When I first started thinking about seventh grade, it seemed like this big empty space in my memory.  It seemed to bleed into other years and have little character of its own. Seventh and eighth grade were not the best years of my life (at least in retrospect).  I didn’t have a lot of friends, but what really makes them different from other years is that I didn’t have a best friend.  I’ve never been that person with a ton of friends, but through almost all of my life, I’ve had that one person I talk to all the time.  I was basically a girl without a group, so I spent my time with one of my good friends from middle school and this other girl she was friends with who I didn’t like.  The rest of the time, I was alone, and I started to grow more reserved.

I’ve always been kind of obsessed with self-transformation (not uncommon in this culture) and disappointed with the reality that you cannot magically change who you are over night.  But, when I look back at seventh grade, it’s amazing how quickly I transformed into this super student.  The seed had been planted in sixth grade, but seventh grade was when I made the final slide into nerdom.  Before, I wasn’t this smart girl who just didn’t try hard; I had tried and I just wasn’t very good at school.  So, it was really weird to me less than a year later to be getting comments from teachers and other students about how I was the smart girl in class.

I was uncomfortable with that, because it came with a lot of pressure to keep performing at a high level. I guess I’m still uncomfortable with it.

I also enjoyed the attention and I think I sometimes even played it up.  One instance stands out.  First, I should say that I am not a BSer.¹  I don’t even have the level of ability in BSing that would just be helpful from time to time.  Either I know what I’m talking about or I don’t.  But, there was this one time in all of my life where I pulled off an amazing feat of BSing, and it happened in seventh grade.  My math teacher would occasionally put a really challenging problem on the board, and we would all try to solve it.  The first person to get the right answer and explain how they got it won a prize and, most importantly, got  the glory.  I often finished in the top 5 or so, but I had never been first.  This time, I just threw something together and went up to the teacher (if you got it wrong, then could go back and try again).  I didn’t have the right answer, but I must have done something that looked kind of right, because he asked me about one part and I started BSing until I somehow got him to tell me the right answer, so that it came off like I’d almost had it myself.  My name went up on the board and everyone thought I was so smart, but, really, I still didn’t understand the problem at all.

This same teacher taught another session of the class earlier in the day.  He would give them the same tests, grade them right then, and then hand them back.  The people in that class would then tell us the answers and all of us big cheaters would get 100% on the tests.  My friends and I copied each other’s homework throughout high school, but this was probably the worst cheating I ever did.  It’s weird to think about it now, because I have never cheated in college;  I wouldn’t even know how.

It went hand in hand with both becoming a good student and not having a lot of friends that this was when I finally got into reading.  Most of the writers and people I know now have always loved reading, but for me it didn’t happen until seventh grade.  I started reading everything.  I read books from the Baby-sitter’s Club and then also Steven King.  I remember very clearly the first ever adult novel I read.  It was John Grisham’s The Rainmaker.  John Grisham is my Dad’s favorite author.  I didn’t tell him I was reading The Rainmaker until I finished it.  It was a point of pride to be sure I could do it.  I swear I read that book constantly, yet it still took me three weeks to get through.  I would read in the morning before going to school, on the bus to school, during free time in class, on the bus ride home, all afternoon until dinner, and then at night before going to bed.  It was a new way of life.

1. In case BSing isn’t universal, I mean bullshitting–making it seem like I know more than I do.

I am blogging through all of my years in school–from Kindergarten through College.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own! Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade, Fourth Grade, Fifth Grade.

Sixth grade was a major turning point in my life.  I’d made the leap from elementary school to middle school.  I thought going to seven classes a day was infinitely more interesting and exciting than sitting in the same one for all six hours of the day.

I would curl my bangs and gel my hair back into a pony tail that I would top every day with a bow that matched my outfit.

My elementary school had been very safe and cozy.  I had the same friends from first grade through fifth.  Middle school was so different.  I didn’t know everyone, my bff Elyse was going to a different school, I had to ride the bus with older kids, and I didn’t have any classes with any of my other friends.   After my first day of school, I was so exhausted that I came home and just fell asleep.  I quickly adapted, though.  I made new friends and began feeling distant from my old friends.  We were a fragmented group now.

