eighth grade

Today I was thinking a lot about eighth grade. I think mostly I grieve for that version of myself: she didn't know what she had coming, she also didn't deserve to carry all of the things she did since most of them weren't her fault.

Tired by Beabadoobee came on shuffle, and I haven't heard that song in ages. It kind of hit me like a brick. I get hit with bricks a lot, and I throw them at myself.

But all I can do is picture me at 13 and 14. There's a certain type of feeling you get at that age, a mix between being absolutely restricted and being completely liberated. You're not a child and you're not quite a teen then, but you're on some strange melancholy bridge between the two. All you have is emotion. 

Most kids these age have no outlet in which to take their frustration out, so they end up lashing out at peers, parents, and teachers. I, for one, was no exception. I went from being the nice, academic, quiet girl in seventh grade to being a troubled, rebellious, feisty ring-leader in eighth. But my age group had it different than any before. COVID hit mid-second semester in seventh grade, causing all of these 13 year-olds to move online and face academia mostly alone with no guidance. We all began to fail classes, to get in fights with our parents and siblings, and we had way too much time on our hands to reflect on our past. The summer of COVID in 2020, I began to build up animosity towards the people in my life because of this. I only then realized I had been sexually abused as a child, finally processed my parents wild divorce, separation, and financial issues, and began to hate my parents for the pain they caused us and they the way they had treated me versus my brothers. 

This initial anger grew into eighth grade. I specifically recall bullshitting my way through Mundt's logic/philosophy project, and did the minimum to get a solid B on the rubric. It was a drawing based assignment: we had to make a comic strip out of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I only did as much as I could to get an average B. Lexi and I worked on it together and our assignments came out similarly. When we turned them in, Mundt gave me the stink eye and told me, not Lexi, to stick around after class to have a talk. At that point, I had absolutely no reverence for authority and wasn't scared of anything. I probably wouldn't have cared if I had run over one of my teachers in the parking lot. I was incredibly apathetic. When I met with Mundt after that class, he led me to his classroom and had me stand in front of him while he scolded me sitting down. A majority of his words were tearing me down and were not constructive criticism. The experience was slightly troubling and so it's hard for me to remember the details, but I know he told me that I had changed for the worse and that I was a completely different person than I had been. And although it was true, it wasn't proper coming from a teacher. I began to cry in front of him, but he kept admonishing me and telling me I had lost all my talent, that he was "not mad, just disappointed", that he expected much more of me, and that I was becoming one of his least favorite students. At this point I was weeping while he kept berating me. I had a raging ED at the time, had an extreme lack of nutrients, and he was keeping me from my lunch period. Our classes were 50 minutes long and Mundt took up 40 minutes of that to make me cry. When he dismissed me, I raced downstairs and outside into the lunch area, still bawling my eyes out, and sat down with my friends. They looked extremely worried, especially Nathan, and probably held a grudge against Mundt after that.

The main thing that irked me about the principle of a situation like that was the complete lack of care that Leman had for their students, particularly their middle school students. They dealt with situations horribly, especially when Mrs. Dinsmoore came on the scene. My teachers could plainly see I was suffering mentally. I would "joke" with them often that I was going to kill myself and that no one would be sad if I did. For a mandatory reporter, they weren't very mandatorily reporting.

A specific instance I recall was in Mrs. Stasney's Algebra I class. I was failing it miserably and was put on a Chromebook to do the stupid iReady thing (after Stasney screamed at me in class because I wasn't taking notes and was repetitively writing "watermelon sugar" on a piece of notebook paper) because they thought I was mentally challenged or something. The school didn't even move you to a separate classroom to do the lessons, but instead made you sit on the floor at the back of the classroom, so that everyone could look at you and how stupid you were. They took your desk away from you. It must have been March or something, and I was nearly done with everything. Every day I'd wake up wishing I hadn't, every night I would pray that I would die. None of my teachers besides Mr. Towne cared and they only made everything worse. As students were pouring in to the classroom, I had sat down with my laptop to pretend I was doing lessons. I was so miserable that day and thought I was going to get home and put a gun in my mouth. I couldn't stand anything anymore. As my classmates continued to walk into the room, I began to bang the back of my head as hard as I could against the metal filing cabinet I was sitting against, in an effort to knock myself out. I didn't want to feel anything anymore, and I didn't mind the pain of smashing my skull into metal. Dominic quickly walked over to me and put his hand behind my head so it wouldn't bang anymore.

