Weird/Embarrassing/Perverted Moments at School? - Page 25

So this happened while I was in grade 8 and in junior high. To tell this story involves giving a bit of information about myself: I’m a pretty smart guy, to the point where back then I didn’t pay attention at all in class, especially in math/science cause the crap was just too easy and I would get 100s on every test. (I’m Chinese if the stereotypes help make this more believable) So what ended up happening was that in grade 8, long story short, I had a business set up where I would do other people’s homework. I forgot how the system worked exactly cause it was such a long time ago but generally like small homework that the teacher assigns which was due the next day would costs 2 dollars. I would charge fees for more complicated stuff like research assignments and science projects etc depending on how hard it would be for me to do it, like how busy my schedule was etc, normally I don’t do those things cause its just too much work and its easier to get caught. I also didn’t do any English homework because I wasn’t THAT great at English and its pretty hard to guarantee an amazing mark, also English homework takes longer to do and frankly it wasn't worth the effort.

So by the 8th grade, my system was pretty well set up, I had a group of “regular customers”, these ranged from popular guys who couldn’t be bothered to do their own work to guys who were just lazy, and some people who would come occasionally to me if there’s too much work and they couldn’t handle it themselves, and I made some pretty good money doing pretty much nothing. Now as you can probably imagine from what I told you that I’m not exactly the “cool” guy at school, I didn’t exactly focus on making myself popular, I didn’t hang out with the “cool” people, I wasn’t particularly good at sports, and frankly back then I didn’t really care about girls enough to make a serious effort to get any, so I never really fit in with the popular people at school. But I was still very well liked because I was a nice kid, and my business somehow made people think that I was “helping others less fortunate souls over come the tyranny of the system”. The funny thing is that the school never caught on, at least not while I was attending the school, I was a pretty shy and well mannered kid back then, since I just came to Canada from China a few years back and was still adjusting to everything. And all the teachers thought I was a perfect student and I guess they never believed anyone who told them about my dealings if anyone actually went to the teachers with it.

Now this situation happened around a third of the way through grade 8, so one day at lunch I was just minding my own business when the hottest girl in my grade/school comes up to my table and asks to talk to me alone for some reason. (The highest grade in our school was grade 8 cause our school feeds directly into a nearby high school, and I never really paid attention to the people younger than me so I’m not really sure if she was the hottest girl in the whole school, although a great deal of people seem to think so at the time, I’m not going to mention her name here since we’re not really close and to be honest I’m kind of scared of her) So we went outside of the cafeteria and she asked me to do her math homework for the whole week, now this is the first time I’ve been approached by this person, she wasn’t dumb and she wasn’t a slacker so she usually did her work by herself, and there was enough guys slobbering at her feet that it wouldn’t be hard to get help if she had any trouble. So this was fairly surprising. I had long figured she was just one of those people I would ogle from afar but never really talk to. Now I forgot what exactly was the reason she told me, but she couldn’t do her homework for a whole week so she wanted me to do it. The thing was, she didn’t want to pay, and instead she offered to go to second base with me, now I didn’t realize this until my friend Josh told me a few years later, but turned out she actually had a crush on me cause she thought I was cute and the whole homework thing was just an excuse.

At that point I had no idea about this, I knew I wasn’t ugly or fat, I was tall and really skinny actually, but it had never occurred to me that I was actually cute enough for a girl, a fairly good looking one at that, to go out of her way and come onto me with some convoluted plan like this. Also like I said before, I didn’t exactly try to fit in well… with anything at that time, you could say I was living in a bubble. And its around those time where I guess you’re suppose to learn all these words for intimacy that you didn’t know before, I couldn’t really care since all that mattered to me back then was Pokemon, Starcraft, Duke Nuk’em, and this Chinese RPG I was playing, so I had no clue what the heck second base is. If I knew I would’ve agreed in a second.