I was happy with my new friends, though they weren’t quite as sweet or loyal as the group I’d once belonged to.  They were just on the fringe of the cool kids, which put me on the fringe of the fringe.  There were a lot more games than I was used to.  I remember this one girl Elizabeth wanting so badly to be best friends with this other girl Chrystal, but Chrystal would so often choose her friend Cynthia over Elizabeth.  I felt bad for Elizabeth, but I was always happy when it was me Chrystal wanted to work with in class.  I was spared a lot of hurt feelings in that tangled mess, because I had my own new bff Rachel.  Rachel had really nice hair and she always wore these cool Unionbay t-shirts.

The kids from my elementary school were outnumbered by kids from one of the other schools in the area.  At the other school, they’d had dances and there had been many couples.  Rachel, it seemed, had dated nearly everyone in her class.  Their influence seemed almost corrupting to the kids from my school, but we quickly assimilated.

I don’t remember how exactly it went down.  Rachel and I were becoming good friends.  I even went to her birthday party.  But, then, I think she started dating someone at our school and she pretty much ditched me for him.  She was no longer on the fringes–she was now part of the cool group.  To be fair to Rachel, I don’t think the ditching was all that dramatic and she came to me not too long later and apologized.  But, in my life to that point, I’d only ever had the most loyal of friends who would never do anything like that.  I said it was fine, but I didn’t really forgive her.  I don’t know if I was trying to teach her a lesson or protect myself, but I distanced myself from her.

The result was that I didn’t really have any friends.  When I turned my back on Rachel, I turned my back on all of them.  There was almost nothing left of my group of friends from elementary school.  I’d really never had to work to make friends and the truth was that I didn’t really know how.  I started talking to a few kids who sat in the front of the classroom.  They were very good students and I wasn’t.  I was just coasting along, doing the work but not really trying.  I couldn’t be part of this new group, which really was not a group, if I wasn’t working hard too.  So, I did.  I mean, I had the time since I didn’t have many friends.

I was hooked on being a good student immediately.  I’d always flirted with it before, sometimes doing well, but never keeping it up.  I quickly formed a new identity for myself as one of the smart kids.  Of course, we were only second string to the real smart kids who were in the advanced classes.  I’d been friends with some of them during my brief stint as a cool kids myself.  Most of them I thought were pretty weird.  Like this girl named Lisa who sat next to me in band.  She has since become a great deal cooler.

In general, I think that real life is very little like fiction where there are clear forks in the road and sharp lines to define everything.  But, sixth grade was a major fork to me and I recognized it only a few years later.  There was no reason I couldn’t be both, but I had my choice of hanging with the cool kids or becoming a good student, and I made my choice, however unconscious it was.  It made the next two years of middle school rough, but it’s very easy for me to see that if I hadn’t made that choice then, then I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.  And I love what I’m doing now.

Just because I need to fit this embarrassing story into this blog somehow:  Throughout middle school, all the girls had a crush on this one boy.  He was actually kind of a dork in sixth grade and he had a speech impediment, but he was cute and he was in my class.  I wasn’t quite head over heels for him like some of the other girls, but he would sometimes tease me and I always wanted to impress him.  Near the end of sixth grade when I’d officially made my move to being a dork, someone came into our class to give a presentation or something and she brought candy.  I have a hard time eating in the morning and I guess I ate my candy too quickly.  Before I really had a chance to think about it, I was running the short distance from my desk, past the cute boy’s desk, to the garbage can where I threw up right in front of him.

I am blogging through all of my years in school–from Kindergarten through College.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own! Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade, Fourth Grade.

• My mom and step-dad had gotten married the previous Spring, but it took a while for them to find a new house.  We sold our house first and had to live in an apartment for a while until they bought a new one.  It was the only time I ever lived in an apartment until I moved out on my own.  We looked at a lot of houses.  It was a tall order trying to find something with 5-6 bedrooms for all of us kids.  We had our hearts set on one and then lost it.  Then we had our hearts set on another and the ‘rents devastated us all by going with a super ugly house instead.  When I say ugly, I really mean it.  Different colored shag carpeting in every room–all of it stained by cat pee.   There was an entire wall in the basement made of cork.  Every window was covered with these really heavy flanel drapes that smelled like smoke.  We all worked together to replace the carpet and paint every wall.  When we finally moved in, it still wasn’t fashionable, but it was clean and there was room for everyone.  Best of all, it was in the small town we’d all grown up in.

