ShmoopTube

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a la Shmoop. My name is Charlie, and I’m what you’d

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call a…

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….professional people watcher.

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Some people think I’m cool, but I don’t know why, since I mostly just sit back and

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observe.

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Honestly, high school is scary. Well, it’s not all bad. I do have two whole

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friends and a really cool English teacher who gives me lots of extra books to read on

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the side…

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…so I guess he’s my friend, too.

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Ok, I know being assigned more homework doesn’t sound all that nice…

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…but I’m the kind of guy who likes to sit back and watch other people’s lives

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happen…

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…and books are the perfect way of doing that. People in books can’t get creeped

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out when you keep staring at them from the corner of the room.

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My two friends who aren’t middle-aged English teachers are Patrick and Sam.

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Patrick is awesome. He’s also gay… which I found out is a really hard thing to be in

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high school.

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Even Patrick’s boyfriend hated him for it.

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And Sam is…Sam is…

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…ahem. Well, she’s just this girl.

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WHOM I LOVE SO MUCH I MIGHT CRY.

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Okay… I… did cry. A few times. At first when I told her I had a crush on

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her she said I was too young, but she was really, really nice about it.

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She was always so nice and pretty and loving and kind and…

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…“with boyfriend.”

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So Patrick tried to help me find another girl. I got to go to a bunch of parties and one

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time, everyone even did a toast to me.

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Which I don’t even get, ‘cause all I did at those parties was watch other people make

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out a lot. Then it turned out that there was this girl,

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Mary Elizabeth, at those parties…and she wanted to make out …with me. We even went

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out.

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Me. I went out. With a real girl. A nice one, too.

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Except then at a party I got dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room and I didn’t

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kiss Mary Elizabeth.

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You can guess who I kissed.

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And then I had two girls who were very, very mad at me.

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I think as a guy I’m supposed to get used to that.

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So then I decided to get a different kind of girlfriend…

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…well, she was small and green and her first name was Mary and her middle name wasn’t

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Elizabeth…

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She was nice I guess but I never liked her as much as Sam.

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Eventually, Sam stopped being mad at me and she and her boyfriend got into a big fight

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at one of the last parties of the year.

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I was so “in.”

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Except when Sam and I were kissing something felt weird, like there was a memory haunting

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my body that I couldn’t recall until someone pressed against it…

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…my aunt Helen. She was my favorite aunt. She had a really tough life and died in a

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car accident.

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She used to let me watch TV with her.

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Well, and I guess she did something else to me.

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…and I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with that.

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And that’s how, freshman year of high school, I ended up not only watching people and reading

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a bunch of books, but also…

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…falling in love, breaking someone’s heart, keeping someone’s sexuality secret, getting

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drunk, becoming a total pothead, making out with a girl I really liked, and ending up

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in the hospital.

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Hey, not too bad for a wallflower.

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