I am 17 years old, and today is my first day at the tenth school I have attended. Private schools all over the country have seen me going through the motions of their life for any number of months before leaving just as suddenly as I came. After the fifth school, I realized that trying to make friends was no use. Soon enough I would leave them behind, too far away or too lazy to maintain the friendship. As far as my parents know, I keep in touch with a handful of people from everywhere I’ve gone. They aren’t around enough to catch me in the lie anyway. Sometimes in a moment of weakness, I’ll imagine my life if I was part of a tight-knit friend group, and had a group of people I could tell absolutely anything. I have brushed off many attempts at friendship in the past, keeping with my usual loneliness and convincing myself that I preferred independence. Friendship was such a fantasy that it seemed too good to be true when offered to me. 

 It had been so easy to politely avoid connection in the past, but something about the girls at Nightmute High School was different–foreign even–in every way possible. My first few weeks there went the usual way–I kept my head down and silently went through the motions, making it clear that I had no interest in letting anyone in. I had seen all sorts of high school popular girl groups, more than most people, but one group here did not fit into that box. They were not the usual popular high school girls. In fact, they rarely interacted with anyone outside of their small group. Yet somehow, from the very beginning, something drew me to them that I was defenseless against. Something that I could never define. It made me ignore my usual boundaries. Creating anything that tethers me to this place would only make the inevitable move more painful, but that did not matter anymore. It may have been something in the smooth way they speak, the perfectly slicked-back bun they all wear, or perhaps my desperation for someone–anyone–to know me, and the fact that they made that dream seem possible. 

Being around them made me feel like a child. I was fascinated by the ethereal way they interacted and carried themselves, almost floating down the hallways. This fixation made it too easy for them to loop me into their group. It was too late when I realized my mistake of getting too close to them.  

Certain things raised concerns as our friendship developed, like how they refused to get together outside of the school building, or their devastatingly old-fashioned versions of the school uniform that they insisted on wearing. As months went on, the more dots I connected in my mind, but denial took over to comfort me. 

There are things you cannot fathom until the truth is staring you in the eyes. The truth was that they had not been teenage girls for a very long time. There were so many red flags along the way that it should have occurred to me to think twice about how all the other girls in the school avoided them in a way that could only be derived from fear. I should have stuck to what I knew instead of getting tired of the lonesome independence. Once this became clear, they already had me. I would become one of them, and the choice was out of my hands. Now, and forever, I have to live alongside the ghost girls of Nightmute High School.

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