• I had the cool teacher.  He was this young guy, which was weird, because I’d never had a male teacher before.  He’d had my brother as a student years before, so he knew my name already when I showed up in his class.  I thought that made me cool.  I still wasn’t a good student, but this teacher really encouraged me.  I always had the feeling that he knew I could be doing a lot better than I was, which of course made me want to do better too.

• After my success as Treasurer of the school in fourth grade, I decided to run for President in fifth.  There were a lot of us running.  I campaigned and did the whole thing.  I ended up losing to the race to Brandy who always had the pony tail on top of her head.  I was sad that I’d lost, but also incredibly relieved.  If I’d won, I would have had to do things like lead student council meetings and stuff.  I didn’t want to do any of that. I just wanted to win and give a speech.

• As our big field trip of the year, my class and one other got to go to sleep away camp for a whole week.  It was a mostly miserable experience.  It rained the entire time, as it tends to do in Western Washington.   Something happened to our cabin’s chaperone, so we were like the orphan group.  My closest friend there cried every night.  Another girl snored.  The food was terrible and if you put your elbows on the table or didn’t properly ask someone to pass you the butter, then you had to get up and sing a song before you could eat at the next meal.  I was never so happy than when my mom showed up that Friday to drive a car load of us kids home.

• The elementary schools in my area had a deal with the middle schools that if you wanted to join band, then you could start in fifth grade and go to a middle school for a first period band class before getting bussed over to the elementary school for the normal school day.  I have no idea why this sounded like such a good idea to me, but I really wanted to play the trombone.  It just looked cool.  My mom didn’t think I could carry a trombone and since we had a clarinet already in the house, that’s what I played by default.  I didn’t take it very seriously.  I just liked being part of the group of students who got to hang out at the middle school.

• We got this new kid.  His name was Bryce and he was in my class.  I’m pretty sure I was taller than he was, but I thought he was cute.  No one in my elementary school dated or anything.  He was kind of a corrupting influence.  There was this thing at a Skating Party where he told this girl Rachel that he liked me.  I played hard to get, I guess, though unintentionally because I was just shy, and so he moved on to my friend Sandra.  They were the only couple at our school. That is until the weirdest guy at our school decided that he liked me and started chasing me around at recess.  I played hard to get on purpose that time and he eventually gave up.

I am blogging through all of my years in school–from Kindergarten through College.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own! Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade.

Fourth grade was a hugely dynamic year in my life.  Everything changed and I was mostly happy about that change.

• Very early in the school year, my mom started dating this guy named Randy.  My parents had been divorced for what to me at the time seemed to be at least 10-15 years, but I now realize was less than five.  My mom hadn’t dated much in that time.  Life after the divorce had been really difficult for her and by the time I was in fourth grade, things were finally starting to look up.  She’d met Randy through a friend of my sister’s.  As it turns out, my sister’s best friend’s sister’s best friend was Randy’s daughter.  My sister and Randy’s son had actually been in Kindergarten together.  They lived on the exact same street as us, but at the other end of our small town.  There were a lot of connections like that.  Looking back, I can’t believe how fast everything moved.  Randy’s two kids were almost the same ages as my brother and sister, and so everyone got along very well.  By Christmas they were engaged and by April they were married.  I liked Randy and I thought my two new siblings were about the coolest people ever.  My family had been through a lot and it was nice to see everyone so happy.

• My only apprehension in the midst of gaining a step-dad, of my single mother no longer being single, of being the youngest of five kids instead of the youngest of three, was that  I didn’t want to move.  I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood kids behind.  When you’re a kid, proximity is everything.  Even when you’re an adult.  Who you’re friends with is like 90% determined by who’s around you.  I knew that, and I didn’t want to waive goodbye to the old neighborhood.

• For motivations that are no longer clear to me and perhaps never were, I decided to run for school treasurer.  I campaigned, made posters, and gave a speech.  Somehow, I won.  At the time, I hadn’t yet adopted the I suck at math mantra unfortunately popular among girls and characteristic of English majors.  Actually, though, the fact that being the school treasurer would mean doing math didn’t occur to me until the very first candy sale when I had to count up the totals.  Then there was the time I had to do math in front of the entire student council (the cool kids!), including the fifth graders.  After the candy sale every Friday at lunch, I got to stay after and count up the money we’d made.  It was a cool job.