Me and my friends would find every opportunity to make a teacher's life hard. We didn't quite see our teachers as humans, but just beings that were making our lives unlivable. Frequently, me, Lexi and Dominic would walk around the building after lunch, skipping Algebra, pretending we were fetching a new mask. In reality, we left the middle school building and would walk around the other one, visiting my mom's classroom and stealing band-aids. When we were 40 minutes late to a 50 minute class, we got in big trouble. But we didn't care. We felt untouchable and that no punishment was effective. We kept on being the bad kids in a school of good ones.

We weren't the only ones though. We were very outward regarding our hatred for the school and its programs: we would lash out at teachers, write mean notes, skip class, never turn in assignments, and frequently be sent to the principle's office. Most others in our eighth grade class felt the same way, but they only thought and never did. We were the representatives for our collective rebellion, and I was the ring-leader. Most of the kids in my class were failing several subjects. We weren't given the support we needed, but were only punished for our expressions of pain.

There was something so freeing about not giving a fuck. We'd tape up crude images in our lockers, steal from the teachers' lounge, and purposefully be out of dress-code. I remember once during passing period, me, Harry, Aidan, and Lexi were hanging out by the bright blue lockers right across from the teachers' lounge. We could plainly see an open box of Krispy Kreme donuts in there from our view in the hallway. We weren't allowed to eat during school, besides lunch, and we were all longing for a bit of sugar. I had half a mind to waltz in there myself and snatch the entire box. But I wasn't that stupid. When I saw that the coast was clear, I asked Aidan to go and grab a donut for all of us that we'd split. He gladly agreed, and snuck in. As soon as he picked up a donut, Mrs. Groves strolled around the corner and we desperately motioned for Aidan to get out of there. No one wanted to face the wrath of Groves. Aidan ran out of the lounge to us right before Groves saw, but he knew that if she saw him with a donut, he'd be busted. So he shoved the whole thing in his mouth. After the teachers passed, he pulled out a soggy piece of glazed donut and sheepishly asked if we wanted any. 

I faintly remember Nathan eating a smooshed gummy bear off of the concrete. But that wasn't the worst he did: once somebody spilled their cold spaghetti lunch onto the concrete where everyone was lined up, and Nathan ate that too. And even worse, once Levi spit out a tortilla onto the ground and Nathan ate that too. 

There were so many shenanigans we got away with that year, and the admin had no idea what to do with us. Once Aidan and Harry were in the bathroom and Harry was taking a shit. Aidan ripped the stall door off it's hinges. The teachers couldn't figure out who did it and kept asking around, but of course we weren't snitches. I'm not sure if they ever found out. Another time, Will found a seventh grader in the bathroom eating peanut butter off of the floor.

One of the foundational rebellious stories I recall involved my entire eighth grade class, or most of it. There were only around 30 of us. During our recess, we weren't allowed to go on the playground. We all hated that idea, because we still wanted to have fun. So one day, Dylinn Bradshaw climbed up onto a pole in the playground and got inside the basket type thing on top of the pole. All of us were gathered 'round, and thought it was very humorous. It was incredibly risky, and we thought no teachers had seen it. While all of us were laughing at Dylinn, we heard a  threatening sound of heels approaching us from a distance. Someone spied Dinsmoore, and Harry yelled, "Scatter!" So we did. A couple of stragglers were found guilty by association. Dinsmoore and a couple others walked Dylinn into a back door, never to be seen again that day. Dylinn's punishment was monumental: he was banned from recess for the rest of year, was required to eat lunch every day with Dinsmoore, and received a week of suspension. All for stepping foot on a playground, really. Understandably, we were all angry because his punishment was unfair. During the next class, by request, I designed "Free Dylinn" posters for people to tape on their lockers. We weren't permitted to have anything on the outside of our lockers anyway, and many of us got into trouble because of it. But it wasn't all in vain. After a couple days of seeing Free Dylinn propaganda everywhere, we found out that the admin had lessened Dylinn's punishment to one month of banned recess and lunch, and only a two day suspension. He has us to thank.

