Chapter One

"Mum, do you think I am ugly?" I asked looking up to my mum for an honest answer.

I asked this question a lot and I think mum was sad about the fact that I didn't feel I was beautiful. Yes, I didn't feel that way because my mates in school called me ugly and fat. As a little girl, I had baby fat till I was eleven. And even in my teenage years, I did lose some pounds during that puberty stage where the boobs grow big, hips get wider and all that, then you start your journey into adulthood. Despite all these, I was still called fat and ugly. I resented looking at myself in the mirror because I didn't want to see the ugly, fat girl that other people saw. I remember an incident that happened when I was still in fifth grade. It was lunch time and I went to the cafeteria with other kids to have lunch. While I was going to one of the tables to eat my food, someone dropped a banana peel which I slipped on and fell with my food all over me. The other kids laughed at me so hard that some of them even teared up. So there was this boy in my class who everybody knew was from a very wealthy family, the Kingston Family. Frank Kingston was cute as a kid, he was tall for his age though and he was pompous even as we were kids. He laughed and told me it was better the food poured on me than I ate it, since I was already fat and ugly. This made the entire students laugh at me the more and I stood up with my face down and headed to the bathroom to clean up. While I was cleaning up,some girls came into the toilet and began to talk about me and how they  thought I was  really ugly and fat as I was not there.I became the talk of the day and I remember crying in the toilet that day because I felt so ashamed. I was being bullied many times by my mates. Even while we played at the playground, Frank sometimes came with his friends and sometimes hit me, sometimes they just laughed at me for being fat, and one time they made jokes about my mum being a poor cleaner and said I could end up being poor just like my mum. I was so sad about it and I cried. I was a little girl and my mum was a single mum who struggled to raise me with the little income she made from her cleaning job. We lived in Avalon which was a small town in California. The people did everything together so literally everyone knew practically everything about themselves and the families they came from. 

My mum always said that I looked a lot like my dad. I did not know who he was because according to what my mum told me, I was just born when he died in a car accident. So the only place I saw him was through the pictures of him my mum gave me. Well, I looked like him but he wasn't ugly so why did people call me ugly. I was a bit fat, yes but I had brown hair like my dad which was curly and needed much attention. I had my mum's full lips but I took my dad's not so pointed nor flat nose, my mum on the other hand was not tall, neither was she short but she was slim and beautiful with curly blonde hair. My mum was a cleaner at a hospital and though we weren't rich and full of everything mum made sure she provided everything and I was happy when I was with her. In school I felt alone, threatened, and maybe ugly. Well, that's because my mates made me feel that way. I didn't have a single friend in school. Everybody knew I was from a poor home and my mum was a poor hospital cleaner so they all treated me like shit. The girls in my class made jest of my hair saying it was mostly uncombed. My mum did comb my hair before I came to school but it got all curly and tangled up before I could get to school because we could not afford the expensive hair care for my type of hair. I was mostly quiet and my mum was not always happy about my situation because she felt that I was a lonely kid and I needed friends just like other kids. I wasn't bothered, I had my toys and I had my diary which she gave me on my eighth birthday. My diary was the only friend I had that I could trust who wouldn't laugh at me when I poured my feelings into it neither did it call me fat and ugly.

So now I was about to enter high school and I was happy because I thought that things could maybe change for the best. We were all a bit grown now. We were now teenagers , everybody began to change boys having the deep voice ,girls growing boobs now the boys grew bigger,muscler and began wooing girls. While the girls were now more conscious of themselves most especially with their bodies,face,hair and all that. Girls wanted to look as slim as their bodies could allow them look,some began heavy make-ups,some others started dating. And worse still I was the ugly, fat girl. Not like I was totally fat, I lost some weight but I wasn't as slim as other girls in my school, I changed too, my boobs grew, a little bigger than other girls, my hips too was more rounded than theirs, I had small tummy fat though but who cares. I was still called the fat ugly girl no matter what. I didn't think they could ever stop calling me that.