• My brother is 9 years older than me, so when I was in fourth grade, he was in his first year of community college.  My fourth grade class had a hamster and someone had to take the hamster every weekend.  I had no special affection for this hamster, whose name I think was Junior, but I liked the attention of being the one who brought the hamster home.  Because I walked home from school every day, my brother had to come to my class during the school day to pick up the hamster and take it to our house.  When he walked in, several kids said to me, “Is that your dad?”   We still laugh about that.

• Speaking of my brother, my fourth grade teacher was out for an extended period of time because of a neck injury.  We had this substitute who was just the worst guy.  That next summer, he applied to work for my brother’s student painting business.   It was weird to me that this guy had a life outside of the classroom and especially weird that he was applying to work for my brother when my brother was so much younger than him.  It seemed a kind of justice for making my friend Lacie cry once.

• I got one of those Adidas coats with the stripes down the arms.  It was royal blue and I loved it so much, because I thought it was so cool.  I remember a boy from class asking if it belonged to one of my siblings and I’d like to think I pulled up my hood and gave him one of those looks and said, “nope! It’s all mine.”

• It happened coincidentally that my dad’s second marriage ended so soon after my mom got remarried.  It changed forever my relationship with my dad.  He was never really single after my mom, and so going to his house for the weekend always meant spending it with my step-mom and step-brother too.  When my dad got his second divorce, it was the dawn of what we now call Dad and Ash time.  We developed a lot of our own traditions.  He’d pick me up on Friday afternoon, back to his office for a while, then grocery shopping, then Taco Bell.  Saturday we’d always have pizza.  Otherwise, we’d visit the used bookstore, the mall, watch TV, go see movies, roller blade.  Whatever I wanted, really.

• My school had some kind of creative writing workshop that only a few students could attend, so my teacher had to choose only three of us.  I was one of the chosen.  I thought there had been a mistake.  It was the first time I’d ever been recognized for writing. A surprise, because I wasn’t a great student.

• There was this girl in my class with this amazing long hair and I remember that she always had her bangs gelled back and I just thought that was so cool.  I started doing it myself, but I could never get my bangs as high.  I tried for years.

• I had this friend named Danielle.  She had braces and she always wore a fanny pack where she kept a tooth brush and toothpaste and floss.  Believe it or not, she was cool.  Danielle’s family lived in an apartment, her mother was illiterate, and her dad wanted to move them to another state after there was a shooting in their building.  I’d been raised hearing that my family was really struggling and this was my first little bit of perspective.

• Elyse and I had different teachers in fourth grade.  Her class was unique in the school, because it had a supply store the students got to work at.  It was actually this awesomely-designed stand in the classroom that the kids would squeeze into when it was their time to work the store.   I remember buying one of those pens with a bunch of different colors of ink where you would push down the color you wanted to use.  I had that thing for years.

• As I’ve said, I wasn’t a very good student at this point.  But, I was motivated by these charts we’d get each week with stickers when we completed everything.  My teacher also had an honor roll you got your name on if you did well that week.  Both of those were very motivating to me, but I was lazy.  Every week we got new vocab words and one assignment was just to look them up and copy down the definitions.  That was too much for me, so I’d just make up definitions and write them in the style of a dictionary entry.  My teacher must have thought I was ridiculous.

• I’ve suffered from migraines as long as I can remember.  They come on when I mess up: don’t eat enough, sleep enough, wear sunglasses, etc.  Once I have one, there’s nothing I can do but try to find a cold, dark place to fall asleep before I start throwing up.  I was having a lot of problems with them in fourth grade, but I had also realized that it was pretty easy for me to fake.  If I was feeling the slightest bit ill, I could just let my pale face fall.  I’d squint like it was hard to keep my eyes open to the light.  That was enough for my teacher to send me to the nurse’s office.  There they would take my temperature while I rested on one of the vinyl-covered beds.  I specifically remember the nurse a few times noting that I didn’t have a temperature, but I guess I was convincing enough that they would still call my mom to come get me.  For this, I will never forgive myself.  My mom was working double time just to keep things together and here I was pulling her away from work on a semi-regular basis when I wasn’t even sick.  My normal migraines combined with my faking was enough that my parents took me to the doctor to figure out what was wrong.  I was tested for everything.  I ended up with glasses (they were bifocals!) and these little orange pills I was supposed to take twice a day to prevent migraines.  I never wore the glasses, even though I’d wanted them so badly, and I stopped taking the pills pretty quickly too.

