I remember seeing the class for the first time.
My mother ushered me into my third grade classroom where even my teacher had a look on her face that indicated something was wrong.
Even at the age of eight, I recognized that look.
Then I started counting.
1...2...3...
Ohhh nooo...
In my third grade class, there were fifteen girls--
--and five boys.
That was including me.
I knew right away that the next nine months were going to be a fight for survival.
It might have been easier if we boys had been able to stick together, but our alliance was a shaky one at best.
The other four boys in the class were:
Donny, the quiet type, who I think might have grown up to be a serial killer.
Sonny, the boisterous dramatic one, who failed to mount a production of Aladdin when a fistfight broke out over who would get to play Apu.
Orin, who might have been a little slow...probably was a little slow...you know what? I'm going to go with saying he was slow.
Tommy, the ladies' man, who I ran into briefly five years ago and made out with at a party (let that be a lesson to you, all you eight-year-old girls out there who read blogs in between viewings of The Suite Life with Zach and Cody).
...And me.
At first, we were united. At recess, we would play Boys Only Tag (a game I would later revive in college) and the girls would sit on the sidelines watching us, trying to figure out ways to break down our brotherhood.
I never thought they'd succeed.
I thought wrong.
. . . . .
Tommy was the first one to cave. He started dating Jenny Iascone, and when the boys and I went to pick teams for 'Kick Something at Other People,' he was sitting with the girls while they made him say things like 'I love my girlfriend Jenna' and 'Boys smell like poopsticks.'
I felt so betrayed. The boys tried to cheer me up, but it didn't work. Sonny threw gravel at Tommy and had to go in the Bad Desk at the back of the classroom after recess, while Orin did this trick where he closed and opened his eyes really fast.
(He thought it was a trick. Bless his heart.)
I figured Tommy would try coming back to us once Jenny broke up with him, but instead, he ended up dating every girl in the class twice, and then a few of the girls in fourth grade.
We had lost him to the world of women--and he would not be our first casualty.
. . . . .
Sonny never saw it coming.
The girls knew he was the strongest member of our alliance. They knew they had no chance of class domination without taking him down.
So they began an assault that would rival the bombing of London in World War II.
Every day without fail, as soon as we were done with the Pledge of Allegiance, one of the girls--and it was never the same one, they were too sly for that--would complain that Sonny had pinched, poked, or prodded them.
Seeing him sit in the Bad Desk after the Gravel Incident is what gave them the idea. If Sonny was always in the back of the room, that only left me and Orin to fend for ourselves during the day in the wide open field that was the general classroom or G.Pop, as we used to call it. Donny always kept to himself in the back, and once he saw that we were losing numbers, he decided to go underground, which basically meant sitting by the window and getting a buzzcut.
With Sonny out of the way, life for Orin and I became a veritable nightmare. We were giggled at for no reason. Rumors were started saying that we were boyfriends, then brothers, then both, then aliens, then alien brothers, then just boyfriends again, which was actually a relief since even then I was more turned off by the idea of being an alien than I was of having a boyfriend. Then again, Orin wouldn't have been my first pick.
When Tommy was directed by the girls to beat up Orin and me during lunchtime while they created a distraction by pretending to freak out after seeing a "mouse," Orin tried to disable Tommy by shooting boogers out of his nose at him.
Tommy did get pretty freaked out by this, but when it became clear that Orin's trajectory was a mere three centimeters at best, we both got the s**t kicked out of us.
. . . . .
After the beating, Orin's mom insisted that he be transferred into another classroom. I tried to get him to give Tommy up to the authorities--that would have gotten him expelled, and then at least the girls would have lost their henchmen.
Unfortunately, Orin was gone by the time I got into school the next day, and one of the sixth graders was blamed for what happened. I guess I still could have said something, but at that point, I feared retaliation.
Losing Orin was the final nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned. I had to throw in the towel and hope that one of the girls would let me be her indentured servant until fourth grade rolled around and I could convince my Mom to send me to an all boys school.
