78/365: K.A.

The teachers probably would have called it bullying and maybe it was. Had we had the vocabulary we would have called it something else like "active avoidance." She was just hard to be nice to, and whether she knew it or not, she worked really hard to make us not like her.

She had an odour that was a mixture of old, unwashed clothes and body oil and tobacco smoke. It followed her around everywhere and you could often smell her before you saw her. A lot of us would probably have overlooked this if she had been a nice person, but everything that came out of her mouth from the moment she transfered to our school was either a whine or a complaint. She was too absorbed in her own self pity to bother to get to know anyone or play or be fun.

About a month after she came to our school she developed a new inflection to her voice: the accusation. We were awful and mean to her. No one liked her. She confronted some of us about it, wanting to know why we hated her. We told her that we didn't hate her but that she wasn't fun to be around because she whined all the time and smelled bad.

She told us that her dream was to go to private school because she believed that people were nicer there. I don't know if she ever got there but she left our school within a week.