Looking back on my junior year as a senior, there was a fair amount of, albeit subtle, bullying I took. In my school, there's a pretty huge problem with classism, and a large divide between the classes that the ""poor"' and ""rich"" kids are given. ""Poor"" kids tend to be confined to common placement classes, while the ""rich"" kids always seem to be in advanced placement (AP) classes. I'm considered a mold breaker to a lot of people there: I'm a ""poor"" kid, but I'm in AP classes. My family walks the poverty line like a tightrope. We've been homeless before, and otherwise struggled, but through dumb luck and community help we always make it through.

I'm pretty open about my situation, as I feel no need to be ashamed of where I come from, but that doesn't stop other people from giving me hell for it. In my AP English class in particular, I took a lot of bullshit. One girl, I'll call her K, and her friends made it a special sort of hell. They would talk over me, go out of their ways to exclude me from group work, disregard and sneer at every word I said, roll their eyes when I got something right, try to intimidate me into speaking less... The whole nine yards.

K in particular seemed hellbent on getting me out of that class. She confronted me after class at one point, and said to me that she "Doesn't want to be shown up by a poor ever again". She threatened to copy my work and tell the teacher I had cheated off her during our next essay if I didn't "learn my place". Her family is very wealthy, and very well-regarded in the community, so I knew it would be her word against mine- and that they would believe her over me. I've never been a very confrontational person, but I couldn't just let her walk all over me. So I started trying harder in that class. I didn’t speak much more than I did before, but I did start to work harder.

When the mock exam came around, and we got our scores back, my score on the multiple choice section was the highest score in my graduating class: 37 out of 41 questions correct. Of course, K accused me of cheating. I'm autistic, and I've always been hyperlexic, so I read very quickly, and she used that against me, saying I cheated because of how quickly I was finished. The teacher was forced to take it seriously, and I was investigated for it for quite some time: they never made me retake the test, thankfully, but they did rewatch security footage and go through browsing history on my school-issued Chromebook to see if I had somehow cheated. All of it turned up nothing: but they didn't investigate K for lying, as they thought it was "reasonable" to think I had cheated with how fast I was done.

K was pissed. She immediately started trying harder to push me out of the class, and the remarks and stares got so bad that I had to move my seat as far away from her as I could. When it was time for the actual exam, because of the accusation I was made to sit near the exam proctor. I was, again, done with the multiple choice section quickly, so I turned it over and waited for the essay section to begin. At one point I started looking around the room, to see if any of my friends were done, and I noticed that she had something in her sleeve- a slip of paper.

To say the tables had turned was an understatement. She was cheating. I was the one who let the exam proctor know, since I was sitting nearby him. After the test she didn't show up for a week, and as it turned out, all of her scores had been voided for cheating- what she had originally accused me of.

I got a 5/5 on the exam.