Ninth Grade

In ninth grade I transitioned over to the high school, twelve hundred students and solid brick buildings, connected by covered walkways and small piazzas, a minor miracle of intelligent building design in CA, which tends to specialize in low squat buildings, space on space on space, without any sort of design towards public spaces.

 In ninth grade my friends started playing football, waking up for practice at 5 AM to beat the sweltering August heat that pounded into the northern CA valley. I’d been playing football since I was a kid, throwing the football to friends and my brother, flooding our back yard with a hose and playing punt return tackle football for years. And yet, when it came time to actually play football I decided it wasn’t for me. Back then, I’d have said that it was because I didn’t want to and was an independent sort who didn’t want to wake up in the morning, but preferred waking late in the last weaning weeks of summer, playing video games all afternoon, searching for the Trident or Dragon Spear on long gridded maps of Dark Wizard as opposed to learning how to run a proper slant route.

The truth of the matter, if such things can be gotten at decades later, is that I was scared because I am scared of nearly everything, plane flights, roller coasters, speaking in class, any sort of wild animal, a task that I don’t immediately feel like I excel at. And it was precisely this fear, which dogs me today, that lead me to stay indoors, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a pair of shorts and trying to decide if my HP was enough to engage the War Lord perched atop the castle. And this fear of not being excellent and therefore avoiding things runs through me like a subterranean river carving out a hole in a bit of rock, such that I appear as though I am confident and sure of myself, when precisely the opposite is true—I doubt myself and wonder if I’m really good at anything beyond pleasing people, which isn’t a skill so much as it is an adaptation. And, to be honest, I also wasn’t too keen on getting hit. I had to work myself into a rage in order to run the football or tackle someone aggressively, and I didn’t want, or couldn’t imagine, walking around in a blind rage all the time just to be good at football.

On one of the first day of classes I was walking in to school with a friend, long hair, parted down the middle, tall and skinny with a pair of front teeth that were not entirely straight. I was wearing a red flannel and jeans, walking down one of the long shaded corridors, behind the gym and just beyond the cafeteria, which wasn’t really used, when I was stopped by a pair of girls, bounding along arm in arm as girls were wont to walk through the halls. “What’s your name?” the girl on the right asked. She had long dark brown hair, her body was rail thin, almost bird like, and she had a quick and easy smile. “Me,” I asked, incredulously. She had her arm looped through another girl’s who’s face and name I don’t remember at all, Jessica maybe? “Andrew,” I said, and then she smiled at me, turned, still arm in arm, and walked down the hallway.

“What was that?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My heart was racing, as I watched them walk quickly down the hallway. Those moments in life, they pass. You are only young enough for a short time to be surprised by a girl walking down the hall and asking for your name. All that day, I wondered what her name was, and whether I’d given her my correct name, whether I should have. Whether she was pretty. Whether I was handsome. What it meant that she had asked me what my name was.

“She likes you, dude,” my friend said, which didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable conclusion. Except that I didn’t remember ever seeing or meeting this girl before, which put our budding relationship on fairly unsteady grounds. What if I’d had a ridiculous named like Philip? I was only a couple of weeks away from getting braces and what would she think of me then?

                I don’t remember most of my classes that year, but I do remember having Mrs. Smith. I think I remember her because she had unusually short hair and perhaps because she occasionally wore a beret. We read plays, so many plays. Why are English classes endlessly reading plays? Is it because there is an assumption that they are meant to be read in large groups? That the only way to read Romeo and Juliet, (and oh, god, there it is, another memory. The actress who played Juliet in the old version we watched, set in Italy, leaning over the window sill, her breasts, so full. My friends telling me before the class that I should watch closely that there was a moment when she is completely topless—the stuff of dreams—the tense moment, a fleeting glimpse of her breast, someone somehow knowing that the actress who played her was only 15 at the time of the filming and all the strangeness and wonder of being an adolescent boy, watching intently to see if Juliet was going to fall out of her dress).

                But you see I have been side tracked by the memory of a woman, born in 1951, playing Juliet in a movie when she was fifteen. What strange times we live in, yes?