Acceptance

Hi. My name is Sophia, but you already know that, because I've been in this online course for a bit. I'm good at most of the arts, I mean, I made it into ACDA and stuff. You want to know what happened over the summer, Mrs. Liglayer? Fine, I'll write it.

I have a brother. He's annoying, but, well, boys will be boys, right? I try to bear with it, but he gets on my nerves. Only brother-repellent I have is dairy, because he's allergic to dairy. Most of the time, when I'm eating, I'm safe. Now why is he important right now? First, my assignment is to tell the most interesting true thing that happened this summer, so I would talk about my life anyway. Second, he plays a large role not in the event itself, but the events leading up to the event. So let's talk about my brother. He used to be a public schooler, but now he's homeschooled. Well, because, being my mom's firstborn, he was like her guinea pig. She didn't know anything about public school, but she did know about education.

So one day, my mom goes and asks him what his classes was doing. Now, I have no idea exactly what he told her, because I was too young to remember and probably not even there, and my mom has a terrible memory, and my brother's going to be tutoring tonight so I won't be able to ask him, but what I do know is that she realized that he wasn't actually learning anything. So she pulled him out halfway through second grade and started homeschooling him. When I was four or five, my mom started to teach me addition and subtraction, and when I was six, she started to teach me multiplication and division. I remember I wanted to learn the 6x on my multiplication table first just because I was six. I also remember sitting on my bed and being confused about long division. But I digress. See, the reason my mom pulled my brother out was education, right? And she didn't send me to public school at all. So my social skills never truly developed that much. The worst of it? I was aware of it by age 7.

At that point, I could tell by the looks on the kids in my neighborhood's faces and many other things that I simply didn't fit in. I was depressed by age 9, which was when I found a best friend to cheer me up. At age 10, which was in 2013, something wonderful happened. I discovered My Little Pony. See, my family and I were on planes for almost a full day (well, with an 8-hour break in Japan) to Singapore. Of course, beforehand, I knew I would get bored, so I asked to borrow my dad's Kindle Fire so I could download some games on it. My mom and dad said I could, so I downloaded about 8 different games. I kept it in my room because my dad never asked for it back. I had gotten Littlest Pet Shop, which had been one of the only free games on my first phone (well, before my brother wrecked it) and I'd gotten addicted. So I looked up other games by Gameloft and saw My Little Pony there and said to myself,  "Well, it couldn't hurt to try." It wasn't very good, but it wasn't bad either, so I kept it. After we left Singapore, I kept the Kindle in my room because, again, my dad never asked for it back. In the daytime, I'd plug it into the charger and do schoolwork because it would show on my assignments if I didn't. In the nigh, well, I have a hard time sleeping, especially when I know there's something less boring to do, so I unplugged it and played on it until about 12:00, which was when I returned it to the charger and slept, because by that time, I was tired and I knew I would be extremely tired in the daytime if I didn't. What happened was that I didn't notice by I got more tired as the days went by. I think one of my Skype friends asked me if I was drunk. So I fell asleep with a Kindle in my hands, just peeking out from under the covers, and of course, my mom caught me. She took it away, made me clean the toilets, hit me with a hairbrush a few times, stuff like that.

Of course, I got bored again. So I decided to just be bored until I went to sleep because if my mom caught me again, she'd be madder than ever. So I waited about a month and then took out my mom's old iPod touch. She'd forgotten she'd given it to me because she was losing her memory, so she hadn't taken it from me. Problem was, it was OLD. It was the first type of iPod to ever be made. Also, it hadn't been used for a while and I couldn't download any new games because it was that old. JawBreaker was boring, FallDown required tilting and surely somebody would notice that much movement, that basketball game didn't open anymore, so I played Solitaire for a few nights. Then I was bored again. So I got my earbuds at about 8:00 PM (I went to bed at about 9 or 10), plugged them into the iPod, and I looked up some episodes of LPS (which I discovered had a TV show on a plane when they first showed Gailbreak) on YouTube. Barely any episodes popped up. The four or five which were there had "Brony Chat Reactions" and I wasn't sure what bronies were so the next day I looked up "brony." That night, I tried out MLP. I have to admit, I didn't like the first two episodes because they were predictable and I'd seen the one rules the day and one rules the night, night ruler turns on day ruler because night ruler is jealous thing already. But the humor, animation, song (not the theme song), and voice acting were terrific. So I decided that it couldn't be all that bad, because it had a giant fandom and it couldn't possibly have that many predictable episodes and cliches and things. I tried episode 3 and liked it a bit better. I then became part of the fandom.

I once saw my best friend watching Equestria Girls. I then tested her (in my own way) to see if she was a true pegasister, not just a girl who saw nothing better to watch while flipping through the channels. Turned out that she's a pegasister too. We became even closer after this discovery.

But one winter day when I was 11, things weren't going my way. My best friend's little brother had been annoying me and my best friend every time I went over to her place, so we tried locking the door. However, the little brother told her dad we did that for some false reason or other and of course, the dad, being a dad, believed him as he was the seven-year-old little brother. So I got fed up about this because he was punching us (not hard, but hard enough to be annoying) and when we were indoors, he wanted to go outside because he said he was bored even though there was so much stuff around him. When we were outdoors, there was even less stuff to do, so he wanted to go inside. Sometimes we tried waiting until he was absorbed in something else and then go to my house, but he always knew that's where we went and followed us. So we were really mad at him, and there seemed to be not many choices, so I simply pinned him down to my best friend's bed with a foot while chatting and looking up videos on her iPad. I made sure to be firm but not hurting him because I'm not that kind of person. But then he told all of his friends that I'd pinned him down, and they took it as if it was to the ground, which is a lot less comfy than the bed. So they all hated me for the wrong reason. All except my best friend (who took a persona test and is supposed to be most like Dashie. I'm supposed to be most like Pinkie. Sometimes I yell "Cupcakes" in her face). I'd known it was coming because it's kind of inevitable when you do that sort of thing, so I spoke a prepared speech I had memorized. It's a lot easier to memorize things when you mean them, especially when you're truly angry about it. I then turned around and stomped toward my house, eyes ablaze but with tears stinging the edges to douse the fire. Even worse, my annoying brother saw the tears and asked about them. I told the truth and he went outside to talk to my best friend's little brother. Being annoying and biased, he sided against me and told my mom. That night. I wished hard to get out of this crazy tangled mess. Word of advice from someone who's been there, though. As they say, careful what you wish for.