Dear Amy at 13,
Despite having moved here earlier this year, you may still feel compelled to try to make more friends by lying about how interesting your life is. Some of my personal favorites are telling people that we lived in France for a bit, and that we were in an Oreo commercial. We even had the details of the Oreo commercial figured out: how we twist the Oreo in half so that all of the icing ends up on one side, lick the icing off, and then eat the cookies with milk. I think we were trying to impress people, but I don’t remember anyone caring too much about where or what we did. We were just the “new kid” and that was interesting enough until a newer kid came along.
The middle school was divided into “Teams” and you had all of your classes with the same kids within your team. Karen was in Team 3 whereas we were in Team 2, so we sought out others to hang out with. Luckily there were some others on Team 2 who we got along with, and they had some other friends on other teams which ended up rounding our group out to 5-7. It varied sometimes, but there was one thing that we grouped up for: Hercules.
Marika and I would almost always find a way back into Mr. Schmidt’s portable during lunch so that we could watch bits of Hercules and hide… that probably isn’t the most accurate word, but when it rained it was definitely nice to be away from the cold and the crowd of people who were just in the regular building. Once we couldn’t find our way back into the portable and I remember Karen bit my cheek. She went to do something else but I turned and she just briefly teethed me. Or maybe I bit her… I don’t remember.
The other great thing about our middle school, even though you technically are not allowed off property during lunch, is Bob’s Mini Mart. There is a small convenience store right on the cusp of the school property… well on the other side of these townhouses… and they sell a bunch of random things as well as Screamers. These are delicious combinations of slurpee/slushies and soft serve ice cream. There is another place in town that does these with hard ice cream, but they aren’t as good. The trick here is getting off of school property without getting caught, grabbing the Screamer, getting back onto property, and not having anyone question why you have it…
You are probably better off sticking to the rules… for now. High school is just around the corner and the beginning of grade nine is going to be a bit weird.
-A
A. N. Stetzl 