It was Maya's first day of high school. She dreaded the day, knowing that as soon as the kids found out she was from their rival middle school, people would look down at her. It wasn't anything new-in elementary school, people from town would always treat her like a lesser being because of her unique style, her dated clothes, and her lower economic status. Everyone treated her like a joke because they thought she was just as useless as her mom, an eccentric waitress at the pancake house. Maya always found it difficult that the only reason people didn't like her was because of her mom. Sure, it was a nice excuse to put the blame on someone. But she always thought that there was something besides her parentage and her appearance that made people dislike her. To her, it was her personality that swayed people from befriending her. No one ever tried to get to know her, and subsequently, she stopped believing she was a person worth knowing. By the time she started middle school, she learned to act a certain way in order to make friends-and boy, did she make a lot. She seemed to be well acquainted with the whole school, on speaking terms with nearly everybody, always in tune with all the gossip while at the same time maintaining everyone's secrets. Although many people knew her, she didn't have a lot of friends. Actually, she had never met a person who she could genuinely say knew her well enough to be close to.
This wasn't her first experience feeling this way, and it certainly wasn't the first time she was the new kid at school. Her mom had moved them around enough that she was accustomed to never staying for too long. Eventually, she evolved from her loner years of elementary school to becoming a more stable, popular person during middle-school. Despite this, years of constantly moving and never really becoming close to anyone led to the constant feeling of loneliness and that same certain aloofness she never seemed to get rid of. On the contrary, she was actually pretty well known in every school she'd gone to. But no matter who she became acquainted with, she never found a best friend in anyone. Other people trusted her, but she never opened up to them. She was a great listener, but no one ever listened to her, so she didn't talk much about her own life.
All of that changed on her first day at John Adams High School.