I was popular in a very strange sense.

When I was in IB, I was a cynical asshole. Gotta say, 95% of the time, most of the kids in that program deserved it. I know the word "fake" is a sketchy word to use when describing people, but holy shit my IB class was fake as all hell. There was this strange, just...untrue belief that everyone was in an IB "family". Hell, it was almost cultish. And it always fell apart with the gossip and racism that circled around the class anyways.

The thing about being a (semi?) intelligent Black kid in a room filled with well-off, silver-spooned White kids is that it becomes really easy to pick apart the bullshit. You just know. And I called everyone out on their bullshit. Especially as highschool got closer to ending. I was just so sick of the circlejerky bullshit. I won't even go into specifics because I could go forever. I was exhausted by the time the year was over, with a mixture of classes and bullshit. I'm very lucky I had a close circle of friends during those years, or I don't think I would have made it.

So, considering how much of an asshole I sound like in those paragraphs, why was I so popular?

Because people thought I was kidding.

Yup, every time I straight up told someone to stop parading their grades around, or the fact that they barely studied for a test and did well, or harassed one of my quieter friends for help on math homework with nothing to show in return, they thought I was just "messin around." Holy shit.

Because of that, I was popular because people thought me being an asshole was some sort of shell, and in reality I actually liked those people. Holy shit.

Senior year we read The Stranger by Albert Camus in class. Everyone told me I was just like the protagonist, Mersault, meaning they both mis-understood what existentialism actually encompasses, and what the point of the novel was. And the fact that I'm not a murderer, but that's besides the point.

I had to relay to the class that just because I was apathetic to everyone in that particular room, to those particular people, did not mean that I was apathetic to life as a whole. Just to them.

I think I was a little less popular after that.