Member-only story
I Was The Queen Bee, Once…
I was weird. I was unique. I was confident. And the world revolved around me for a while…
It wasn’t until senior year in high school, 10 years ago this June. It was a lunch period like any other with my normal group of friends. We were half and half upper- and underclassmen, a decent mix of all sorts, if not heavy to the Hot Topic side. We read real books, but also Twilight (yeah, it was that era). We watched a lot of anime, checked out every manga from the school library, and one or two of us dressed exclusively in Tim Burton merchandise. We all really dug that emo aesthetic, without embracing the lifestyle. I’m sure you know the type.
One of the underclassmen in the group was two years behind us, and she lovingly called me ‘onii-chan’ — that is, ‘big sis’ in anime — and it was my favorite. And that afternoon, she got this super sad look on her face and said:
“I just don’t know what the rest of us will do when Emily graduates. Who’s going to pick the lunch table and scrounge up change when one of us is short and chronicle our adventures in comic strip form? She’s basically the leader!”
And that’s how I found out that I had been queen bee the whole time.
