I grew up in a relatively small town for the first 15 years of my life. It was a pretty safe place to grow up. Children played about the neighborhood while their parents set out to do parental things like organize produce co-ops and the like. The school system was excellent under Louisiana standards, and I met most of my friends in kindergarten or before and kept them throught my stay there and then some.

When I was 15, I left my small town home and moved to another, even smaller town, ready for a new existence. That summer, my mother and I lived alone in a trailer on a dead end street. I took a part time job as a carhop at the local Sonic in order to be able to have some extra money and to purchase my own school clothes - a luxury I had not had for two years. I made a few friends at my job and expected that I would continue to have them when I began school in the fall, and was pretty excited about the opportunity to expand my friend base and make afresh start.

Now, I know that kids are cruel, but what I found upon my first day at my new school was that this small town bred an entirely different kind of cruel. They didn't take kindly to outsiders, and when my new friends from my job realized that no one else liked me, they dropped me like a hot potato. I was alone in a completely alien environment with no one even remotely like me.

I should have known that I would have issues the day that I enrolled at the school. I spoke to the school counselor and expressed my interest in taking a speech class. He told me repeatedly that I did not want to do that. Completely dumbfounded, I persisted until he told me that the teacher who taught the speech class was black. Folks, this wasn't 1950. This was 1987, and I was floored. I told the counsellor again that I wanted to enroll in the class, so finally, he went ahead and enrolled me. The next class was even worse, as I wanted to join the chorus. He explained again that I didn't want to do that, we went through the same dialogue, and again, he begrudgingly signed me up.

On my first day, I realized why the counsellor didn't want me to join the chorus. I was the only white kid in the class. I didn't care, mind you, but it took a while for the other kids in the class to accept me. See, the town and the school, for all practical intents and purposes was largely segregated. Sure, we all shared the same restrooms and cafeterias, but the people there still didn't get it. We had the school's first integrated Prom during my junior year in 1989, and I can assure you that there was a tremendous uproar about it.

I guess that I didn't make things easy on myself as I didn't care what the other kids called me when I chose to hang around with my black friends. They were truly remarkable people and I didn't care about the color of their skin. By the time I was a couple of months into the school year, I was not only an outsider and therefore not worthy of my existence, but I was also a white girl haging out with the black folk, and that was completely unacceptable.

These were the times of acid-washed denim, and I remember telling my mother that I wanted an acid-washed jacket for Christmas. Having quit my job at Sonic shortly after my "friends" there began to treat me poorly, I no longer had spending money and therefore didn't have the means to buy my own. My mother didn't either. Instead of getting an acid-washed jacket, she asked me if a regular denim jacket would be ok. I agreed, thinking that I could do any number of things to it to make it really cool.

Once home, I found a plastic bucket, some bleach, a spray bottle, and a hair dye applicator. I filled the spray bottle with water and the applicator with bleach, wet the entire black of the jacket with the spray bottle, pressed the top of the bucket into the denim in order to form a circle, bleached the circle, and then bleached lines through it, forming a giant peace symbol. I've always been a hippie at heart and was exceptionally proud of my work.

Evidently, no one in the school knew what a peace symbol was, as they began calling me a witch. At first, I didn't get it, but later someone said something to me about the upside down cross on the back of my jacket. Idiots. It made the remainder of my time there a living hell. They called me a devil worshipper and asked me if I was going to turn them into frogs, and if I could have, the town would now be likened to Calaveras county.

So why the trip down not-so-nostaligic memory lane? As it turns out, my thirteen-year-old stepsister is now attending thesame school. And it hasn't changed ONE bit. Her first day of school she was called a "s/him", a hermaphrodite, and a dyke. I felt a flood of resentment rush through me as my mother recanted the story to me. My stepsister is living there because her mother threatened to throw her out on the street, so it's not like she didn't go into the situation with some issues already. And it's not like there's anything I can do to help her except to listen and be supportive. My heart really does go out to this kid - she's got a long four years ahead of her.

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