I am blogging through all of my years in school. If you want to participate, write a post of your own! Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade.

• My third grade teacher was probably my youngest ever. I’m guessing she was in her late 20s or early 30s. She had a super good looking husband and a cute kid. She drove a convertible. And she ate Slim Fast popcorn for lunch every day.

• We wrote these poems where you actually wrote the verses in the shape of whatever you were talking about. I wrote mine about an umbrella, so I cut out the shape of an umbrella and wrote the words along the edges of it. I remembered that poem for a really long time, but now I can only remember one part: “and in the rain, they do the same.”  I created very few things in school that I was really proud of, but that was one of the few.

• There was some kind of contest or raffle at my school. The prize was a giant bag of Peanut M&M’s. They announced the winner over the loud speaker and I won. It’s one of the only times I have ever won a random draw like that.  I got to leave class and walk to the office by myself to pick up my prize.

• My school had this program called Terrific Kids where every month each teacher would name three terrific kids who were then awarded a certificate at a school-wide assembly. You’d also fill out this red poster that asked you about your favorite things. Each teacher would display the posters of their terrific kids on the door of the classroom for the month. I was named as a Terrific Kid almost every year, but usually near the end of the school year after the teacher had gone through all the kids who were actually terrific. When it was slim pickings, then my name came up. But in the third grade, I was named a Terrific Kid in the very first month. And the thing was that no one told me. My mom got the letter in the mail and didn’t say anything. So there I was at the assembly and my teacher gets up to announce the Terrific Kids and she calls my name. I’m totally shocked and thinking there’s been a mistake, but I walk up there and collect my laminated certificate and when I walk back to my seat on the gym floor, my mom is there in her suit  and high heels clapping for me.

• What I remember most in terms of the work we did in third grade were the times sheets. You were given a page full of simple math problems and you had to complete them in a certain amount of time. I think that was the year we moved beyond just adding and subtracting and delved into the world of multiplication and division. Everyone started with the A times sheet and if you did well enough on that, then you got to the B times sheet. I blasted through all of those, but I remember getting stuck around O or P.

• I have this image of myself sitting at the little table in the back of our classroom trying to read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. I just couldn’t get into it. I was more of a Beverly Cleary kind of girl. I thought I was Ramona Quimby and my sister was Beezus.

• My school made this PC move to say that if we wanted to dress up for Halloween, then we had to dress up like a character from a book. I have no memory of my own costume, but I remember that my friend Elyse was a mail man from some book. She carried this pink plastic messenger bag with brightly colored letters all over it. I wanted that bag so badly that if I had the chance for it now, I would fight for it or pay good money.

• We went on some kind of a field trip that I remember nothing about, except that I got to ride in my teacher’s car. Yeah, the convertible. I felt super cool, becuase I thought she was cool. Even then, though, there was something sad to me about the fact that she ate low fat popcorn for lunch every day. I don’t remember having any consciousness of weight before then and I’m thankful that I didn’t connect any of that to myself or my body.

• There was a new girl in school that year. Her name was Brandy and she wore half of her hair up on the top of her head so that it spilled out like a fountain. I remember having this conversation with her about the kids who would leave to go to a special classroom for the reading lesson. They were the remedial reading kids that I had been a part of in first grade. She didn’t pick up on the stigma attached to being below average in reading–of needing special help. I pitied her for being so naive.

• And because this post wouldn’t be complete without a little more about me being a big cheater, I remember that we would grade spelling tests by exchanging them with the people around us. I would exchange with the people I knew would change some of my answers for me. I would do the same for them.

I am blogging through all of my years in school.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own!  Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade.

• I have always considered second grade to be one of my favorite years in school.  I had a great teacher and our classroom was out in the portables.  These portables were pretty new and the only other class out there was a fourth grade class, so somehow I thought that made us cool by proximity or something.

• Still dealing with the divorce, my family moved from the duplex we were living in temporarily to a house not far from my school.  I could now walk home from school, but one of the first days after we moved, I forgot and accidentally got on the bus I used to ride.  I think I realized my mistake before we left, but the bus driver wouldn’t let me off, so it turned into this big ordeal and they had to call my mom to confirm before they would let me walk home. I was a crying mess, of course.

