The gravity of fact weighs down upon me.
Planets are spinning around in my head.
Equations
I hate physics class.
Giggling girls
Pointing Boys
I’m at the blackboard
Turning pink
I hate myself some days…
The days when I can’t
Seem to find the simplest solution
Like today…
Embarrass myself
Whoever said that the stupidest question
Ever asked
Was the one that was
Never
Asked
Was obviously
Not in high school
When he said it.
He becomes fierce
under the constant glare
of his enemy.
He has been given
a bad name
and no advantages.
Highlighted is his bloodstream.
It sticks.
Everywhere he goes, it rapidly follows.
His misconstrued thoughts
make much sense.
His words make no sense at all.
He becomes a dried flower,
pressed between my yearbook pages.
I run down the stairs to avoid the laughing clump behind me.
Why do groups of people have their voices all mesh together? It’s annoying. I can hear him, though, and her too.
I run down the stairs, down into a corner on the lowest level. I hope they stop on the second floor. The steps go… and go… and go… no. They’re coming down.
I look to the left, to the right, nervously, a mouse knowing that there’s a cat coming but unable to do anything. I think I can even feel my nose twitching.
And there are their feet. Like a movie, really, the camera pans upward: the feet, the knees, hips, stomach, breasts (it stops here for a second—if I’m going to be in an uncomfortable situation, I may as well have a little fun), up to the shoulders, neck, head. The laughing smile.
And the audio comes in suddenly, the conglomerate of adolescent voices forming one all-powerful. The popular crowd is a single being with semi-liberated appendages.
A mouse, did I say I was? Yes. A mouse, cowering against the wall. A mouse, deep in thought, paralyzed by headlights that have suddenly sprung from her eyes. Cats’ eyes are reflective, right? Sorta like headlights.
My eyes are black. Technically and metaphorically, it’s because they don’t reflect any light. It’s because it absorbs everything and gives nothing back.
Anyway, my eyes are black, not as catchy, but I’m a large mouse, so I’m noticed. A six-foot mouse cowering in a corner from the popular entity. Well, from a lot more than that, but it’s complicated.
“What are you doing?” he asks, smiling, laughing at the image of a large mouse with long curly hair.
I don’t answer.
“What are you doing?” Repeated. The smile is beginning to fade.
“Are you OK?” It’s gone.
And they begin to walk toward me. The cat, unbeknownst to itself, is upon me.
“What’s wrong?” It’s on me, as I slip my back down the wall and huddle myself into a crying ball.
The being and its conglomerate of voices start up again. What’s wrong, can we do anything, what happened, should I call a teacher: the cat’s claws rip me to shreds.
There’s nothing more boring to a cat than a mouse it can’t eat or play with, however, and since I don’t answer, it soon gets bored. It leaves. I am forgotten, forgotten fairly easily for most of the appendages. She remembers, maybe, but she’s not really an appendage. She’s everywhere. She’s a shiny black: absorbs everything, but reflects some. That’s the only difference between me and her, even if it is a small one that causes such a huge gap in our existences.
The mouse limps off.
In middle school I’ve learned many things, but the two most basic are you have no friends, and life’s not fair. Don’t even try to say I’m wrong, because I know. You may think that you have a friend, maybe one you’ve known since kindergarten, but eventually you split up and never talk to one another again. Of course no one will admit this but it’s true. When I say that life’s not fair, that’s because it’s not! In middle school you get dealt a bad hand, and there’s no way out.
Being in middle school is like being a lemming in a cage. The lemmings follow each other, and are trapped; there’s no way to get away from it. No matter how hard you try to get away from the other lemmings it never works. Friends are like lemmings, who follow the head lemming. As soon as they find someone better, a faster better-looking lemming they totally forget about you. Many times you think this person, or people, will be there to confide in forever and would always have a shoulder for you to cry on. Then one day your best friend finds a more perfect lemming and slowly begins to drift away from you. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until one day you look up and you’re alone. Then you begin to think, and you realize, they weren’t really my friends in the first place. You’re alone, alone, alone, and there’s no one to pick you up when you fall.
