THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL IS OVER. I HATED IT. I’M NOT GOING back.
I wish I was back in the sixth grade. I was important there. I’m nothing here. I’m a turd.
They had us fooled for a little while, the teachers. “Welcome to all our new seventh-graders,” the principal said over the intercom.
The woodshop teacher, Mister Slatter, gave us a little speech. He told us to relax and sit on the edge of the bench if we wanted. He smelled like sawdust. His eyebrows were golden from it. “You are not boys anymore,” he told us. “From now on you are on the road to adulthood. You left your childhood back in grade school. You can kiss it goodbye.” He saluted out the window. “You are in junior high school now. You are… young men.”
Hah! I was a young man for about half an hour in woodshop on Wednesday. Then I had to go to the bathroom. The door didn’t say Young Men. It said Boys. As soon as I opened it a ninth-grader took a cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Watta you lookin’ at, faggot-face?” I walked out. For the rest of woodshop I was sawing wood and having to pee. The more I had to pee the faster I sawed. Young man, monkey dung.
The teachers don’t run this place, neither does the principal. It’s the ninth-graders. You can tell a ninth-grader a lot of ways, like size and deep voice and all, but the main way you can tell them is their eyes. They don’t see you. It’s like they’re blind to the sight of seventh-graders. They’re always talking loud and laughing to each other and shoving each other, and their eyes are always off in the distance; always down the hallway somewhere like they’re looking for more ninth-graders, or girls or something. If you’re a seventh-grader, even standing right in front of them, you’re invisible. I saw a seventh-grader, a puny little kid even for seventh-grade, and he was standing in the hallway when a mob of ninth-graders came running up. They just went right over him. Never turned back. Like he was grass.
I didn’t get run over yet. Mostly it’s just eyes, zooming up and down the hallways over your head, like you’re in a shooting gallery of eyes. Pray one of those eyes don’t hit you. It happened to Richie. He was going along being invisible with the rest of us when all of a sudden he got hit by a ninth-grader’s eye. We were in the bathroom. I was in one of the stalls, sitting down, but I could see out because there was a little round hole where the latch used to be.
I could see Richie right across the way. He was standing at a urinal. He just got started when some ninth-graders came in. Well, right away they start saying stuff, like, “Hey, look, we got a dingle-dick in here!” And “Leteem alone. He’s tryin’ to find it!”
I froze. I was thinking, Richie, you’re dead. All I could see was the back of him, all hunched over and looking down and not moving a muscle. I made a vow to use a stall even when I had to go standing up.
Then some of the ninth-graders stepped up to the urinals. That made a problem, because now all the urinals were used up but there was still one ninth-grader that had to go. I stopped breathing.
This one ninth-grader—the backs of his sneakers were slit down to the soles—went up to Richie and put his face about one millimeter from Richie’s ear. Richie didn’t even look up. Just hunched over. I think he was in a coma.
The ninth-grader took his face away and just sort of stood there, next to Richie. Actually he even backed off a couple steps. Good, I thought. Then I saw it: this sparkling yellow stream going from the ninth-grader’s pants down to Richie’s right sneaker.
It’s funny how you act sometimes. Like when me and Richie met outside the bathroom, nobody said a thing about what just happened. We just talked about geography class. We said everything we knew about the continents, plus Australia. But you still couldn’t help hearing the sneaker squooshing away every step down the hall.
In grade school, if you had asked me what a classroom was like, I would have said “boring” or “hot” or maybe even “interesting.” Now, with all these ninth-graders in the hallways and bathrooms, I have a new word for a classroom: safe.