Monologue About The Bahamas

You. With your beauty, your brains, your popularity. I want your life. I want to be like you. I envy you. There’s a torrent of jealousy burning within us all. Sometimes, it goes unnoticed. I wish this was my case, but no. My envy was unleashed by a particular girl in second grade, who always had more. She was more popular, she was smarter, she was privileged, and her laugh was always a little louder than the rest. It’s not that I hated her. Hate wasn’t an option; she was my friend. Teachers, adults, and kids acted like she was surrounded by a perfect little aura; the girl could do no wrong. The truth is I wanted to rip her perfection to shreds, turn it to dust, and claim it as my own. I, would be the smart one. The popular one.

A two-timing, French-speaking, piano-playing, angel-faced rich kid. With her big house, her in-ground pool, her doctor parents, her lavish vacations. Where are you going this week? Maui? The Bahamas? Cancún? Italy? Peru? The moon? Blah, blah, blah. Curse all that! Money can’t buy happiness, but she seemed pretty damn happy. Parading about the school with her posse. Did I say posse? I meant army. An army of girls who bowed down to her like peasants to their queen. Oh my queen, how beautiful you are. Oh my queen, how we love thee. All hail the queen. Shut up, shut up, shut up! Idiots! Couldn’t they see she was nothing but stuck up, a dirty little

According to teachers, books were magical smartness-inducing bundles of joy. So I read. Classic literature, poetry, and books about science and math. Without understanding a word. At first, anyway. I stopped talking to friends outside of school. Studying became my life, my greatest devotion. Hour after hour, day after day, dawn melted to dusk, and still I studied. It worked. My teacher didn’t know what was wrong with me. How had I become so smart? One fateful day, she scrawled a challenging math problem on the board, and asked if anyone wanted to take a stab at it. Glancing around, and seeing that even she-who-must-not-be-named hadn’t volunteered, I flitted to the front of the room, as thrilled as a butterfly free from the cocoon’s darkness. Finally, there was light, and it would not slither from my grasp. Taking that red whiteboard marker, which smelled more rancid than she-who-must-not-be-named’s giant chlorinated pool, I solved the problem in seconds. The teacher’s mouth fell open. Books cascaded out of her hands and fell to the floor, where they landed with a dull thud. The class was silent, and I knew. We all knew. I was suddenly the prodigy, the darling of the second