So I thought that she was just screwing with me, like she’s trying to get free homework from me just because she’s pretty and that she was making fun of me for not being good at sports by saying I needed help to find second base. So I got mad and basically told her off in not so pretty words and that if I wanted to get to second base, I could walk out onto the field and get there myself thank you very much. And in a few seconds, I just made the most popular, hottest girl in school my enemy. I might have thought her reponse through more carefully if it was someone else, but the girl was really hot and the unusually close proximity and the fact that she was wearing pretty tight clothes that day distracted me and I couldn't really think straight. I also get very nervous around her because I think I would do something stupid so I wanted the conversation to end before that happened, which I guess lead to my rather abrupt response. Now it wouldn’t have meant much except she started telling people about what happened, skewed in ways to make her look better, and tried to convince people that I was gay. (I think in one version it went like she started taking off her shirt in front of me and I just raised my eyebrows and told her that I’m not interested) The gossip spread pretty fast around my school except it didn’t go the way she wanted it to, instead of people thinking I’m gay, they just thought I was really cheap and stingy, this was of course enforced by the fact by the stereotype that Chinese people are cheap. So basically in a few weeks, everyone thought I was a cheapskate, which didn’t really bother me much.

The story would’ve ended there if I didn’t do something stupid, so basically like I mentioned in the first paragraph, I don’t pay attention in class, and this usually results in me talking to my friends or people sitting next to me in class to try and pass the time. Now back in junior high we had these home room teachers who basically teach like most of your classes for the whole year, and my grade 7 teacher moved with us when we became grade 8 so she could keep teaching us. So she knew that I knew the material and so she didn’t really bother me much, except she didn’t want me disturbing the class. So usually she would just tell me to shut up, but sometime in the middle of grade 7, she came up with a plan to keep me quiet.

Now I don’t know about you guys, but back in grade 7 and 8, I had a lot of math tests, like there would be a test or quiz every 3 or 4 days. So what would happen is the day after the test, if I was being a nuisance in class, she would just kick me out and make me grade the tests. This worked out fairly well in the beginning because she knew that since I got everything right, I wouldn’t have any reason to cheat, and I worked pretty hard to actually grade everything correctly. But then I realized that there was a business opportunity in this as well, so later on what happened is that after a test, I would accept 2 dollar fees from anyone who wanted an increase in their grade, not a lot, but like they would get bumped up to an 80 or 85 or whatever it was they thought they could get away with. (This works fairly well because everyone who bought into this did it fairly regularly, and I had been doing this for so long that they get around the same mark every test, so the teacher never really got suspicious.) And basically what I would do is bring a pencil and an eraser out with me along with the red pen my teacher gave me when I mark the tests, and I would just make changes on the fly.

So this one day, like a month after the aforementioned incident, we had a math test. And afterwards, one of the more popular guys in school, Josh, came up to me and wanted me to boost his marks up past 80. Now Josh is one of my regular customers, he wasn’t very smart, but he was a really nice guy and would often stick up for me. We ended up being pretty good friends and basically he was the guy who told me the truth about this incident later on since I had no clue. So he wanted me to help him out, except he didn’t have any money at the time. Now what I didn’t know is that apparently Josh’s parents have told him that if he didn’t do well on this test, i.e. get above 80, they were going to confiscate his game boy and ground him, and he was about to explain this to me when out of a stroke of genius/stupidity, I told him I’ll do it for free. Now my rationale behind this was that since people thought I was cheap, if I did this and if word spreads around then they wouldn’t think I’m cheap anymore.

Things went exactly as planned. After I did this, every time Josh heard someone say that I’m cheap, he being the nice guy he is, would jump up and argue with the guy, and he’d bring up the example about how I helped him for no reason at all. And in a few days, no one thought I was cheap anymore, unfortunately, now that the theory of me being cheap was down the drain, the only acceptable answer in everyone else’s eyes as to why I turned down the girl was that I was gay. So basically, for the rest of the school year, everyone in school thought I was gay, they never mentioned it, however I realized something was weird when girls started doing strange things around me like bending over, loosening their tops, etc. Looking back on it, I realized they were probably “testing” how gay I was. My responses to their tests didn’t help, since I was pretty shy I would usually just turn away or pretend I didn’t notice. I had an inkling that for some reason, people thought I was gay or special near the end of the school year, but frankly, there wasn't anything I could do to confirm, or refute this since no one would talk to me about it and I never felt comfortable just bringing it up. So I never really had a chance to find out the truth, and right after that year, I transferred into a special gifted program and I never really talked to anyone from my junior high again. I still kept in touch with Josh and he basically told me what happened a few years ago and we had a few good laughs about it, apparently people still think I’m gay since a few of his friends from back then who knew we still talk would occasionally ask him if I’m out of the closet yet. :S

Anyways this was pretty long, but it was just a fun story I wanted to share…I think in terms of being embarrassing, convincing the whole school that you’re gay rank pretty high up in the list.