That's when I found the note in my desk.
"I've got an ideah."
Donny never was good at spelling.
. . . . .
The idea was intricate. It was investment. It carried a big risk.
If Donny and I pulled it off, we would make it out of third grade not only alive, but on top.
If we failed, the girls would probably eat us.
(This is third grade reasoning we're talking about here.)
Our plan was to turn something the girls loved against them:
Gossip.
Using a series of well-calculated notes passed anonymously throughout the class, we managed to slowly dismantle their empire.
Sometimes our notes were only meant to take out one person:
"Chrissy says you smell."
Then we got a little more ambitious:
"MJ and DD talk about you behind your back."
Until finally, we were ripping apart factions and pitting sister against sister.
"Sally, Steph says your Mom likes her more even though you two are identical."
By the time we were done, the age of girls vs. boys was over. It was every girl for herself while Donny and I watched the carnage from the sidelines. (I also got a desk by the window.)
Even Sonny rejoined us once the girls were too busy putting Elmer's glue in each other's PB&J sandwiches to get him in trouble.
Tommy even got his comeuppance when the girls decided at the end of the year that all the anonymous notes were started by him. They cut his hair one day during recess by holding him down while the teachers were busy sneaking a cigarette.
Have you ever seen a shag cut attempted with safety scissors?
It's not pretty.
. . . . .
When June rolled around, we finished up the school year and said our good-byes.
Chances are we would all be split up, and--after our teacher complained to the principal that her third grade had turned into The Seven Samurai--there would be no more gender gaps in the classroom.
As I bid good-bye to classmates, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
When I turned around, there was Orin waiting to get picked up by his mom.
"Kevin," he said, "You made it!"
Knowing Orin, he was probably talking about the solar system diorama I held in my hand that had won me third prize at the science fair, but I chose to believe he was talking about how I had survived third grade.
"No, Orin," I said, "We both made it."
And we waited for our moms to show up, and take us into summer.
My mother ushered me into my third grade classroom where even my teacher had a look on her face that indicated something was wrong.
Even at the age of eight, I recognized that look.
Then I started counting.
1...2...3...
Ohhh nooo...
In my third grade class, there were fifteen girls--
--and five boys.
That was including me.
I knew right away that the next nine months were going to be a fight for survival.
It might have been easier if we boys had been able to stick together, but our alliance was a shaky one at best.
The other four boys in the class were:
Donny, the quiet type, who I think might have grown up to be a serial killer.
Sonny, the boisterous dramatic one, who failed to mount a production of Aladdin when a fistfight broke out over who would get to play Apu.
Orin, who might have been a little slow...probably was a little slow...you know what? I'm going to go with saying he was slow.
Tommy, the ladies' man, who I ran into briefly five years ago and made out with at a party (let that be a lesson to you, all you eight-year-old girls out there who read blogs in between viewings of The Suite Life with Zach and Cody).
...And me.
At first, we were united. At recess, we would play Boys Only Tag (a game I would later revive in college) and the girls would sit on the sidelines watching us, trying to figure out ways to break down our brotherhood.
I never thought they'd succeed.
I thought wrong.
. . . . .
Tommy was the first one to cave. He started dating Jenny Iascone, and when the boys and I went to pick teams for 'Kick Something at Other People,' he was sitting with the girls while they made him say things like 'I love my girlfriend Jenna' and 'Boys smell like poopsticks.'
I felt so betrayed. The boys tried to cheer me up, but it didn't work. Sonny threw gravel at Tommy and had to go in the Bad Desk at the back of the classroom after recess, while Orin did this trick where he closed and opened his eyes really fast.
(He thought it was a trick. Bless his heart.)
I figured Tommy would try coming back to us once Jenny broke up with him, but instead, he ended up dating every girl in the class twice, and then a few of the girls in fourth grade.
We had lost him to the world of women--and he would not be our first casualty.
. . . . .