A  particularly humorous, though problematic, memory I hold dear is one of Aidan's quips. Before the middle school building was built that year, we were still in the main building. Me and a couple others were walking back to class and mumbling to ourselves when a fifth grade boy walked past us. He was Indian. Aidan, who was walking in front, tapped the kid on the shoulder and said, "Yo, Baljeet!" Our hands covered our mouths in horror, but also to keep from laughing. We knew it was horribly prejudiced, but we were immature and always looking for a good laugh. The poor kid went back to his classroom and told his teacher about it. Aidan was sent to Dinsmoore. 

Although I'm ashamed to admit, once Daniel and I drew swastikas all over the desks in Mrs. Seeley's classroom. We absolutely despised Nazism and were satirizing it, but no one could tell. So we quickly turned them into window-panes. Nearly every day after school, we'd steal Stasney's Apples To Apples cards and play them in the cafeteria. Usually it was just me, Lexi, and Daniel but sometimes others would join in. When we got home, we would all hop on the House Party app and play Chips and Guac, that app's version of Apples to Apples. If you were dealt either of the cards "Haboob" or "Hillary Clinton", it was an automatic win. We would play late into the night.

I recall one instance when I absolutely let Dom have it. It was after one of Towne's tests, and we weren't allowed on our phones, so I grabbed a map of Arizona from the bookshelf to look at. The map was huge as I unfolded it, and Lexi and I giggled at the funny town names. Suddenly, across the room, I hear Dominic say, "Wow, Sky! That map is bigger than you!" I was very insecure about my height at that age, being only 4'8" and thin. And Dom's comment made my blood boil. People were still taking the test and began to look at him irritatedly. I put the map down and started screaming at Dom to shut up and about how much of an asshole he was and said some other choice words. The funniest part was that Mr. Towne didn't even stop me. He knew how often I was teased about my height, and I was one of his favorite students. You can plainly tell I was on edge that year and was very easily pissed off.

When the middle school building finally finished construction, it was our job to move all of our homeroom teacher's things into her new classroom across campus. We got most of the stuff, but Lexi and I went back to fetch some board games. When we came back, the door was locked and nobody would let us in. We sat out there for around 20 minutes and played checkers on the ground. Aidan had made sure to bring our class pet along to the new classroom. It was a piece of broccoli that we had named Timothee, and we set him on the windowsill. A couple weeks later we found out that Seeley had thrown it away.

Another memory from eighth grade was from Seeley's Latin class. She had us all sit down and watch a video of someone's creation of ancient Rome in Minecraft. The lights were dim and it was the last period of the day. As the video droned along for 35 minutes, every single person in that class fell asleep, including Seeley. Dom was the only one who was awake, and he sat in front of me. He was upset that everyone had slumbered without him, and he slammed a textbook on my desk, which woke up the whole class.

Every year we would have a choice of electives, and that year I wanted Seeley's ukulele class. After about a week I was kicked out because my grades were too bad, and I was shoved into a study hall classroom which was supervised by Mrs. Cox. I didn't care to raise my grades, so Mrs. Cox gave me her copy of the Silmarillion to borrow and read during that time. I also remember joining cross country, but after about a month I was kicked out of that too because of my grades. I only joined it in the first place because Nathan joined it. Lexi did it with me, and we both thought it was miserable. Once we were late to practice because we'd been too busy walking around her neighborhood barefoot. We got terrible callouses on our feet and ended up not practicing.

