We were all sitting around one day in the woods just outside the school parking lot and they pulled out a baggy of weed. Mike tamped the dried leaf into a pipe and they took turns lighting up the pot in the bowl, hands cupped around it so as not to lose any vapors, sucking in the smoke through the stem of the pipe. They offered the pipe to me, but I declined. They didnít deride me or pressure me to take drugs. Still, they accepted me for who I was.

After a few weeks of declining their invitations, I accepted. Peer pressure is a subtle thing. It was peer pressure that drove me from seeking company among the jocks, the brains, and the preppies, and placed me with the only group that would take me; the only grouped that treated me like a human being. It wasnít their pressures that caused me to start doing drugs. It was my desire to belong somewhere, and I emulated the only people that wouldnít cast me out of their social circle.

To be honest, I started to like doing drugs. I felt like I was under a lot of stress and the drugs relieved, at least, temporarily, the pressure that I was feeling. As detrimental as drugs may be, they certainly have a way of altering your perceptions. Suddenly everything comes into a different light. With marijuana in my blood stream, the things that bothered and concerned me most didnít seem like such a big deal anymore. Probably, that is the danger of pot; the temptation to run and hide behind the rose-colored haze that it provides instead of dealing with your problems in a head-on productive fashion.

At the time, I didnít know, or ignored the grave repercussions that taking drugs could have on my health. I still didnít realize that I had cystic fibrosis, yet I knew that I, at the very least, had bad asthma. Smoking anything should have been a taboo for me. As it turns out marijuana was something of a double-edged sword for me.

Outside of my marijuana bliss, my troubles continued to mount. For some reason junior high and high school kids feel a need to persecute any one that deviates from their narrow perception of what is normal. I fell outside the delineation of what was considered acceptable. This came as no real surprise to me, but the depth of others dislike for me became apparent when three football players cornered me in the hall one day between classes.

They towered over me. Any single one of them probably could have beat the crap out of me, but for some reason they needed strength in numbers when confronting me.

The tallest one started in on me. "So freak, whatís your problem?"

I shrugged and tried to brush past him, but they had effectively cordoned me off. The shortest, but by far the widest football player, stepped up and slugged me in the gut. I went down, sucking wind. The three of them laughed at me, as I sat, with my butt firmly planted on the floor, doubled over in pain. I glanced up and among the gawking onlookers I saw one of the school counselors briefly watching the scene, before he turned his back and continued on his way.

"If we see your ugly face here tomorrow, weíre going to pound you into the ground," the acne-faced jock sneered. With nods of assent they filtered off to their lockers and eventually their classes.

I got up and went to the principalís office to report the incident. I never managed to gain audience with the principal, but was quickly shunted off into the office of the very counselor that had witnessed the incident. At first, I figured this would be good for my case,