Lockers turned out not to be a problem. Eighth graders didn’t use them, and they’d won this battle long ago. Eighth graders liked the look of carrying all their stuff in a backpack from class to class all day. It worked with their casual image. Like they were just passing through. Like they’d be in high school before seventh period.
And what the eighth graders did, we all did.
But there are always myths about middle school. I can think of three, and one of them was about lockers.
MIDDLE SCHOOL MYTH #1
The administration claimed they had taken off the locker doors because people were leaving things in them, for months: smelly food, outgrown shoes, other stuff. But the story was that they’d taken off the doors when they found a human hand in a locker.
Gross, right? A human hand severed at the wrist and wearing a class ring. Sometimes an ID bracelet, but no ID. Sometimes it’s a foot, with a sock.
The rest of the story was that an ancient high school had stood here before they built the middle school. Then when they were digging up the old foundation to build the new foundation, they discovered a skeleton wearing nothing but a cap that read: “Class of 1917.”
In some of the tellings, the body is missing one hand. In others, both hands. Anyway, after they built the middle school, a human hand kept appearing in one locker after another. Mummified.
Annoying, and one of the main secrets of the Board of Education. You’ll notice they were able to keep it out of the newspapers, which everybody but me reads.
When they got tired of burying hands in the dark of night, on school property, they took the doors off the lockers. This has solved the problem, so far. But who can say for the future? This was a story we liked better than the truth, so we sort of believed it.
MIDDLE SCHOOL MYTH #2
And this is a total myth: that middle school teachers are smarter than elementary school teachers. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Mr. McLeod knew the most of all the teachers we’d ever had, put together. And he hadn’t even graduated yet. Also, Mrs. Stanley was smarter than we’d noticed. Just to make us learn things on our own, she’d pretended not to know. Ms. Roebuck didn’t have to pretend. Lynn Stanley and I ended up in her homeroom along with four Joshes, both Emmas, Esther Wilhelm, and Raymond Petrovich. And half the Eastside and Central Elementary people.
One thing about Ms. Roebuck: She was totally absentminded. She drove a Chevy Volt, and it burned a ton of gas because she’d forget to charge it up. She’d come to school smelling like an oil rig because she’d carried a can of gas down the side of the road from the Shell station, back to her Volt.
We liked her fine. She didn’t yell and she never tried to tell us stories about when she went to school.
“Maybe she didn’t,” murmured Lynn Stanley.
I forget what she taught. It wasn’t computer science. Morning attendance was computerized in a system Ms. Roebuck never got a handle on. The first day she sent out a send-all e-mail to our parents, reporting us absent. All of us.
This could have led to a parent revolt and another lockdown. An Amber Alert. Anything. But lucky for Ms. Roebuck, Raymond Petrovich was there and ready.
She got out of his way, and he sent another e-mail to our parents, countermanding the first one.
“Thank you, Josh,” said Ms. Roebuck to Raymond, from the bottom of her heart. From Day One he was our permanent attendance officer. This didn’t solve everything. Whenever Ms. Roebuck even walked past the computer, she’d set it off. One time parents heard that we’d been sent to the nurse. All of us. One day we all went to the counselor. “It may have something to do with her magnetic force field,” Raymond said, and did what he could.
MIDDLE SCHOOL MYTH #3
If you tried to eat in the food court at noon, seventh graders would shake you down and steal your phone.
No, wait. That was no myth. That was the truth.
But Lynn Stanley had googled the school floor plan and saw that they’d drained the indoor pool for insurance reasons. She figured the room with the empty pool would be a “dank and sequestered” place that would work for our lunch.
It was dank all right. We sat on a bottom bleacher in there that first noon. She looked into my lunch. “Are those croutons? I haven’t seen a crouton since June. All we ate at fat camp was kale. Bales of kale.”
“What is it?”
“Like lettuce but without the personality,” she said.
A chlorine smell in here reminded me of Holly on summer nights.
“You know why they drained the pool?”
“Insurance reasons?”
“Wrong,” said Lynn Stanley. “The girls didn’t want to get their hair wet. We may be lunching together permanently. I’m having second thoughts about peer-grouping with girls. I mean, have you seen them? And why are they all named either Sienna or Peyton? And what about the piercing on the girls from Central Elementary? What are they thinking?”
“Nothing?” I said.
“Exactly,” said Lynn.
She was never going to do a lot of peer-grouping with girls. It wasn’t her.
“What’s in that bottle you’re drinking out of?” I inquired.
“A wheatgrass smoothie.” She wiped off a mustache.
“What’s it taste like?”
“Like an open field,” she said, “with cow pies.”
Then out of nowhere she said, “I’ll probably marry Raymond Petrovich. It crossed my mind when he was canceling our absences on e-mail this morning. He’s a take-charge guy.”
“I thought you weren’t ever going to get married,” I said, “end of story.”
“I was in elementary school when I said that. I’ve moved on. And don’t throw everything I say back in my face.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m looking for serious, not exciting. And Raymond’s really smart.”
“A little nerdy,” I offered.
“And probably a future dot-com billionaire. We’ll probably be living somewhere in the Bay Area.”
“Maybe you’ll marry somebody you don’t meet till you’re grown. Would that be so weird?”
“You can wait too long, you know, and the good ones are gone.” She was looking back into my lunch. “Are you going to eat that last crouton?”
“It’s yours,” I said, and watched her make a meal of it.
“But what I wanted to say is, I’m sorry about your grandpa. I should have sent you a card from camp.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “He had a good life, and it fit him like a glove. Uncle Paul and I scattered about a tablespoon of him on Wrigley Field. Then we went for a burger.”
Lynn seemed to think this was fairly interesting. A lot of what I had to say didn’t interest her at all.
“Did I tell you Uncle Paul’s gay?” I asked.
“Did you need to?” she answered.
“Oh, right. I forgot. You know everything.”
“I know that,” Lynn said. “Where were you in second grade when Mrs. Canova read us Daddy’s Roommate?”
“I thought it was fiction.”
“Then that spring she read us And Tango Makes Three.”
“I thought that was about penguins.”
Lynn Stanley sighed.
So she wasn’t all that different. New name. New shape. But basically the old Lynette, always with a plan, always knowing everything. Always thinking she could see the future.
But she couldn’t.