School Days Timelines: Seventh Grade

I’ve been blogging through my school years.  If you’re so inclined, you can start here, finish preschool, & join me in kindergarten & then in first, second, third, fourth, fifth, & sixth grades.

Seventh grade marks the start of middle school, & I don’t know if I’ve ever been so nervous.  My dad drove me across town to my middle school, starting a morning routine of him & I having a little bit of alone time in the car every morning, filled with conversation that alternated between hilarious & serious & sometimes is comprised of him turning up his music & me glowering out the window because I am twelve & hate everything.

I kick off middle school by tripping over something, falling face first & doing a somersault because my backpack is so heavy with new textbooks, it propels me forward.  Spoiler alert: I do nearly the same thing my first day of college.  Awesome.  Once I pick myself up off the ground, I head into my homeroom class, my English class.  I sit with some girls I know from All-City Band, & we shyly make small talk before changing classes, which is basically the coolest thing ever in my twelve-year-old mind.

I remember a lot of things from that year in vivid detail: my teachers, for example.  My science teacher could have been no older than 25, & used to rave about seeing the Talking Heads live & wear dark nail polish everyday.  Once, she told me I was witty, & I had to look it up, but I loved her for it once I knew what the word meant.  My math teacher was a grumpy lady who kids tortured, due to her morbid obesity & penchant for wearing monochromatic outfits, leading to nicknames that were completely mean, like School Bus, when she’d wear all yellow.  I remember that I left a card that a friend gave me in her classroom, & she teased me mercilessly for it, asking everyday, “You got everything, Amy?”  I was not amused.  My history teacher was fun & lighthearted, but also had weird habits, like wearing tight jeans on Fridays & writing “Blue Jeans Friday!” or “Twisted Tuesday!” or “Wacky Wednesday!” on the board.

My English teacher was a total jerk.  In a conference, I confessed to him that I a) loved reading, b) loved writing & c) thought I wanted to be an English teacher.  He told me that I was “a shitty writer” & “being an English teacher wasn’t something I should consider.”

A note to you, Michael Kortwright: YOU CAN SUCK IT.

I had a group of friends in seventh grade, a group of girls who were just as silly & strange & lost as me.  My friend Jessica (from previous timelines) & me & many other girls comprised a tight-knit circle.  We were almost all in band & we did silly things like wear giant plastic rings that we joked were full of Prozac because we were all SO HAPPY all the time.  That was our schtick: being HAPPY & PERKY & DRAWING SMILEY FACES on everything.  We also divided ourselves into two camps: people who preferred strawberries & people who preferred peaches.  I was a peach girl.  Over the summer, we made amends by mixing peach & strawberry Jell-O, & were united once again.

Don’t ask me where the strawberry-peach war came from.  No idea; I just know that the unfortunate side effect of being a peach girl was listening to this song wayyy too often.  Seventh graders are weird, okay?

A million tiny moments stand out from that year: meeting my friend Alicia, who to this day remains one of my favorite memories of that time (we’ve since lost touch) because she was such a breath of fresh air from the people I’d grown up with.  She was tiny & confident & silly & universally adored.  Our school was divided into smaller academies that shared teachers,& mine ran the school store, & I remember eating a ridiculous amount of junk food during breaks & lunch, something that the students of today cannot even imagine because candy has been banned.  I remember absolutely dying for a copy of the book 14,000 Things To Be Happy About because we were all so convinced that we were so happy, even though, looking back, I don’t really think any of us were.  At least, I wasn’t.  I remember being up & down & all over the place that year, emotionally & socially, because it seemed that someone was always being estranged from our group, & sometimes that girl was me.  Now that I teach middle school, I see this cycle over & over again in my students, & I remember the absolutely paralyzing sadness that came when I wasn’t considered cool enough to sit at the lunch table.

The summer after seventh grade brought my first boy-girl party, where we listened to No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom over & over again, & played Spin The Bottle & danced in the heat on my friend Heather’s porch.  I remember feeling ridiculously grown up after that night, seeing myself in the reflection of the car window as my dad drove me home, & I saw my face with traces of makeup & sweat & my freshly-kissed cheeks, & still, when I hear “Spiderwebs” I’m right back there, on Heather’s porch, dancing & swaying with my thirteen-year-old self.