This is the story of a high school teenager who has battelled and overcome the stresses of being smart enough. She is a product of a broken home with not much support from her mother she puts a lot of her focus into her education so she can use it as a means to get out. However, this concept becomes her obsession and eventually she begins to make bad choices for the sake of the grade. She stops eating and taking care of her body until her body begins to shut down. The one thing she never forgot was her first-grade teacher that taught her the word “intelligence.” She held on to that all through her years in school and it was this teacher, Miss Keller that randomly sees her at the library, holds her, talks to her, and gets her the help that she needs. This is a story about a young person who uses drugs and deprives themselves of a healthy life because they have no coping skills with how to deal with life and the things that are coming at them. In this day and age teen suicide is at an all-time high and this story hits on one of the more ignored topics: anxiety and the idea of educational perfection. *This can be performed by a male or female student. It is permissible to change pronouns as needed.
Intelligent
Intelligent. That was the word, that was the word that my first-grade teacher said would be the most important word in the English language for someone like me. “Someone like me,” what does that even mean? Someone who comes from nothing. Someone who has nothing. Or maybe Miss Keller was smart enough to be able to see into the future and she knew, somehow, she just knew. She knew that my mother’s heart was always in the right place, but her mind never was. She knew that unlike my six-year-old counterparts who all wanted to be superheroes that I had a different reality sitting on my shoulders. She knew that I didn’t wear the same clothes to school every week because I was strong in my convictions and wanted to, those few shirts, pants and one pair of shoes was all I had. So many of the students in my class always talked about how they looked up to their parents and how their parents by their heroes. I was never able to say that...honestly say it. I often thought about lying so that they’d stop looking at me like I was a freak, but I didn’t. It’s been a rough go, and here I am in my senior year of high school and my focus is checking the mail twice a day and checking my email every minute that I can spare. Intelligent, I can’t believe I still remember that.