Loners and outsiders don’t make friends with each other because they want to. In fact, in many instances, they’d really rather not become friends at all. They are friends due to the morbid fate of being loners and outsiders. Without each other, they’d have no-one at all.
Even among such sad-sack groupings there are stark and sometimes very subtle gradations. Chaps or chappesses who are referred to by the commonality as ‘Smelly’ are beyond the pale even for this lowly congregation. They are very firmly ‘on their own’ as far as even the bleakest social scene is concerned. No-one was even sure what Smelly’s real name was excepting the teachers who must have read their name out at register but it hadn’t ‘registered’ with any of their peers who after all delighted in the appellation ‘Smelly’.
“Ahm no’ sittin’ beside Smelly, Miss. He’s honkin’ the place oot”
Presumably, the teachers never resorted to this lazy insult.
“Right, Smelly, what’s the capital of Brazil?”
But, there was a hierarchy among the rest of the generally despised. Wee specky runts, gentle giants that couldn’t/wouldn’t fight back, posh kids and lassies accused of having incestuous relations with their brothers (actually, they weren’t always as unpopular as you’d think among the post-puberty male generality).
The leader would maybe be an otherwise acceptable boy who’d been found masturbating in the school toilets by his peers and, to compound his embarrassment, this viewing would have also exposed skid-marked underwear (this is in no way an autobiographical account). He would, quite naturally, despise the other membership of his little troupe of losers, as they did nothing but reflect on his own recently diminished status. In fact, he’d bully them thinking maybe this would exact a re-introduction into a more normal grouping.
You’ll never see a social website named ‘Loners and Outsiders Re-United’ though there is one, I believe, for Smelly’s.
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