That was the year, 2020, that I began collecting records. My first record was With The Beatles, and I remember being so proud of it that I stuck it in my backpack, along with my portable record player, and played the record in Mr. Towne's room after school with Lexi, Nathan, and TJ. I remember one rainy September afternoon. I was the last one to be picked up by my mother, and for some reason that day I tasted my first slice of utter hopelessness. That was just the beginning. I remember that night I spilled my guts out to Nathan, and the next day at school he looked at me so pitifully. 

Nearly every day, we would have lunch in Mr. Towne's classroom. He always gave permission for Nick (Mr. Butter Braids himself) to play music on his speaker. Nick took requests but was always picky with the music, and could never let the full length of a song play. I requested he play We'll Run Away by the Beach Boys, and he kept refusing to do so. After 15 minutes of him teasing me about it, Nathan started yelling at Nick on my behalf. Nathan always got mad like that, especially if people were teasing me. Once I was sick and stayed home, and Nathan got into a fist-fight with Daniel somehow. I don't remember what it was about, but I wish I did. At the end of eighth grade when we received our yearbooks, us eighth graders got a special feature in it where you could see our baby pictures. Ethan Seeley (who ended up being my manager at Dairy Queen 4 years later) started to make fun of my pointy ears as a child, which I still sort of had. Nathan threatened Ethan over that, because he knew I was insecure about it.

Even though we had lunch every day with them, we didn't realize that Mr. Towne and Mrs. Stasney were romantically involved. We found out the hard way. Stasney had COVID and videoed herself teaching the lesson at her house, and then she'd upload it to YouTube and have us watch it in class. In one of the videos we saw Mr. Towne walking around shirtless in the back. She was filming it in Mr. Towne's house. A couple days later we have Towne's class and he starts the lesson mournfully and says, "I guess the cat's out of the bag." This was nightmare news to hear. Mrs. Stasney was married and had just had a baby with her disabled veteran of a husband, and Mr. Towne had recently been engaged to a gal in Chile. A few weeks later we found out Stasney was getting a divorce and Towne cut off his engagement. By the end of the year Towne and Stasney had broken up.

Another instance where Leman's admin sucked ass was how they dealt with bullying. Our friend Brayden Paul was getting physically bullied every day by Caleb and his cronies. They'd push him to the ground and kick him, or shove him against the brick and scrape his face. Once they gave Brayden a black eye and sprained his wrist. We were so angry about it that we went and told Mr. Towne, but nothing was done about it and Brayden continued to get bullied for the rest of the year. But as soon as a girl wore leggings on a Friday, that was just too much. 

I remember that year we had the same seating chart for the entire second semester in every class. Lexi sat in front of me and Harry sat behind me. One day during a work time in US History, Harry tapped me on the shoulder and I looked back to see the screen on his Chromebook broadcasting a photo of two Black guys kissing. We almost blew a blood vessel laughing at it.

Another time in Stasney's class, Lexi had for some reason brought in Kinetic Sand to fidget with during class. We got too occupied with it and accidentally made a mess of it on the floor. We spent our lunch period cleaning it up. 

Lexi and I started a rumor that Dinsmoore was killing kids and storing their bodies in the Tuff Sheds outside.

At the beginning of the year, we had a very strange English teacher called Mr. Van Sandt. He was really weird and very creepy. He was always talking about sex robots and would pull mine and Lexi's desks towards him during class. He would write students names on the board if they got into trouble, which was against the handbook, but worse he would instead write crude nicknames like "dirt bag" or "speck of dust". Once I stood up and called him out on it, but he yelled at me to sit back down and shut up. That made a few people angry and we all ganged up on him. He would assign ten chapters a week of the The Red Badge of Courage and absolutely no one read it. He would also talk shit about other teachers in front of us. Lexi and I would go back to her house after school and walk around on the football field as the sun set and call him "dad-bod Sandt". When our beloved Mr. Phillips came back to town, we told him all about how weird our new English teacher was. Eventually Van Sandt got fired for being a lowkey pedo, but not before we were all pulled into the principal's office as witnesses. That was a great kickstart to our year. After that, we had a long term sub called Mr. Lin, I think. He was Japanese or Chinese and could barely speak any English, but he was teaching us grammar. After that we got our beloved Mrs. Cox, who forced us to read The Lord of the Rings. 

