Middle School

I've been thinking about middle school lately. It keeps coming back to my thoughts, these memories of being a stringy-haired 80-pound nerd-girl and walking to school and hating my teachers.
I wish I could see myself back then, walking the halls of Wilson school, a mixture of insecurity and outspokenness weaving between all of the friends and rivals.
I wasn't a really good student.
But I was a good kid.
The teachers liked me, at least most of them did. I did my homework and stayed out of the way, participated in class and minded my own business. I didn't break the rules and chew gum or use pen to do my homework. I didn't forget assignments at home or lose my math book. But I was lonely.
I didn't realize that the kids I went to school with were different than me. That probably more than half of them were sad kids from broken homes who hated their lives. What's it like to hate your life at age 13? I don't really know, because things were pretty good for me. I wasn't popular and I never felt like I had good friends in middle school, but I could lug that backpack and French horn home at the end of the day and my mom was there waiting. And my dad took me out on bike rides and my brothers played Nintendo with me. And the neighbor kids would come over and we could still play make-believe once in a while, even though we were supposed to be too old for it.
I didn't realize that most of the kids at school didn't have families like that. I wish I had, because it might have made me a little less righteous, a little more understanding. It might have helped me know why some kids just weren't nice. It might have made me a better friend.
I have so many memories from those three short years. And the best part about it is, even though I know living the day-to-day of tweenage angst was in no way pleasant, I mostly have good memories of that old school on the hill and the kids that went to it with me. I spent most of sixth grade writing really long stories in neon notebooks and drawing pictures while everyone else took notes. In seventh grade I just survived and wished that my mom would home school me every day. Then in eighth grade I made friends with two girls named Sara and we hung out the rest of the year and things were much more bearable then. I also realized that I'd been trying way too hard in school and I could still get pretty good grades without trying too hard. So I stopped trying as hard. I stopped doing things that would make me be popular because they weren't working, and I stopped caring too. My homeroom teacher that year was awesome and thankfully, we had a sort of understanding. I'm pretty sure I was one of the two smartest kids in the class, so I could pretty much get away with anything.
If I could go back to middle school, I wouldn't.
I would leave all of the angsty days and heavy backpacks and baggy overalls and hairpsray right where it belonged, in the early nineties. I would keep the good memories with the bad there on the shelf, seeing what they made me into in the years that followed. And if you looked back, you would see me there, scribbling down stories in the wireless notebooks with a bic mechanical pencil, hiding novels to read inside of text books, chewing giant wads of gum, and just holding my breath to the end of the day, when I could hurry home to watch Batman and hang out with my neighbors and my brothers. You would see me trying my hardest to do the right thing, even when it made me less popular. You would see a little girl praying every night for a best friend, who, looking back, discovered that she'd had one all along, and He never once left me alone. Even in the halls of middle school terror.