Sonny never saw it coming.
The girls knew he was the strongest member of our alliance. They knew they had no chance of class domination without taking him down.
So they began an assault that would rival the bombing of London in World War II.
Every day without fail, as soon as we were done with the Pledge of Allegiance, one of the girls--and it was never the same one, they were too sly for that--would complain that Sonny had pinched, poked, or prodded them.
Seeing him sit in the Bad Desk after the Gravel Incident is what gave them the idea. If Sonny was always in the back of the room, that only left me and Orin to fend for ourselves during the day in the wide open field that was the general classroom or G.Pop, as we used to call it. Donny always kept to himself in the back, and once he saw that we were losing numbers, he decided to go underground, which basically meant sitting by the window and getting a buzzcut.
With Sonny out of the way, life for Orin and I became a veritable nightmare. We were giggled at for no reason. Rumors were started saying that we were boyfriends, then brothers, then both, then aliens, then alien brothers, then just boyfriends again, which was actually a relief since even then I was more turned off by the idea of being an alien than I was of having a boyfriend. Then again, Orin wouldn't have been my first pick.
When Tommy was directed by the girls to beat up Orin and me during lunchtime while they created a distraction by pretending to freak out after seeing a "mouse," Orin tried to disable Tommy by shooting boogers out of his nose at him.
Tommy did get pretty freaked out by this, but when it became clear that Orin's trajectory was a mere three centimeters at best, we both got the s**t kicked out of us.
. . . . .
After the beating, Orin's mom insisted that he be transferred into another classroom. I tried to get him to give Tommy up to the authorities--that would have gotten him expelled, and then at least the girls would have lost their henchmen.
Unfortunately, Orin was gone by the time I got into school the next day, and one of the sixth graders was blamed for what happened. I guess I still could have said something, but at that point, I feared retaliation.
Losing Orin was the final nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned. I had to throw in the towel and hope that one of the girls would let me be her indentured servant until fourth grade rolled around and I could convince my Mom to send me to an all boys school.
That's when I found the note in my desk.
"I've got an ideah."
Donny never was good at spelling.
. . . . .
The idea was intricate. It was investment. It carried a big risk.
If Donny and I pulled it off, we would make it out of third grade not only alive, but on top.
If we failed, the girls would probably eat us.
(This is third grade reasoning we're talking about here.)
Our plan was to turn something the girls loved against them:
Gossip.
Using a series of well-calculated notes passed anonymously throughout the class, we managed to slowly dismantle their empire.
Sometimes our notes were only meant to take out one person:
"Chrissy says you smell."
Then we got a little more ambitious:
"MJ and DD talk about you behind your back."
Until finally, we were ripping apart factions and pitting sister against sister.
"Sally, Steph says your Mom likes her more even though you two are identical."
By the time we were done, the age of girls vs. boys was over. It was every girl for herself while Donny and I watched the carnage from the sidelines. (I also got a desk by the window.)
Even Sonny rejoined us once the girls were too busy putting Elmer's glue in each other's PB&J sandwiches to get him in trouble.
Tommy even got his comeuppance when the girls decided at the end of the year that all the anonymous notes were started by him. They cut his hair one day during recess by holding him down while the teachers were busy sneaking a cigarette.
Have you ever seen a shag cut attempted with safety scissors?
It's not pretty.
. . . . .
When June rolled around, we finished up the school year and said our good-byes.
Chances are we would all be split up, and--after our teacher complained to the principal that her third grade had turned into The Seven Samurai--there would be no more gender gaps in the classroom.
As I bid good-bye to classmates, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
When I turned around, there was Orin waiting to get picked up by his mom.
"Kevin," he said, "You made it!"
Knowing Orin, he was probably talking about the solar system diorama I held in my hand that had won me third prize at the science fair, but I chose to believe he was talking about how I had survived third grade.
"No, Orin," I said, "We both made it."
And we waited for our moms to show up, and take us into summer.
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