I remember Nick would bring the craziest things to school to show off. Once he brought in an entire computer monitor and carried it around. Then he wore a tux to school, or a kilt. Another time Nick brought an electric guitar to school and had me and Nathan carry it around. At that school, students weren't allowed to be in a room unless a teacher was with them. We had all gotten off of lunch early and headed back to our homeroom, but Seeley wasn't there. We walked into the room anyway, knowing we were going to get in trouble, and locked the door behind us, closed the blinds, and gathered in a circle around Will who was sitting on a stool. He started singing random songs for us while strumming that electric guitar. It sounded terrible.

Another time, our music teacher Ms. Keith, who was a very awkward lady was engaged to the janitor, told us we had a concert on a specific day in the next couple weeks. We all disliked her, she was a bad teacher and was terribly uninteresting. Will raised his hand in response to the concert date and said, "I'm sorry, but I will be sick on that day." She was so dense that she didn't understand. I believe that was the same concert when Nathan and I played glockenspiel together, since we were the most musically inclined.

Second semester was absolutely ridiculous. All of us desperately wanted to graduate and so no one was trying anymore. I remember in Mr. Towne's class he gave us all a project based on the Cold War era. I got the Space Race. We were given a worksheet to fill out about the research we found. I never finished the worksheet and didn't ever do the project, but I remember one of the questions being "what's a song that addresses this event?" and so naturally I picked Space Oddity by David Bowie. The next question was "Who was the song intended for?" or something like that and I wrote, quite apathetically, "probably David Bowie fans". I know I have that sheet of paper somewhere and it makes me laugh every time I see it.

As I was attempting to work on that project, I heard the Smashing Pumpkins for the first time. After seeing Elijah Wood's repetitive Pumpkins shirts in Flipper, I decided to give them a try. The whole directory of my life changed. Before that, I had mostly been listening to the Beatles, Vashti Bunyan, Her's, Plums, Strawberry Guy, Mac DeMarco, Tame Impala, Mitski, Foxygen, Current Joys, Men I Trust, The Strokes, Clairo, and TV Girl. But the Pumpkins changed it all and I began to listen to more 90s rock. I remember, depressingly, laying on the floor in the dirty hallway at my dad's house listening to Starla. 

After that, I began to dress 90s too. I dressed like a 15 year old boy in 1996. I wore baggy jeans, baggy SP shirts, baggy flannel, and converse since I couldn't get my hands on Filas. I dyed my hair a natural red and got curtain bangs. To tell the truth, that was one of the only moments when I truly felt like myself. Being 14 was the time of my life, both good and bad. 

A few more anecdotes...Caleb Schemmel was a real piece of work and he probably still is. Everybody always talked about how he had a micro-penis. He was mostly responsible for the bullying of Brayden and said some weird shit, too. I remember once in April of that year that Caleb told me he wanted to try out his new sex toy on me. I honestly don't think anyone has said anything more weird to me than that. Nathan heard Caleb said that, and proceeded to tell him to fuck off and give him the stink eye for the rest of year. 

Mr. Towne made us watch the film Dr. Strange Love for our 60s unit. Lexi and I thought it was incredibly boring, so we customized our Chromebooks and pretended we were working on an assignment. Lexi found a photo of Mike Wasowski's ass on Google and set it as her wallpaper. We were nearly about to burst out laughing when Mr. Towne walks over to see what we were doing. Lexi came up with an excellent excuse on the spot, and he never found out were looking at Mike Wasowski's nudes on google.

