This is Tommie - Reinforcements

Well let's see. After the gun incident we moved to our new house and that is the house that my parents currently live in today. The thing about the new house was that it was in a different school district. The school my brother and I should have gone to was called Riverdale High. My parents gave us a choice (well me a choice) of what school I wanted to go to. We lived in the area before when I was in elementary school and I knew that a good majority of the kids I went to school with then would be at Riverdale. Central and South Clayton County hadn't started White Flight at that moment and was still about 80 to 90% white. Knowing the people as kids I had no desire to be back in school with them. White people from the South were mean and ugly enough as small children, I knew I didn’t want to get into it with them as near adults. Also, I had Black teachers at North Clayton. Not all of my teachers were Black but some of them were and as I said I could see a difference between the way Black teachers treated me and how White teachers treated me. I was sticking with the Black teachers because I fared better when I did. Plus who was to say I wouldn't have to deal with another Jason or something worse. I was tired of running and on top of that I'm not quitter. I wasn't going to be scared of him or anyone else and I refused to let him beat me.

The sad thing is that my brother wanted to go to Riverdale and part of me thinks he may have had a better high school experience than he did if he did go there but, my Mom didn't want to have to fight her battles on two different fronts so since I was the oldest I won out.

After the winter break I met this kid named J. I don't know how we met he was super smart and was in the gifted classes I think there were only 4 other people in his class and they stayed in the same room all day I they let him out for Science and Math classes. All I know is that he liked video games like I did, he drew like I did, he read like I did, he had the same outlook on Christianity like I did and best of all he was born a day before I was. And on top of that he was Jason's former whipping boy before I showed up so we had a common enemy. So after talking to him for a while and getting to know him school didn't seem so bad. I still had terrible luck with the girls. Years of rejection had pretty much shattered any self-confidence I had when it came to girls; I was either too white or too black either way I was lame. Plus it didn't help that the star basketball player made jokes on me every chance he got. With J around it wasn't so bad. It was really one of the first times that I had a friend or at least an ally.