to come live in Canada with my white parents. My mother's family has been here lomg enough that they're just New Brunswickers. My father's family came over from Sweden, and as the youngest, they didn't bother teaching him Swedish.
If you have a problem with the way I talk about my family and my racial identity, please kindly fuck off.
What else is there to know about me? I was kept from school for one year because I was born at the end of the year and I was very shy, so my mother wasn't comfortable releasing me into the arms of strangers at four years old. In fairness, I wasn't comfortable being released into the arms of strangers at four years old. My parents never had to put me in daycare, and I was only sent to preschool so I could be properly socialized. It didn't really work.
But hell. All that's just details. I've gotten top grades in my class every year since they started putting number grades on our work. I used to get taken from class to be in "enrichment," which was just my rural elementary school's way of saying "Give the teacher a day off. Make Nora teach the class."
It was obvious to my mother that I could not go to the high school I was slated to go to. Between the number of reported hate crimes and the notoriously poor quality of education, I had to be enrolled somewhere else.
Unfortunately for our finances, there was a private school in a place with somewhat reasonable housing prices and when we went to visit, it did a good job of turning on the charm. So in the winter of grade eight, we bought a house in a town close by and prepared to start moving over the summer.
We bought the house in December of 2019. The wi-fi in my rural hometown was unreliable enough that online school was a "when you can" sort of deal, and so we drove everything to the new house in March and April, one car-load at a time.
When I started at the private school in September of 2019, masks were mandatory. It took me months to get used to seeing people's noses during lunchtime. For most of the day, I interacted with the same ten people, because we were a bubble. Our free time was highly regimented to prevent us from spreading COVID-19.
One of the few times I got to interact with other people was debate club. I hadn't thought I would particularly love debate club; my mother simply thought I would be good at it.
To nobody's surprise, debate club was a very small group when I joined. Aside from me, there was a twelfth grade girl who i fell head-over-heels in love with, two eleventh grade boys, a girl in my class who held the record for most consecutive years winning provincials, and two younger boys, one in grade eight and one in grade seven.
I only ever saw the twelfth grader, June, a few times, because she had so many other things going on and she was good enough at debate that she didn't need to be there for every practice. Mostly, when she came, it was to help run the club. We were a pro/am team for a squirrel debate once. That's debate jargon for "experienced debater teaching a new debater the ropes, in a joke format."
The two eleventh grade boys were the classic rich straight white boys you expect to attend a private school. One was named Cawdor. The other was named Victor, but people called him Vic. They were nice enough most of the time, but always made sure you knew they knew something you didn't. And not in the usual debate way, in the way that made you feel like you were making a mistake by not being them.
I didn't pay much attention to the younger boys, because they were an established debating partnership, and I was more interested in what the older kids were doing. The eighth grader is Lewis, called Lewie, and the seventh grader was another Vic-short-for-Victor.
I stayed in touch with Seanna, Ruth, and Medea, texting frequently, and learning of each of the new friends they made. I met a family friend, Helena, and started an instant known-you-forever-even-though-it's-only-been-days friendship. I made friends with Arya, Hannah, Natalie, and Helen. I opened the friend group to welcome Marcus.
It was magical, having friends who were healthy. Sure, there were some issues here and there, but the scale was so much lesser. And sure, Seanna, Ruth, and especially Medea still had their issues, but having the filtering force of the internet between us sure helped.