That semester, Ethan and I made a sculpture of drizzled donuts out of toilet paper and won a county art contest, somehow. The both of us absolutely hated the project and kept sneaking it into each other's lockers until one of us threw it away. I remember one of the days we worked on that, it was a free dress day and I wore my very cropped Captain EO shirt with very high waisted wide legged pants. The rule was that if your bellybutton showed, your shirt was too short. But my pants were so high that they covered my bellybutton. I still had some midriff showing. I got dress-coded of course but I kept arguing with Seeley that I wasn't actually violating it, and that the handbook needed to have more precise language. I am still in the habit of arguing with teachers about dress-code. I remember my dad driving me back to my mom's house that afternoon because I had to pick up some things. My mom saw me climb out of my dad's car with my ridiculously short Captain EO shirt on, and started screaming at me in the driveway as I was fetching my things. She was so angry with me.

Although it feels like that same day, I know it wasn't because I was wearing a different shirt. I came home to my dad's wearing my Mellon Collie shirt, and was so insanely depressed and numb that day. This memory sticks out to me for some reason. I laid in my bed with my jeans and t-shirt, and listened to the song My Blue Heaven by the Smashing Pumpkins until I fell asleep fully clothed. I had it on repeat for nearly the whole night and it remains one of my top songs on Spotify. That night felt like the end of the world for whatever reason, and I was utterly numb and also angry at the world. In those days I was angry at everything. I hated myself, I hated my family, I hated my school and teachers, and was always irritated by my friends and peers. I hated what was going on in the world, and was so hopeless. I was quite close to attempting suicide.

Another unfortunate memory that I clearly remember was one night second semester in eighth grade, when I was about to go to sleep. My mom walked into my room right as I was about to turn the light off, and started berating me about my grade in Algebra. Honestly, she had every right to do so because I had a whopping 3%. Yes, Three Percent. I left tests blank, never did any of the assignments, was always drawing in class, and even when they put me on iReady, all I did was watch Marvel movies on Disney+. Of course I had a 3%. I told my mom I didn't want to talk about it, and she began arguing with me. Then I told her to shut up and leave me alone because I was going to bed. Well, that set her off. She began chasing me around the house with a knife that night, and I had to hide behind the couch. After she couldn't find me, she finally went upstairs and I slept on the bathroom floor that night.

That was the same year that our house was infested with mice. One night I was about to fall asleep when I heard some rustling under my pillow. Sometimes our ears make funny noises, so I thought it was just that. But it got louder. So I lifted up my pillow on my bed and it revealed a blonde mouse scurrying around right where my head had been laid. And then a brown mouse followed it. I went and told my mom there were two mice under my pillow, and I was so spooked that I slept on the couch that night, and watched Frodo Baggins Tiktok edits while eating chocolate eggs, as it was shortly after Easter. I made a tumblr post about that when it happened.

By that time, it was finally time to graduate from that hell hole of a school. We had our graduation a couple days before school ended, and I remember driving away from the school, gazing at it with utter hatred, listening to 1979. On the actual last day of school, I wore my red SP shirt, as my graduating class walked out onto the turf with all of our things, I turned back to the middle school building and flipped the bird so aggressively. I told my friends that I wished they would release a wrecking ball on it or set it on fire.

Y'know, it may seem like I'm exaggerating how bad Leman Academy was. Mrs. Cox, who was our replacement English teacher that year, quit her job when we graduated and became the Freshman English teacher at my high-school the next year. When school started up again, I asked her why she quit and she told me that Leman was comparable to Nazi Germany. Not quite, I thought. But she detailed how she never hung around the other teachers because they talked shit about the students and other staff members, and the admin had favorites who they would give extra opportunities, and Mrs. Cox was not one of them. Mrs. Cox despised that school along with me.

Today, I have her number and we talk sometimes. She still has some of my Lord of the Rings art from eighth grade, and occasionally she'll visit me in the art room to see what I'm working on. She always encouraged me and supported me as long as I knew her, and she's a huge reason I got through middle school.