• At our new house, there was a girl my age who lived next door.  She and I were aware of each other for a long time before we actually started talking.  I remember one time we even rode bikes together without saying a single word.  Finally my older sister got us talking and we were bffs after that.  We would play every day after school, dividing our time mostly between bikes, scooters, and roller skates.

• Every other Friday, my dad would pick me up from school.  We would first drive back to my mom’s house to pick up my suitcase from its hiding place behind the milk box (We had our milk delivered.  That seems weird to me now.)  Then we would stop at this convenience store called Goody Goody, where my dad let me pick out candy.  I almost always got Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  Then we’d start the 45 minute drive to my dad’s house where I would spend the weekend.

• Elyse, Mariah, and I all had class in the portable, but two of our other friends were in a regular class room inside the building.  Their teacher was weird, and so were a lot of the students.  I remember our friend Lacie telling us about this girl who put  Elmer’s glue all over her hands and then let it dry. There was something creepy to me about this girl who didn’t follow the rules.  I always imagined they were jealous of us and our cool class in the portable.

• The best thing about the second grade was that our teacher had us write books.  At this age, I showed no obvious signs as someone who liked to write, but I was head over heels for these books we got to create.  We would work with other classmates or alone to write the book and illustrate it, and then bind it (with staples).  Then we got to put it out on the shelf for other students to read.  I still have one written by me and illustrated by Mariah.  It was about this story one of our substitute teachers told us about a secret staircase in our school.  I’ve always been enchanted by secret staircases too.

• Elyse always wrote her books with this mean girl named Emily.  Elyse and I wanted to write a book together, but that meant telling Emily that she was going to work with someone else.  She did it and we started our book, but then the teacher called Elyse to her desk to talk to her about hurting Emily’s feelings.  I can’t remember what exactly happened, but I suspected Emily of twisting the facts a bit.

• After being in remedial reading in first grade, I was supposed to be in it again, but my teacher decided I had improved enough that I didn’t need to.  I was really happy about that.  My family probably was too. After I’d been placed in remedial reading, my mom had made us spend an hour every night reading aloud from The Chronicles of Narnia.  My brother and sister hated it, and I had no idea what was happening.

• I mentioned before that I was a little liar as a kid.  I was also a little cheater.  When we’d play Heads Up 7-Up, I would put my head down on my desk, but keep my eyes open, so I could see the shoes of the person who touched my thumb.  Everyone was amazed when I always got it right.

I am blogging through all of my years in school.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own!  Previously: Kindergarten.

• The biggest thing that happened to me in first grade was that I wet my pants.  Yup.  I was wearing this new jumper for the first time.  I’d wanted it so badly and my mom had finally bought it for me.  It zipped up the back, though, and I didn’t realize until lunch time that I couldn’t get the zipper down.  Instead of asking someone for help, I just didn’t go to the bathroom.  There I was sitting next to my friend Elyse when I finally couldn’t hold it any longer.  All down my jumper and onto my orange chair and then down to the thin classroom carpet.  My teacher had another student walk me to the nurse.  The nurse pulled out some sweats from a trash bag of extra clothes she had.  They were ugly and too short and I really would have rather stay there instead of return to class wearing them, but that wasn’t my choice.  Somehow I managed to escape a lot of ridicule.  Elyse will bring it up every once in a while, but everyone else seemed to forget.  Proof that I went to an oddly nice Elementary School.

• Speaking of Elyse, who is still my friend today, first grade was when we met.  I think we sat next to each other and then we started playing together at recess.  I have this very particular memory of this point later in the school year (after I wet my pants, I think) when we decided quite consciously that we were now friends.  The only thing I remember about that conversation was each of us saying that we would invite the other to our birthday parties the next year.  I guess that was a real sign of friendship.

• My pride and joy was this giant box of crayons I had with a sharpener on the back.  Of course, it didn’t compare to my friend Mariah who had Crayola markers in the primary colors and pastel, each in both regular and skinny size.  I’m sure I remember thinking that one day I would have all the markers I wanted.

• I had this amazing teacher who was also an artist.  She actually painted us each a special Christmas card.  I still have it.  Oh what a difference an awesome teacher can make.  She was my first.

