Dear My Freshman Year of High School,

I hate you. 

Hated? 

Who cares.

You made me what I am.

I are? That doesn't make sense.

Fuck grammar.

Here I am, first day of school.

Lookin' all fresh in my white kicks. 

WTF was I thinking?

I was heavily into rap, like I was in 8th grade, so showing up to high school like this would have been cool.

Because of that picture, I almost missed the bus.

I get to my homeroom.

My teacher was Mrs. Harlan.

A nice, blonde, older lady.

I would find out later that Mrs. Harlan was, and always will be, Legendary.

We listen to the morning announcements, and the bell rings.

So I'm walking to my first class, which I think was science, with the school map in hand.

I get lost. I feel like an idiot, so I ask a teacher for some help, and I get there on time.

That's all I remember of my first day.

I think sometime in December, I made on of the stupidest decisions of my life.

I told my friend, Jimmy Johnson, "I think I'm gonna be a goth kid!"

Why? It was sooo irrational. I had no reason why I should do this to myself.

I let my hair grow out long. I then died it jet black. I wish I had photo evidence of this.

On the plus side, I bought my first pair of thick rimmed black glasses.

Then, to have the goth transformation completed, I bought my first Slipknot tee shirt, and listened to them 24/7. I would draw pictures and words on my knuckles, and I thought I was mad sweet. False.

During this time, I started up my very first social networking page. Xanga.

My backgrounds would always be black, or pictures of the jersey devil.

The theme: black and red.

My playlist had almost every song of Slipknot's Volume 3: The Subliminal Verses.

But on this xanga, I met some pretty cool internet friends. One's name was Colleen. She was pretty cool. The other, Elizabeth Beck. This girl was funny as hell. I will always remember how she called my phone one night, and started off our first phone conversation with the words "Jesus tap-dancing Christ on a flagpole!". I laughed for soo long. As a matter of fact, we were just talking on facebook, and she's the inspiration for this post. She's still as funny as freshman year, and is now a Georgia Bulldog. Luckkkyyy.

It's my birthday. My parents are threatening to get me a treadmill, which could possibly be the shittiest gift you could ever give a freshman in high school. I begged for a drum set. I wanted to learn how to play in the worst way. If they would have gotten me a treadmill, I'd still be upset to this day.

But, my parents are amazing. They got me my first kit. A Verve five piece, with their own trash can lid cymbals. And they thought I wouldn't ever play drums. Psshhhhh.

Everybody remembers their first freshman crush, right? Or is it just me?

Kylee was in my history class. she's funny, smart, cute, and an all around nice girl.

We got kinda close, I guess, but I was too much of a p*ssy to ask her out.

Well, four years later, we're freshmen in college, we're in the same math, and I'm the smartest kid in that class, so I help her out. 'Sall good, we're really good friends now! 

Around Easter, I noticed that my once beloved birthmark on my right heel was turning, for lack of a better term, funky.

I showed it to my mom, and an appointment was made to see a dermatologist.

Long story short, I was scheduled to have it removed under local anesthesia, and it would be biopsied.

I get it removed, and was now forced to use crutches in school.

The first day back was awful. I could barely make it to the library.

My fat ass had an asthma attack.

So, I lived the last quarter of my freshman year in a wheelchair.

At first it was cool! I could leave class early, get to do wheelies, and go down the ramps as fast as I wanted. After 3rd mod english, I would have somebody wheel me to fourth mod lunch.

That lucky person, ladies and gentlemen, was Greg Marino. We didn't really know each other at the time, but he was the strongest kid who could wheel me up the ramp in C Hall.

Who knew that we would become band mates and best friends? Not this guy.

Anyway, the results of the biopsy came back... funky! They didn't know if it were melanoma or not! They sent it down to the researchers at Johns Hopkins, and seeing how they didn't quite know what it was, they deemed it as an "abnormal lesion of skin cells". Cool, eh?

To be safe, the surgeon suggested that I were to go under general anesthesia, and have more skinned removed, just incase my lesion were to be cancerous. Turns out, I healed faster after my second surgery.

Anyway, life in a wheelchair was hell. Older kids gave me shit. Kids my age gave me shit. It sucked.

And then, you ended. Then it was off to your big brother, Sophmore Year.

Love,

Max.