Ok so, I didn't particularly have a normal high school experience, due to factors I can't really get into, I had to go to a specialized, work at your own pace type school that was connected to the main districts high school. It was a pretty cool program actually because it allowed me to recover all of my credits and complete the entirety of high school in like, a year.

Most of the kids who went there were like, either neurodivergent and/or queer kids who didn't like the high school for whatever reason or people who found out about the program after being sent to the out of school suspension program (which was connected to the same building that my program was in). Since I'm both very autistic and very queer I immediately jived with almost everyone there. There was drama occasionally but it was always resolved in like, a couple days or at most a couple weeks. There were some people of people who were more disliked them others but even they had like, their own groups of people who were chill with them. It was a very accepting environment too. However, there was one kid at the program who was like, universally disliked by everyone the entirety of the time he was here.

We're just gonna call this guy kevin. Kevin arrived at the school around like, 1/4th of the school year, and at first we were pretty ok with him. He very obviously had some form of autism, which we immediately were able to deduce by like, his accent and the just the general way he spoke, but so did like, a good chunk of my classmates (including me) so we didn't care. He was also a larger guy who like, wore anime shirts and basketball shorts a lot, and apperently was also quite experienced with writing fanfiction and wanted to become an author one day. He was also gay (well technically bisexual but he was exclusively into men the entirety of the time we knew him), and allegedly had a boyfriend.

First week or two nobody really had an issue with him because like, you know we hardly knew him long enough to really form an opinion on him. After that time though we started to notice small annoyances and things that were off about him. Firstly, he smelled like shit, and I don't mean that like, metaphorically, he literally smelled like shit. We sorta thought that this was like, because he was working poor (which his family was) so we were guessing he just, didn't have any access to hygiene supplies. Eventually someone tells the principle about it and the school starts giving him that shit alongside new clothes. Nothing changes, still smells as bad as he ever did. He also like, wears the same set of like, I'm guessing 4 anime shirts every week, and a set of two basketball shorts too. It isn't even like, any anime in specific it's like, those generic anime themed shirts you get on Amazon that are based around the concept of anime itself. So either like, he has no water pressure at his house and can't use the supplies, which is unlikely considering we would have known that because he never shut the fuck up (more on that later), or he just, chose not to use it and it's his personal choice to smell that bad. Oh btw I forgot to mention this, he was 18 when we knew him.

The second thing we all noticed was that he liked to talk, like, a lot. If you've ever known anyone with autism you'll immediately know what I'm talking about here, but if you don't, he would basically just, talk at you about whatever without concern for your side of the conversation. He would also frame everything as a question, sometimes he'd just, randomly ask me and my friend (who we'll just call Becky) how our food was or like, ask us random hypotheticals that had nothing to do with the conversation we were already having. Now, as an autistic person myself, I can say that I also used to be like this, not to the same extreme, but I didn't really get how human conversations worked, however, I can also say that around the same age as him I eventually learned how to have proper conversations with people, or at the very least when to tell i was making someone uncomfortable.

The thing about that however is that kevin was in denial about him showing obvious signs of autism. Around the beginning of the year when we were still figuring him out we suggested to him multiple times that he definitely had autism and getting diagnosed or having tests ran by the special Ed people there would be beneficial for him, he rejected this multiple times, as since he wasn't formally diagnosed, he couldn't conceive himself having it despite how obvious it was to everyone around him. Another thing about the Ted talks he would give random people is that he didn't really get what was appropriate for conversations. Multiple times he like, casually dropped potentially triggering or offensive subject matter without warning. Now, to be fair, in my friend group, my best friend at the time would often talk and we'd joke about some of the fucked up stuff that happened to her, but the thing about that is that we all knew eachother very well and we were both extremely aware of what was and wasn't ok in a conversation. I remember one time he just, dropped a very racist joke even though we were very obviously uncomfortable with it, and another time he like, wanted to show me something, and I said no, and he just, showed me anyways. He made everyone there extremely uncomfortable and that alone caused people to slowly turn on him.

The last thing that made us turn against him was his academic behavior. For one, he would do the aforementioned poor social etiquette while we were trying to do our work, which was very distracting and disruptive to the entire class, and eventually even the fucking teachers started talking shit about kevin for that reason. He also like, had a very bad habit of not doing what was required of him for those classes and eventually he was caught cheating multiple times. This wouldn't normally be a problem for other students outside of himself, but eventually due to this they ended up like, placing multiple safeguards against this that ended up actively making us do our work at a slower rate in math specifically, meaning our chance of graduating at a timely rate was potentially compromised. He actively made things harder for other students because of his fuck ups.

Eventually the entire school, including me, turned against him and we all just, started talking shit about him when he wasn't around. He was probably the most talked about student there. It sort of brought the school together in a weird way, we were all from different backgrounds and had all sorts of different home life's and tramuas and economic situations we had to deal with, but we all came together to talk shit about this one guy. I remember one time when he was sick or something and couldn't come to school and we realized this in the lunchroom and proceeded to cheer and I started high fiving everyone. The amount of shit that was talked was of biblical proportions. We hated this kid with every fiber of our being and prayed he didn't come back next school year for whatever reason.

Is this fucked up? Idk I feel like it was justified with context but at the same time, this is all pretty mean.