• One day the teachers decided to put all of the first graders in one room to show us Fantasia.  If it was possible to die of boredom, I would not be alive to write this post.  Judge me now, but I hate everything about that movie other than the dancing brooms.  To this day, I’ve refused to watch it again.

• By now we had moved from the big house my parents had shared to a duplex not too far away.  My mom hadn’t been able to find a new house yet, so this was just temporary.  I would ride the bus home to my daycare’s house and then my sister would come by later to pick me up and walk me home.  We had to walk by this house with really mean dogs, sure one was going to attack us.  It seems silly to me now, but that was a huge stress in our lives.

• I shared a locker with a boy named Michael who supposedly (and I still don’t know for sure) had an uncle who was a famous baseball player.  Michael was kind of a weird kid, though probably not weirder than me, and yet I thought I was kind of cool for sharing a locker with him.  I can picture the name tags on our lockers.  They were shaped like apples.  That reminds me that we always had name tags on our desks too.

• I must have done poorly on a competency test, because I was placed in remedial reading.  This meant that when we did our reading lesson after lunch every day, the smart kids (including all of my friends) divided off to read their advanced book, the regular kids remained in class to read their regular book, and the rest of us who weren’t quite catching on went off to a totally different classroom where we worked with a special teacher. I was in class with the trouble makers and the boy who always had snot on his face.  I didn’t have a lot of shame about it and my friends never bought it up.  Of this class, I was the star and that felt great.  On our way back to class, the special teacher would always give us a treat.  Sometimes it was confetti.  Even then I remember thinking, “what does this lady think we’re going to do with a handful of confetti?”

A while ago on You Tube, Michael Buckley vlogged through all of his years in school.  Others followed after him.  I think it’s a great idea, so I’m going to follow along too.  I will blog through each of my years in school, from Kindergarten through college.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own!

Life when I was in Kindergarten is kind of foggy.  I only remember it in small flashes.  My childhood as a whole was very happy, but things weren’t going so well for my family when I was in Kindergarten and it had its effects on me.  Here is what I remember:

• It was my first experience riding the school bus.  It picked me up outside of my day care and then dropped me off a couple blocks from my house.  It’s hard to imagine by today’s standards, but I used to walk from the bus stop to our house by myself.  By then, my brother and sister were already home from school; I’m sure they would have come looking for me if I never arrived home.

• My parents’ divorce was very fresh.  We were still living in the house they’d shared; it was my mom, my brother, my sister, and I.  The house was on the market.  It was too expensive for my mom to afford alone.  I would go visit my dad and new step mom on the weekends.  It was always really hard to leave my mom.

• At the start of every class, the student of the week would have to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance and then give us a weather report by sticking a little felt sun or rain cloud on a board.

• I was pretty big on telling little lies.  I remember telling a boy named Rhett that one time I had drowned.  He told me if that was the case, then I would be dead.  I did not understand.

• I didn’t have a lot of close friends, but I talked to a lot of kids.  Of the friends I had throughout the rest of Elementary School, I only knew one in Kindergarten.  Her name was Mariah and she had awesome hair.  There was nothing in the world I wanted more than long hair and she had it.

• My teacher was this big, nice but intimidating woman.  I don’t remember much about her except that one time she yelled at us for not drawing well enough.  It started when I walked up to her with a drawing I’d done and none of the people had arms.  There were only two Kindergarten teachers and I wanted the one that Mariah had.  She was sweet and didn’t seem like she’d yell at someone for forgetting arms.

• My mom volunteered in my class by helping us learn to sew.  We used big plastic needles and yarn.  She was working full time, as well as going through a bit of a personal crisis, and didn’t really have the time to come by my class those few afternoons, but she made the effort anyway.

• I got bronchitis for the second time.  That’s when we learned that I’m allergic to amoxicillin.  I broke out in hives.  I was out of class for a while, but then I remember that my dad had to take me into class one day and explain to everyone that my hives were not contagious, so they didn’t have to worry about catching anything from me.

• One time I saw a girl crying.  I asked what was wrong and the friend that was comforting her told me to mind my own business.  It was the first time I ever remember thinking that something more terrible than I could imagine was happening in someone else’s life.

• There was another girl named Ashley who had Kindergarten in the mornings.  Our projects were always getting mixed up. To this day, in the folder my mom keeps of our different school projects, there is a book that the other Ashley made.  She drew fire flies on the front of it.  I never said anything, because I really liked those fire flies.