This is because life’s not fair. In a way you’ve always known that because you didn’t always get the color Popsicle you wanted, but now its because of real things. Life’s not fair because you don’t get along with your family, and they cut you down and insult you all the time. Life’s not fair because your so-called friends betray you and there’s no one to turn to, and whenever you have a bad day there’s really no one to turn to. Life’s not fair because after missing the bus, failing a test, getting a referral and pulling a muscle you still have to go home, do three hours of homework, take out the trash and listen to a lecture from your parents. Life’s not fair because many times you feel like no one loves you and feel as if you can’t go on.
I may sound like I’m whining and complaining, but that’s because I am. I’ve learned that sometimes, well a lot of times, whining and complaining make you feel better. Most of the time you get yourself nothing except people sick of and mad at you but you feel better. Since you have no friends and life’s not fair you might as well do things that make you feel better because you’re the only one you’ve got. I don’t know if it will stay that way forever, I sure hope it doesn’t, but if it does then at least I learned two important things in middle school, and I know I will remember them always, true or not.
Gym class was never a whole lotta fun for me. I knew that I wasn’t going to be an athlete, the other kids knew I wasn’t going to be an athlete, and the coach knew I wasn’t going to be an athlete. With all this knowledge floating around, I still had to move the ball and make it go that way, very fast. So I would approach the ball, and make it move in a general direction, at an adequate speed, which was good enough for me. I was still beaten up.
You know what I’ve got issues with? The gym propaganda. There’s tons of it, leaking out of the mouths of teachers, coaches, celebrities, committees, activists, presidents, and the like. They say over and over again that sports help children develop self esteem, as well as help them live happier, healthier lives. Well, my question is, why do over half the students in my gym class sit with a depressed look on their faces? They look at the ball go by, scratch a little, look up at the clock, and look at the ball go back by the other way. If they’re not going to enjoy the athletics and aren’t going to even try, then give these kids another option.
Eg. Instead of actually playing baseball, kids can watch “Pride of the Yankees.” Instead of playing hockey, there’s air hockey. A nice alternative to football would be foosball.
Why do aerobics when you could simply watch Cindy Crawford do them for 45 minutes?
Old Coach Curko, there was a coach. He could tell who wanted to be in gym, and who didn’t. He put all the boys who could, and wanted to, play basketball on the full court. He put us boys who really didn’t like gym all together on a half court with some partially inflated relic from the Carter administration. So we would talk about computers and politics, and at least attempting to shoot a basket once in a while. Of course, whenever we did try to shoot a basket it would bounce off the bottom of the rim and end up in the full court. Then one of the larger boys would kick it at us and shout something about us being of homosexual orientation. And the cycle would begin anew. We boys on the half court had fun because there really wasn’t much pressure to do well. The kids who were on the full court had a nice, hard game of basketball. Of course, the Constitution states that all men were created equal, whether they like it or not. So in the spirit of equality the administrators try to have everyone playing on the same field. It’s a great intention, but not the best reality. Case in point: Dodgeball.
Now there’s an interesting sport. We used to play it all the time when we were kids. It’s a method of relieving academic stress for some kids; in other words, gargantuan monosyllabic idiots got to peg the smarter kids with inflated balls and get away with it.
A basic game of dodgeball went like this: Ten of us would line up on one side of half the gym, ten on the other. You would have to peg the kids on the other side of the gym to get them “out.” Our coach at the time was a very nice guy under normal circumstances, but he also liked to see kids getting hit with inflatable balls. He would demand that some of the bigger kids try for head shots, just to make things interesting. “That’s head shot number two!” he would shout.
I could never really throw the ball very fast, or very accurately, or very far, so I would just try to avoid getting hit. Eventually I was the only one on my side of the gym, which is when the other kids decided to throw all their ball at once in the hopes of scoring a hit. Dodgeball has some interesting ties to medieval gun battles. A bunch of men loyal to one lord would take one side of a battlefield and a bunch of men loyal to another lord would take the opposite side. The guns weren’t very accurate and didn’t have a very good range, but if there were a lot of people on your side, and they all had a gun, someone on the other side of the field was bound to die.
Am I mad at the gym teachers? Not really. They’re out there doing their best to keep everyone physically fit. They also seem to be out there doing their best to keep everyone mentally unstable, psychologically unbalanced, and borderline psychotic, but physically fit.
And if you don’t have your health, what do you have?