Mommy’s Piggy Tales – 8th Grade

I’m participating in a project called Mommy’s Piggy Tales where I’ll be writing stories about my childhood once a week for 15 weeks, starting with birth and ending with graduation in the hopes that my children, and possibly my children’s children, will one day appreciate it.

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I am so late with my 8th grade post!  In my defense, I’ve been crazy busy this week and tearing my house apart, so other things have been a bit neglected.  Now I’m here to catch up!  Let’s see what I can remember about 8th grade…

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…OK, not a damn thing…

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…got it!  I have two memories now and they both have to do with my skill (or lack thereof) in handling boys!

The first one isn’t even about me, but it always pops into my head when I think about 8th grade.  It’s about a 7th grade friend of mine and her crush on an 8th grader.

A few of my friends in my neighborhood were a year younger than me, so it was nice in 8th grade when they got to join me at the middle school.  One of these girls, we’ll call her Jennifer (cuz that’s her name) developed a crush on an 8th grade boy who we’ll call Mike (yep, also his name).  Luckily, we determined that he also liked her a bit.  The question, then, became how to get them together so they could “Go With” each other?  Of course, the perfect solution: Notes!

In middle school, everything is accomplished through notes passed back and forth.  (I think one of the perks of teaching adolescents is that you get regular, free entertainment when you get to read the many, many notes you intercept each day.)  So, we began a note campaign, complete with overly complicated plans for passing the notes back and forth.  I must’ve had a ton of vicarious fun with this since I remember it so well and I’m proud to say that our efforts did have a happy result and Mike and Jennifer did end up Going With each other.  Probably for a whole month!

My very memory of 8th grade is graduation day.  We had a ceremony in the gym for our families and a dance afterwards, so it was a “formal” event for us.  Formal enough that my mom made me a fancy dress.  It was so pretty: pink and some slightly shiny material that I can’t remember, though it did have a slight pattern in it. 

The pattern we chose was very pretty too.  It was strapless with a sweetheart bodice and a flared out skirt.  Only problem was, it had a bust and I most definitely did NOT have a bust.  My mom did a great job on the dress and did put some boning (or whatever they call it these days) in to give the bust line some shape and I looked very sweet in it.

Not until I was sitting in the front row during the graduation ceremony did I realize the problem: my dress kept denting in at the bust!  My dress was convex and I was flat (if not concave) and the fabric kept denting in since there was nothing supporting it.  All through the evening, I would surreptitiously (I’m sure) slide my thumb along the top and push the fabric back out.  I’m sure no one noticed (or at least, that’s what I tell myself!).

That evening, during the dance, I ended up outside talking with a friend of mine: a boy named Mike (a different Mike than the Mike above).  He gave me a present and I was so surprised that I didn’t handle it well at all.  I can’t remember what the present was or what I said, but it was definitely not the reaction he was looking for.   At one point, he was fairly angry with me and set the present on the hood of a car.  He got even angrier when he later sat on the hood of that car and broke the present.

Poor Mike.  I felt so bad about that night for the longest time, but I just had no clue what to do.  There had been a few boys who showed interest in me since 5th grade and I was so completely unprepared for any of that that I rebuffed them all.  I often wonder what would have happened had I returned their interest.  Probably I would’ve ended up Going With them…maybe even for a whole month!