Cicada and Lola have convinced me that it would be (ahem!) fun to reminisce a little about the early teen years. It's been twenty-eight years since I left the hallowed halls of Junction Avenue School, but (sadly) I remember it like it was yesterday.
It would be too much to ask even you, my devoted readers, to wade through twenty-eight junior high school memories, so I think I'll just start with three and then add to them later on when I have nothing else to say.
Begin.
1. I rode the bus
This was both good and bad. Bad because we lived out in the country, and the ride was about forty-five minutes. Also, there were a lot of cowboys on the bus. Once my little sister had a guy spit tobacco juice on her foot. That was gross. The bus was good because at the stop right after us, Chris Hardman got on. Chris was a senior, he sat at the very back of the bus, and he looked exactly like Luke Skywalker. (Star Wars, Episode IV had come out the previous summer.) Chris also loved my little sister (age 5), whom I exploited by taking her back to the back and sitting with her while she and Chris flirted with each other. Once in a while he would talk to me, which I interpreted to mean we were getting married someday soon.
2. Second crush
Mike Green, even the foxiest guy in the entire school, asked me to skate with him on couples skate at the roller rink. The song was Leo Sayer's classic, "When I Need You." Even today when I hear that song in the elevator or KMart, I get chills. Anyway, I guess Mike's girlfriend Tina Bellina (I'm not even kidding) didn't show up as promised, and being the foxiest guy in the school, he couldn't sit the song out or skate alone, so he chose me. I never found out why. He pretty much never spoke to me again, but I felt definite vibes from him in French class when Tina wasn't watching.
3. I found out someone hated me
For no reason. This had never occurred to me before--that someone could not like me, and it didn't have anything to do with my actions. Just the fact that I existed bothered this girl. I was crushed. Later, in the eighth grade this girl gave me a sucker. Just handed it to me for no reason. After eating it, I convinced myself that it was drugged and ended up staggering around, almost passing out, and having my friends drag me to the office. The police retrieved the sucker stick from the garbage and had it tested, but the results were negative. That's when people started to label me as "dramatic." Go figure.
4 comments:
Please tell me that the last part is not true. Please?
I remember finding out that people in jr. high hated me. There were a lot of them. And I didn't know why, either. I still don't. But I'm glad that we both survived it... No one hates you anymore!
Oh... wait... never mind.
.
Better dramatic than dead.
I once ate a package of Starburst at the movie theater and wondered why they were damp. I convinced myself that they had been poisoned (I even determined that the perpetrator had injected the poison into the Starburst with a hypodermic needle), went into the restroom and made myself throw up. So, I am/was equally dramatic, but not smart enough to think of having the wrapper tested. So glad the mean girl did not succeed in her supposed plot to kill you!
Cicada, you know as well as I do that more people hate me now than were even enrolled in my jr. high school.
sob!
But I think I might be making inroads there. It's nice when they assign you to VT the people who hate you, and you can spend your whole life running errands for them and taking them little treats so they can find out you're not a horrible person after all.
Natgo, I can just see you throwing up Starbursts. Classic!
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