Judah Norman

Mr. Gordon

English 1101

January 31, 2018

The Heroic Awakening of Julianne-Mary

It was a mild September morning when little Julianne-Mary skipped up to the fresh concrete steps of Westfort Elementary School. She was a new student, but being the lighthearted, 9-year-old that she was, she seldom thought much of it. While most kids her age would kick and scream just to avoid leaving their whole lives at one school and moving to another, Julianne pounced with joy. By now, she had transferred to four different schools in the same year and often thought of the idea like it was a silly game of leapfrog. “On to the next lily pad, right, mother?” she shouted cheerfully as she approached the school doors. “Just make sure you don’t slip on this one!” her mother replied from the car.

It wasn’t some old joke that her mother took lightly. At almost every school Julianne attended, she had been teased, mocked, and belittled for her red-ribboned pigtails and unusually slender limbs. She had been kicked, smacked, spat on, and even been pulled by her hair. It was the reason she moved from school to school. She was constantly used as a guinea pig for despair. But, by some sort of miracle perhaps, Julianne never ceased to keep every hair on her head facing the sky. She brightened her day by simply proclaiming to herself, “One day I will be a hero.” And so, she never was seen by anyone with a frown on her face, especially after her first day at Westfort Elementary.

Just as usual for Julianne, the students recoiled and cringed at her outward appearance as she strolled down the hallway. “Nobody wears pigtails anymore,” chuckled one student. “And her ribbons look dirty. Does she wash her hair?” whispered another. “She looks like a skeleton.” “What was ‘er name again? Oh yeah, it was ‘Skelet’n-Mary!’” “Dirty, Hairy Skeleton-Mary, picked to the bone by a meat-eating canary!” The noises seemed liked nothing to Julianne now but irrelevant chatter amongst a sea of mentally confused children. That was, until Bill “Buffy” Williams came down the other end of the hall and joined the commotion. Buffy was feared by all of the kids at Westfort with his height of five-foot-one, arms and legs like that of an ape, and the smirk of a malicious villain. Those who seemed to be weaker than him became his targets for pounding, and Julianne-Mary was one of them.

“Hey Skeleton-Mary, get ready to have your bones flattened!” Faster than time could even tell, Julianne-Mary found herself on the ground with a throbbing pain in her left eye. Suddenly, an odd spark inside of her grew into a flame, then a fire. Julianne then catapulted off of the ground and punched a dent so deep into Buffy’s face that some say it was usable for eating cereal. The children jumped and cheered, for the vicious Buffy Williams had finally been put out of his power never to hurt anyone again. Julianne-Mary had never felt stronger in her life. She finally won…a trip to the principal’s office. Sadly, none of the faculty had the heart to believe her story, though none of that really mattered to her. 

The Westfort children never again spewed a nasty comment about Julianne’s pigtails or slimness. How could they do such a thing to their hero? She stood up for her respect and liberated those who had been bullied like her. Whether or not any teacher felt that her actions were just, Julianne-Mary could not have been happier. She finally became the hero she had always desired to be.