Tribulations, Fifth Grade Edition
They say it gets worse before it gets better. Good to know.
"Your dad is getting a transfer," Mom said.
"What does that mean?" we asked.
"It means we're moving to a new house in a different place."
I still remember looking through the windshield from the middle row of our 1988 Plymouth Voyager and trying to corral all the implications of that statement in my mind. We'd moved to this house six years earlier when I was 4, so the concept wasn't completely foreign. But 4 is only barely sentient. Now I was 10. And at 10, I knew enough to know this was significant.
After giving my sister and me a sitrep on the timeline, new location, and exciting new additions to our vocabulary such as "yinz" and "yunz", we heaved open the sliding door of our burgundy minivan and piled out into the garage, our imaginations scattered with the hopes, fears, and excitements one can only experience in the face of life-changing news.
The advantage of being so young was a limited scope of what lived in the unknown. My parents no doubt had thousands of wily threads frilling around in their minds about ways this move could go sideways, but I assumed I'd be living the exact same life only with a different phone number. I knew I'd have to make new friends, but I wasn't self-conscious enough to believe I wouldn't. The big excitement of a different house - a brand new, newly-built, never lived in before, just-for-us house - was more than enough to keep my mind from drifting to unpleasant what-ifs. When my parents showed us the floor plan for the first time and we could attach our visions to a tangible blueprint, that was all she wrote. We couldn't wait.
We relocated in the middle of the school year which wasn't ideal, although the send-off brought me a lot of attention, which I liked. My class organized a going away party and everyone pitched in to buy me a basketball as a parting gift. I'm not sure how they got the idea I loved basketball (I didn't), but a present was a present. At that age, you could have given me a carton of rat poison and as long as I got to eviscerate some wrapping paper I was happy. I held my new basketball in my lap as we drove west across the state, not thinking at all about the finality of those 5 hours. It wasn't until nightfall toward the end of the route that I discovered an immense sadness bubbling up. I spent a few minutes in the back seat silently crying the way we all cry over the end of a chapter until the feeling passed.
It was maybe a week before I had to go back to school. I remember trying in vain to do homework in a room still full of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes, their out-of-place-ness lording over me. I also realized almost immediately that the constitution of my peers did not meet my expectations. I didn't even know I had expectations for something like this, but in my first days and weeks of a new 5th grade I was railroaded by how harsh and forward the kids in my class were. At first, I thought it was because I was a new face, but in time I came to realize the personalities of the students and teachers were a complete inversion of my experience up to that point. I was accustomed to my classmates being sweet and kind while the teachers were strict and devilish. Now, as it turned out, the opposite was true. My teachers were nothing if not helpful and accommodating. Jovial is not a word I would ever use to describe the nuns from my old Catholic school, but there I was sitting in a classroom doubled over in laughter as the teacher was killing with his newest material.
That was the good news.
The bad news was the gauntlet of negative attention I was learning to negotiate at the hands of everyone who recognized me as the new kid. At some point I realized if I misbehaved I'd receive encouragement instead of ridicule, which gave the more curious of my peers an idea: let's see what outlandish things we can get the new kid to do. It wasn't until I was stuffing rolls of toilet paper into the ceiling light fixture of the boys' bathroom that I caught on. This was not a winning strategy. Not only were these not my ideas (though that's no excuse), but I was also ratted out by none other than my co-conspirators. I guess they underestimated how far I would go to avoid being teased for wimping out. One phone call home and parent-teacher conference later, I learned the time-honored lesson that not all attention is good attention. These were unfamiliar waters. At my old school, I did the right thing because everyone else did it too. I never had to make a stand on moral grounds. So when faced with a dare where the failure to execute resulted in being teased, I immediately folded.
My behavior at school calmed down when I realized two things. One, my classmates didn't really want me to misbehave. They were running me through my paces to see what kind of person they were up against. And two, none of this would matter next year when I changed schools again. Many kids would go to other middle schools and I might never see them again. So who was I trying to impress?
In the meantime, I had a few more months of the school year to endure. And while I wasn't the target of scrutiny for acting unhinged anymore, I was having an impossible time completing my work. The cycle was vicious. Get started. Get distracted. Find something more fun to do than work. Run out of time. Go to bed. Pull the covers over my head in the hopes I'd run out of oxygen and not wake up, thus avoiding the personal humiliation of not turning in yet another assignment.
My teachers thought they had a way around this. They sent me home with little notices to be signed by a parent informing them I'd missed work. No problem, I thought. I can sign pretty good. I'm not sure how my Mom found out. Maybe they called the house. But she pulled me aside and asked if I knew what forgery was. Though I was performing it on a weekly basis, I did not. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was wrong, I just didn't know they had a word for it. Who knew they could spot the difference between my mother's immaculate font-level script and my sweaty, bomb-defuser-shaky chicken scratch?
One day as she was picking me up from school, a classmate in the car ahead flashed me a huge smile. He was holding up a brand new Sega Genesis, purchased by his mom that day and brought as a surprise, and he proudly pressed against the rear windshield. I managed only a courtesy smile back. I was distracted by the waves of disappointment washing over my left ear as my mother duly peppered me with questions about my latest offenses. No one liked taking the bus. To get picked up was a welcome retreat. But while others were picked up and showered with gifts, I was picked up so the discipline would commence as early as possible.
At some point, I also picked up a bully. I caught him like a cold. One day he was an invisible stranger I couldn't pick out of a lineup and the next he showed up unannounced like a seasonal allergy from the wrong month. I didn't have any classes with this person, so I couldn't fathom why he took an interest in approaching me every day with the express intent of making me uncomfortable. He was barely a bully in the conventional sense. He didn't perform any of the stereotypical duties of a bully. The top of my head remained noogie-less. My underwear was never formally introduced to the innermost parts of my butt crack. He was more of a stop-me-in-the-hallway terrorist, specializing in developing a cold war of weird, unanswerable non-sequiturs that made me question if I was really awake. If I wasn't so shy I might have been able to converse my way into at least a vague understanding of what he wanted out of our relationship. As it stood, I spent my afternoons hoping he was too lazy to bother that day.
One day while walking with a friend, I spotted him standing near the door that led back into the school from where we had recess. "Oh great, there's my bully. This kid hates me," I told my friend.
"Nuh-uh. No he doesn't," he protested.
As we approached the door, I was made. Seeing me through the glass, my harrier shifted his position so his back was to us and asserted his dominance by grabbing both door handles so we couldn't enter the building. We stopped in our tracks and I looked at my friend. "See?"
"Oh my god, you're right!"
At least it wasn't in my head.
After only a moment and in a strange display of benevolence, the bully mocked deference and moved aside to open the door for us, even outstretching an arm as if to guide us along. I don't know if it was knowing my friend saw him doing it, or my lack of reaction to his torment, but that was the last time my bully acknowledged my existence.
Some weeks later, my elementary school tenure mercifully expired. With the relieved sigh of a coal miner showering off the filth of a 12-hour shift, I entertained the thought that surely middle school would be easier. Surely it would. It has to be.
Right?
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