So it’s funny that I find this because I knew two people like this my Sophmore year of high school.
Okay the first guy I knew claimed to be Russian. Like, he spoke with a weird Russian accent (mind you, the only Russian people I really knew of were the girls from t.A.T.u so I really wasn’t familiar with a Russian accent enough to call it out), insisted to pronounce his name the “Russian” way, and always told stories and historical shit about Russia. Anyways, funnily enough, he rode my bus and every time he got off, there was this group of kids who would talk shit about him. I even had them in a few of my classes and they would end up talking about him there too. They would debate whether or not he was really Russian. I remember there was this one kid who was like, “His accent is fake, I’ve heard him talk without it!” Aside from them though, most people actually bought the whole thing. He was kind of a weirdo anyways, so that might have also contributed to it because people didn’t really care. Basically sometime through the year he ends up dating one of my friends, who I’ll call Rose, and she goes to his house. I decided, because of those kids on my bus, to ask if his parents had accents. She said no, that they just sounded American. I still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt though, because I figured, “Maybe he wasn’t raised by parents but other relatives with an accents”. All that doubt was gone though, when he came out about it to Rose. I guess in middle school he was bullied for being weird, and the kids tried to blame a lot of shitty things on him, which ended up getting him in trouble (I vaguely remember something about a bomb scare). He noticed that foreign exchange kids got treated better for being different, and he came to the conclusion that if he was “foreign”, people would like him more. Even though he was kind of weird, it definitely worked. Instead of people thinking he was weird, they just equated it to him being Russian. No one ever messed with him either due to it. After coming out about it to Rose, he slowly dropped the accent.
The second person was way worse to be honest, and he was also a boyfriend of one of my friends (who we will call Lilly). This guy said he was Jewish, but it goes WAY further than that. Okay, so first off, this guy’s backstory was that he was from Israel but his family moved after his mom was murdered there or something. He claimed to be able to speak Hebrew and he even had a tattoo of the Star of David because heritage or some shit. To interject for a moment, we also had a guy at our school who was from Iraq. His sister had actually been killed and his family fled to America (this was true, and mind you, I went to an alternative school so almost everyone had a story). If you think about it, he had to struggle with culture shock and learning English while mourning the death of his family member, someone who he really lost. Someone who he could really never get back. Well, him and fakey met at some point (before I was ever involved) and they bonded OVER THE LOSS OF FAMILY MEMBERS. Oh man, just thinking about it, it’s so fucked up. Especially because fakey’s mom was actually still alive (his dad slipped up once while Lilly, my friend and his gf, was over). Getting back to it, my friend used to be like, “talk dirty to me, but in Hebrew” bcs whatever lol and one day she just got an itching thought and told me, “What if he really doesn’t know and it’s just gibberish? Like, I don’t speak Hebrew how the hell would I know?” So she ended up bringing it up but he got all fucking defensive about it. After a couple weeks or so he ended up owning up to it. I guess it started in like elementary or something, he spun a lie to get kids to like him (why is it always this) and he kept spinning it bigger and bigger until he didn’t know how to get out of it. I think one of the worst parts is that he even got his family involved, so they ended up lying for him too lol. I guess he actually does have some heritage, but needless to say, he wasn’t connected like he was saying he was.