Don't read this please.
Mar. 15th, 2004 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
godream After eighth grade, Eme of the long dark hair and devilish smile left for boarding school in Connecticut, and my stepsister Jordan switched to Catholic school. Karen, Kelly, and Dana were all a year behind us, and still confined to the middle school portion of Rivers. It didn’t really sink in that our little loser clique was down to two until the first day at lunch. I sat down at a two-person table with David (the last member of our group) and we realized that for once, Mr. Harper the football coach/English teacher/lunch monitor wouldn’t be coming around to lecture us for having too many people at a table. It was just Dave and I, and suddenly the four square feet in front of us felt a lot bigger.
It was kind of inevitable, then, that we got to know each other better than we had as just two people of more than half a dozen in a group of friends. Before, it had always been Jordan and David, Eme and Dana, and Karen and Kelly and I, all separate sub-groups within the larger gang, and though I could tell you Karen’s birthday and favorite color and music preferences and her brother’s name and where he was in college, I’d be hard-pressed to think of David’s favorite movie. After a long succession of half-hour conversations over the cafeteria’s attempts at gourmet vegetables, after a year of camaderie based around being the last two losers in ninth grade, that inevitably changed.
We had a couple classes together -- fourth period Honors Biology, block 5 Latin, Honors Geometry at eight am -- and ended up in several of the same activities. For extra credit in bio, we worked on an elaborate, carefully painted DNA model with another freshman, Mark, a tall guy with dark hair constantly flopping in his face, whose voice rose an octave in pitch on the frequent occasions when he was particularly excited about something. The three of us strode to the science building during morning study halls, high on our own importance. We argued over who had to paint the black spots, where between the color and consistency of the paint the slightest error would result in huge, obvious splotches. We carefully examined splaying plastic adenine/thymine and guanine/cytosine pairs and discovered only after we’d begun to paint that we had them all backwards or upside-down. Mark and David, both remote-control car nuts and born engineer types, plotted ways to make a mechanical spinner for the model, while I hand-coded HTML for a page on the school science website centered around the thing. It was a huge deal to us then, and another of those special "bonding" experiences.
During the September mandatory attendance ninth-grade lock-in, all the cool kids went down to the basketball court to shoot hoops and slouch fashionably against the padded gym walls. I stayed in the auditorium with the geek guys, including David. We played Dr. Demento, Weird Al and Monty Python skits over the speaker system and hooked up somebody’s game system to the projector, then played first person shooters with the paintball cheats enabled for hours. When the novelty of ten-foot shotguns and loud explosions on the screen above where we usually watched Mr. Olverson lecture us on school policies wore off, we stood on tiptoes to make silhouettes and shadow puppets on the solemn white screen.
Three years later, still in touch, I got an instant message from David, who has grown his hair out over the last few years in a Vermont boarding school, and now dresses in black and goes by Dave. Somehow the conversation drifted towards freshman year at Rivers, and somehow a subject never before broached came up. “Did you know,” he inquired casually, except with far less capitalization and emphasis on complete sentences since, after all, this was an IM conversation, “that everyone thinks we were dating in ninth grade?” “What???” After I calmed down from the fit of hysterical laughter, I related the exchange to my twelve-year-old sister, who was nine then. Baffled, she asked, “You weren’t?”
It was kind of inevitable, then, that we got to know each other better than we had as just two people of more than half a dozen in a group of friends. Before, it had always been Jordan and David, Eme and Dana, and Karen and Kelly and I, all separate sub-groups within the larger gang, and though I could tell you Karen’s birthday and favorite color and music preferences and her brother’s name and where he was in college, I’d be hard-pressed to think of David’s favorite movie. After a long succession of half-hour conversations over the cafeteria’s attempts at gourmet vegetables, after a year of camaderie based around being the last two losers in ninth grade, that inevitably changed.
We had a couple classes together -- fourth period Honors Biology, block 5 Latin, Honors Geometry at eight am -- and ended up in several of the same activities. For extra credit in bio, we worked on an elaborate, carefully painted DNA model with another freshman, Mark, a tall guy with dark hair constantly flopping in his face, whose voice rose an octave in pitch on the frequent occasions when he was particularly excited about something. The three of us strode to the science building during morning study halls, high on our own importance. We argued over who had to paint the black spots, where between the color and consistency of the paint the slightest error would result in huge, obvious splotches. We carefully examined splaying plastic adenine/thymine and guanine/cytosine pairs and discovered only after we’d begun to paint that we had them all backwards or upside-down. Mark and David, both remote-control car nuts and born engineer types, plotted ways to make a mechanical spinner for the model, while I hand-coded HTML for a page on the school science website centered around the thing. It was a huge deal to us then, and another of those special "bonding" experiences.
During the September mandatory attendance ninth-grade lock-in, all the cool kids went down to the basketball court to shoot hoops and slouch fashionably against the padded gym walls. I stayed in the auditorium with the geek guys, including David. We played Dr. Demento, Weird Al and Monty Python skits over the speaker system and hooked up somebody’s game system to the projector, then played first person shooters with the paintball cheats enabled for hours. When the novelty of ten-foot shotguns and loud explosions on the screen above where we usually watched Mr. Olverson lecture us on school policies wore off, we stood on tiptoes to make silhouettes and shadow puppets on the solemn white screen.
Three years later, still in touch, I got an instant message from David, who has grown his hair out over the last few years in a Vermont boarding school, and now dresses in black and goes by Dave. Somehow the conversation drifted towards freshman year at Rivers, and somehow a subject never before broached came up. “Did you know,” he inquired casually, except with far less capitalization and emphasis on complete sentences since, after all, this was an IM conversation, “that everyone thinks we were dating in ninth grade?” “What???” After I calmed down from the fit of hysterical laughter, I related the exchange to my twelve-year-old sister, who was nine then. Baffled, she asked, “You weren’t?”
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 04:05 pm (UTC)And wow, touchy touchy. :P A Dave by any other name would ... would ... okay, my creativity fails me. Would verb as adjective, choose your own.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-17 03:47 am (UTC)Yeah, I definitely got all nostalgic while writing it too. Funny how things keep changing...