8th Grade Epiphanies
There I stood in my school-issued swimsuit, damp and goosebumped, as I padded out into the pool area of my junior high school with the other pre-teens in my physical education class. The once blue suit was now faded to a muted and uneven purple. The leg holes were frayed on the edges and made a 1950s style horizontal line across my thighs, which modestly cut off my circulation and made my skin bulge in unsightly places.
Swimming class. It was an adolescent girl's nightmare. Not only did I have to parade around in this unbecoming, outdated swimsuit, but I also had to wet my perfectly coifed junior high hair in order to get a passing grade in P.E. We only had 15 minutes at the end of class to shower, blowdry, and reapply blue eye shadow as needed. For someone who went through most of her school career feeling like the Elephant Man, this was a deeply shameful time.
Being the first child of two wonderfully well-meaning, but horribly unfashionable, parents, I was doomed to be the one kid at school wearing maroon culottes in 1987, almost a decade after culottes were actually in style. The people around me wore pegged jeans, giant sweaters, and loafers with no socks. I came to school wearing clothes straight out of Saturday Night Fever. I held my cloth lunchbox, with my full name emblazoned upon it in craftsy fabric paint, clutched in one hand while I adjusted my enormous, pink and blue glasses with the other. I would duck behind lockers as the cool kids came down the hall. I had decided early on that being invisible was much easier than being fashionable.
In swimming class, the pre-teen playing ground was somewhat leveled, however. We all wore the same ill-fitting, school-issued swimsuits in either mottled purple or faded was-once-red. I was even lucky in this department. Being slower to develop, I didn't have the same issues that some of the more well-endowed girls had, as they tried, unsuccessfully, to squeeze oversized knockers into swimsuits developed in a much simpler time, when girls, apparently, didn't go through puberty until well into high school.
The boys didn't have it easy, either. They were forced to wear a 1950s version of a Speedo-looking suit in the same fabric, worn thin with age and chlorine. They suffered as their already tiny packages shrunk to microscopic when they entered the water. Or, god forbid, did the opposite when confronted with the plethora of smooth, adolescent girl skin sitting on the metal bleachers, while we all waited to be told our swimming assignment for the day.
It was on those very bleachers that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. On one very ordinary day, three of the cool girls were chatting as we waited for our teacher. Not having any of my dorky friends in the class with whom to commiserate, I decided on invisible mode and leaned against the wall several feet away from them with my arms crossed over my minuscule breasts. I watched from afar. What made them cool, anyway? Was it the way A. tossed her black hair over her shoulder in disdain? Or the way E. rolled her eyes when something was obviously beneath her? Perhaps it was the way J. laughed more loudly and wildly than necessary at certain jibes made by the others.
Then, the moment of truth happened. J., with eyes like a predator, spotted a small cut on the top of A.'s big toe. She inquired about how it had happened. Much to my surprise, instead of a snappy comeback bathed in biting sarcasm, A. shrunk about three inches, looked down, and mumbled something unintelligible. Peaked by the smell of fear, J. pressed her to say it louder. A. looked up, knowing she was found out. Her eyes darted back and forth like a scared animal as she stuttered, "You know how it is. You're all lathered up in the shower, and, you know... you just, like, shave your toes, too." What?! A., the dark-haired, ivory-skinned, green-eyed beauty shaves her toes?! And, evidentally, she knows what a freak of nature that makes her, and has the decency to try to normalize this outrageously aberrant behavior. To no avail. Tragically, A. fell out of cool that day. Later, in high school, she became one of the drama geeks to save herself from becoming the Quasimodo of New Brighton, Minnesota.
And so that day after P.E. class, I took my time putting on my sparkly, blue eye shadow as I watched A. over my shoulder in the mirror, getting dressed by herself. She looked devastated. J. and E. finished their primping and giggled their way out the door together, on their way to lunch to find more unsuspecting victims. The battle was over. And I was smarter for it. It was that day in 8th grade that I realized we are all dorks just bumping through life, trying not to let our embarrassing secrets spill out into the world too quickly. It doesn't matter how cool our facade is; inside, everyone is an 8th grade schmuck, just trying to be as cool as the other kids.
