Bad turns to better in a way

So pretty much all my life I’ve always had friends. But fourth grade is when things got bad a little bit. There was this girl. Let’s call her A. So A one day decided to gather up her friends and make a little circle outside. In this circle they would talk about me and say very mean things that would make me cry a lot. Well I told my friends and they told me they would go to the circle and pretend to be on A’s side so they could find out what they were saying about me. Well they went everyday and I started to get suspicious cause they weren’t telling me what she was saying about me. I finally found out that my friends were staying there to talk about me too. This really hurt my feelings. But luckily,two years later one of the boys in that circle changed his ways, left A and became one of my best friends. We’ll call him J. He was really popular and so because of him so was I. He always had my back and made sure I was never alone. The next year we went to different schools. I made friends at this new school but i missed J and my other best friends. Now I am in 9th grade and I go to school with J again and all my other best friends. But the problem is, J is really really really popular and he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He pushed me away and I see him in the hallways all the time but I don’t say hi because Idk if he wants to be my friend anymore.