I stand outside, blowing puffs of smoke into the air. My nose turns red as blood pools into my face due to the 20-degree weather. I hear a loud roar as the earthquakes beneath my miniature black boots. I reach for my tiny bookbag as the big, yellow school bus rounds the corner. I load the bus and quickly find my assigned seat. The other kids and I laugh, cheer and sing along to our favorite 2000’s classic Dynamite by Taio Cruz. Our life is easy; our life is carefree. Suddenly, we all stand, as the bus rolls to a stop and lets us off to start another day at school.

I sit down in homeroom, pulling out my bright orange agenda and talking to the friend that sits across from me. My classmates laugh and play before class starts but soon, no one’s laughing and Alex walks in. Wide eyes turn to her, then quickly dart away. The room soon fills with whispers, whispers that talk about the holes in her khaki pants and the stains on her washed out, blue T-shirt. We all whisper harsh words about her appearance, but the harshest ones pertain to her personality. We mock her when she cries or has a regularly scheduled temper tantrum. She speaks often, but her words make us tense with discomfort because they don’t sound like the rest of ours.

Fast forward to my middle school years, its seventh grade now. I wait at the cul-de-sac inmy neighborhood, I see that big yellow bus turn the corner. I walk onto the bus and sit across from my friend Jessica. Jessica snaps her head toward me and says, “did you hear about Alex?” Her statement caught me off guard, I hadn’t seen or even thought about her since elementary school. Jessica begins to tell me about how CPS had taken Alex and her two siblings away from their parents on severe child abuse charges the night before. I had always known that there was something different about Alex, not necessarily bad but different. It never crossed my mind that her casual outbursts could have been cries for help or that the holes in her pants were because of her inattentive parents.

I always understood that people had hard lives, but I never knew that someone I saw everyday could also be suffering every day, especially someone so young, someone my age. I thought about how harshly I had judged her while simultaneously knowing absolutely nothing about her. Even though I was so young when this happened, that memory always seems to resurface when I make a rash judgment about another person. It’s so significant to me because it’s the first time I ever realized that so many people around me could be struggling with demons unknown to me. The memory is a scar on my mind that never fades.