Swimming class. It was an adolescent girl's nightmare. Not only did I have to parade around in this unbecoming, outdated swimsuit, but I also had to wet my perfectly coifed junior high hair in order to get a passing grade in P.E. We only had 15 minutes at the end of class to shower, blowdry, and reapply blue eye shadow as needed. For someone who went through most of her school career feeling like the Elephant Man, this was a deeply shameful time.
Being the first child of two wonderfully well-meaning, but horribly unfashionable, parents, I was doomed to be the one kid at school wearing maroon culottes in 1987, almost a decade after culottes were actually in style. The people around me wore pegged jeans, giant sweaters, and loafers with no socks. I came to school wearing clothes straight out of Saturday Night Fever. I held my cloth lunchbox, with my full name emblazoned upon it in craftsy fabric paint, clutched in one hand while I adjusted my enormous, pink and blue glasses with the other. I would duck behind lockers as the cool kids came down the hall. I had decided early on that being invisible was much easier than being fashionable.
In swimming class, the pre-teen playing ground was somewhat leveled, however. We all wore the same ill-fitting, school-issued swimsuits in either mottled purple or faded was-once-red. I was even lucky in this department. Being slower to develop, I didn't have the same issues that some of the more well-endowed girls had, as they tried, unsuccessfully, to squeeze oversized knockers into swimsuits developed in a much simpler time, when girls, apparently, didn't go through puberty until well into high school.
The boys didn't have it easy, either. They were forced to wear a 1950s version of a Speedo-looking suit in the same fabric, worn thin with age and chlorine. They suffered as their already tiny packages shrunk to microscopic when they entered the water. Or, god forbid, did the opposite when confronted with the plethora of smooth, adolescent girl skin sitting on the metal bleachers, while we all waited to be told our swimming assignment for the day.
It was on those very bleachers that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. On one very ordinary day, three of the cool girls were chatting as we waited for our teacher. Not having any of my dorky friends in the class with whom to commiserate, I decided on invisible mode and leaned against the wall several feet away from them with my arms crossed over my minuscule breasts. I watched from afar. What made them cool, anyway? Was it the way A. tossed her black hair over her shoulder in disdain? Or the way E. rolled her eyes when something was obviously beneath her? Perhaps it was the way J. laughed more loudly and wildly than necessary at certain jibes made by the others.
Then, the moment of truth happened. J., with eyes like a predator, spotted a small cut on the top of A.'s big toe. She inquired about how it had happened. Much to my surprise, instead of a snappy comeback bathed in biting sarcasm, A. shrunk about three inches, looked down, and mumbled something unintelligible. Peaked by the smell of fear, J. pressed her to say it louder. A. looked up, knowing she was found out. Her eyes darted back and forth like a scared animal as she stuttered, "You know how it is. You're all lathered up in the shower, and, you know... you just, like, shave your toes, too." What?! A., the dark-haired, ivory-skinned, green-eyed beauty shaves her toes?! And, evidentally, she knows what a freak of nature that makes her, and has the decency to try to normalize this outrageously aberrant behavior. To no avail. Tragically, A. fell out of cool that day. Later, in high school, she became one of the drama geeks to save herself from becoming the Quasimodo of New Brighton, Minnesota.
And so that day after P.E. class, I took my time putting on my sparkly, blue eye shadow as I watched A. over my shoulder in the mirror, getting dressed by herself. She looked devastated. J. and E. finished their primping and giggled their way out the door together, on their way to lunch to find more unsuspecting victims. The battle was over. And I was smarter for it. It was that day in 8th grade that I realized we are all dorks just bumping through life, trying not to let our embarrassing secrets spill out into the world too quickly. It doesn't matter how cool our facade is; inside, everyone is an 8th grade schmuck, just trying to be as cool as the other kids.
posted by Bert at 8:17 PM
1 Comments:
Good post, Bert. I can so relate to your experience, except for the swimming. Thank goodness we never had to do that in school. There were plenty of other embarrassments, though. ;-)
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