< Introduction | The Almost First Kiss | The New Game |
Sixth grade ended and summer brought bike rides with friends and family vacations and Boy Scout camp for a week, where I climbed rock walls and canoed across lakes and threw hatchets and fired rifles and pulled back the bow string to let loose arrows into hay bale targets. I earned my mile swim badge and told ghost stories during night hikes and basked in laughs while performing skits around the campfire.
There were no girls at Boy Scout camp. There were no worries.
In retrospect, failing to smooch Erica in front of the entire sixth grade class should have knocked my confidence before arriving for the first day of seventh grade. But honestly? I wasn’t worried. I figured since diving for the ball during recess soccer had won me acclaim and pretty girl smiles before, all I needed to recover from the “lips missed” incident was to win whatever game everyone played during Junior High recess.
If I had an older brother, maybe someone would have told me that Junior High had no recess.
What my Junior High had was a fifteen minute break after lunch in the large uncovered parking lot where the sea gulls met. You’d stand in a circle with your friends and talk. Most kids would linger near the building, which provided some shade from the Texas sun, but with that many people standing around, you increased your risk of accidentally getting into a fight. The smokers would walk several lanes out to a concrete island and sit with their backs to the school. I didn’t smoke, so I usually gathered with friends somewhere in the middle. Do you have friends that smoke? (Remember, I attended school when my favorite X-Man fought villains with a cigar in his mouth and amusement parks had public ashtrays every twenty feet). Do you have friends that talk during breaks? (I also went to school before cell phones! Some kids had pagers, but usually just the drug dealers!) Do kids still drop acid in the restroom? (So many times I saw kids with dime-sized pupils staring at the flush spiral).
Don’t misunderstand. I know my Junior High years weren’t that wild. I never duck and covered and worried about nuclear bombs falling on my sock hops like your grandparents or duck and covered and worried whether our classroom could silently evade an active shooter like you.
Nevertheless, the game played during the not-recess? Not soccer.
Quarters.
Some kid would throw a coin and everyone near where the quarter landed would punch everyone else until someone could snatch it off the asphalt and hold it up. I usually loitered in the circles of advanced classes kids, where Quarters was not a popular game in the fifteen minutes after lunch, but if anyone ever accidentally dropped their change, I would tense up and hold my breath and step away from the clank-tink-tanking. Once, as a joke, my friend Jack threw a bottle cap. Punches flew. Some kid got knocked down. Some kid cursed. Some kid shouted, “It’s a fucking bottlecap! Who threw this!” as Jack ducked his head and hurried away.
No merit badge skill was going to help me win hearts in the after lunch parking lot.
And even if I threw a lucky punch and captured a quarter, would that gain me the attraction of any one of the many girls I crushed on? And if, by chance, it did; I harbored no illusion that I could maintain the Conan ferocity required to keep it.
Where was my best friend, Andy, in this asphalt arena?
His parents thought my Junior High was too rough so they transferred him to one of the richer schools. And Andy’s parents didn’t even know about Quarters! They just knew about the vice-principal being shot by an angry kid at my school a couple years before.
This meant my parents arranged a car pool with two girls and another boy who lived near me, who was nice enough, but stayed quiet when others puffed up.
The two girls? Would you believe that one of them was Erica? (Believe it! Remember, I promised to never lie to you).
My parents had no idea about the “missed lips” incident. It wasn’t something I brought up over vacation. My parents knew Erica’s parents because her younger brother was in the same Cub Scout patrol as my younger brother.
So every day, after the dismissal bell rang and I strode out the school doors to Erica’s mom’s car, careful to not carry any spare change that might accidentally fall out of my pocket, I would arrive and acknowledge the other boy, who always managed to reach Erica’s mom’s car first, and we would wait for Erica and her friend, who were always late, and I know this isn’t fair, but I assumed they were late because they stopped to kiss some boys on the way, but when Erica and her friend finally hopped into the back, every day, she would say, “hey Walt.”
“Hi Erica,” I would say and nod.
“Darling,” she’d say, drawing out my last name.
“Yes, Erica.”
“Do you remember when you licked my face?”
I would turn to Erica’s mom and say, “Everyone’s here now, can we go?”
Because I felt a little less trapped when the car was moving. Because even when I laughed, the other boy would only stare out the window. Because how else can you respond to repeated humiliation except to act like it doesn’t matter?
“Just waiting for everyone to get buckled,” Erica’s mom would say.
Because her mom totally knew.
And as we would pull out of the parking lot, Erica’s friend would curl her tongue and make slurpee sounds and I would sink into my seat, waiting for Erica to end the storm of sucking noises in laughter and to start talking about some other boys they were crushing on.
Epilogue:
In case you’re wondering, yes, before seventh grade ended, I did get punched a couple times, but I didn’t win any pretty girl smiles. No one wanted to kiss me. (Not yet).
Further Epilogue:
Erica’s family moved away after seventh grade and my Boy Scout friend Benjamin replaced her and her friend in the carpool.
More of a Footnote than an Epilogue, Really:
Erica, if you read these recollections, I do hope they amuse you. Looking back, I realize how very sweet and kind you were. If you feel I have painted you with too harsh a brush, please don’t hesitate to touch up the image. (Some deeper contrast would be welcomed by all).
Finally, I’m returning to my Walt Darling saga! If you liked this, let me know! If you didn’t, that’s okay, let me know! Or, if you remember it differently, (ahem, Erica), let me know!
And if you’d prefer to unsubscribe, that’s okay! Or if you want, you can choose to receive all my posts EXCEPT for my Walt Darlings, or receive ONLY my Walt Darlings! Whatever you want! You choose! But choose wisely! Because “we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself, he chooses for all men…”
Walt doesn't owe Erica an apology. But if she wants to give him one, I'm all ears.😏
And no one wants to kiss anyone in middle school, really. Just like no one really WANTS to drink, smoke, or drop acid. It's all peer pressure. Yes, you have urges, but along with them a healthy (and necessary) dose of fear. Because sixth grade is way too early for shit like that to go down. Hold hands first, for fuck's sake. Hugely underrated milestone. 😊
Middle school is truly nightmarish. Great entry in the series. Love the opening paragraph.