Mid-October, 1984 — Eighth Grade
There was something particularly agreeable about October in 1984. Summer had finally loosened its suffocating grip on the Imperial Valley, mornings were becoming tolerable, and the prospect of walking to school no longer carried the very real possibility of spontaneously combusting somewhere along the sidewalk. By mid-October, the air had acquired a certain crispness, or at least what passed for crispness in a desert town where temperatures below ninety degrees were considered a legitimate change of season.
I was in eighth grade, thirteen years old, weighed approximately ninety-five pounds soaking wet, and possessed the metabolism of a hummingbird with a caffeine addiction. My priorities were simple: food, friends, surviving the school day, and whatever small adventures might present themselves along the way. There were other concerns, of course. Girls were becoming increasingly interesting and considerably more mysterious, teachers continued insisting that homework served some greater purpose, and the prospect of high school loomed somewhere in the distance like a foreign country we would eventually be required to visit.
But for the moment, life was good.
That morning began, as many good mornings did, in the kitchen.
The smell of warm flour tortillas mingled with the unmistakable fragrance of chorizo sizzling in a skillet. Beside it, another pan held scrambled eggs and chopped weenies, those wonderfully economical hot dogs that somehow became a respectable breakfast ingredient when combined with eggs and wrapped in a tortilla. There were two varieties of burritos available, and naturally, I saw no compelling reason to choose between them. The tortillas were soft, the eggs were hot, and the chorizo had left behind that glorious reddish-orange oil that stained everything it touched and made absolutely everything taste better.
I had one of each.
There was coffee, too. Real coffee. Not the watered-down, sweetened nonsense that masquerades as coffee in certain establishments today, but a proper cup, dark and fragrant, served in a ceramic mug that had probably witnessed more mornings than I had. Coffee mattered even then. I cannot explain why a thirteen-year-old needed caffeine before facing the rigors of junior high, but I can assure you the need was genuine. Besides, when you’re thirteen, drinking coffee makes you feel considerably more sophisticated than your actual circumstances warrant.
I was halfway through my second burrito when my best friend, Alfonso, appeared. He didn’t so much knock as announce his arrival through the screen door.
“¡Eh! You ready?”
“Almost.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“And I was almost ready yesterday, too.”
He stood there with his backpack slung over one shoulder, wearing the expression of someone who had already accepted that punctuality was a negotiable concept.
“You got anything to eat?”
I gestured toward the kitchen. He needed no further invitation. Alfonso was the sort of friend who knew his way around the house, understood that food was generally available, and required very little encouragement to make himself comfortable. A few minutes later, adequately fortified with breakfast and the boundless confidence of boys who had absolutely no idea what the day had in store, we headed toward school.
The neighborhood was coming alive. Cars rattled past, their engines sounding vaguely mechanical in that distinctly 1980s way. Somewhere a radio played a song that had probably been in heavy rotation on KICO for the previous three weeks. The sidewalks were uneven, the morning sun cast long shadows across the streets, and the smell of somebody’s breakfast drifted through an open window. A dog barked from behind a chain-link fence, apparently offended by our presence. We ignored him. He ignored our indifference and continued barking anyway.
Alfonso kicked a pebble down the sidewalk.
“You study for math?”
I stopped chewing the last remnants of my burrito.
“Study for what?”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
“Oh, hell.”
And so began the academic portion of our day.
First Period: Mathematics, Mr. Allen, and the Art of Avoiding Responsibility. Mr. Allen’s classroom smelled of chalk dust, pencil shavings, and the accumulated despair of generations of students confronted with fractions. The chalkboard occupied most of the front wall, its surface bearing the ghostly remains of equations that had been erased but never entirely forgotten. Rows of desks faced forward in obedient formation, their surfaces decorated with the occasional carved initials, mysterious scratches, and evidence that students before us had also found mathematics insufficiently entertaining.
Mr. Allen was a man who believed in order, arithmetic, and the educational value of catching students unprepared. He also had a peculiar fondness for the school lunch menu. Every morning, somewhere between taking attendance and introducing the day’s mathematical torture, he would announce what the cafeteria intended to serve. Whether this was a public service or a subtle form of psychological warfare was never entirely clear.
“Today,” he began, consulting a sheet of paper, “the cafeteria will be serving Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and fruit cocktail.”
A collective groan moved through the room.
“Is it real steak?” someone asked.
Mr. Allen looked over his glasses.
“That’s a question better directed to the cafeteria.”
There was wisdom in that answer. The cafeteria’s interpretation of Salisbury steak was a matter best approached with caution, preferably from a safe distance.
Then came the dreaded words.
“Clear your desks. Pop quiz.”
The room erupted in protest.
“Aw, come on!”
“You didn’t tell us!”
“That’s why it’s called a pop quiz,” Mr. Allen replied, with the satisfaction of a man who had delivered that line approximately ten thousand times.
But there was a loophole. The Question of the Day. Answer it correctly, and you earned a free pass from the quiz. No calculations, no frantic erasing, no staring helplessly at numbers that appeared to have been arranged by a malicious stranger. It was a wonderfully democratic arrangement, provided your brain happened to cooperate at precisely the right moment.
Mr. Allen folded his arms.
“All right. Today’s question: What is the only number that has the same number of letters as its value?”
Silence.
Students stared at the ceiling, their desks, one another. Somewhere behind me, a pencil rolled onto the floor. I counted on my fingers.
One. Three letters.
Two. Three letters.
Three. Five.
Four.
Four letters.
My hand shot up.
“Four!”
Mr. Allen regarded me.
“Correct.”
I nearly levitated.
“You’re excused from the quiz.”
There are moments in a young man’s life that define his character. Moments of courage, triumph, and personal achievement. This was one of them. I leaned back in my chair while the rest of the class began their mathematical suffering, feeling like a man who had just escaped a firing squad through a technicality.
Alfonso, seated two rows away, gave me a look of profound betrayal. I smiled. Friendship had its limits.
For the next several minutes, I enjoyed the rare privilege of doing absolutely nothing while everyone around me worked. It was a magnificent sensation, made all the sweeter by the occasional frustrated sigh or vigorous erasing from nearby desks.
I had beaten the system. Admittedly, the system consisted of one mathematics teacher and a question about the number four, but victory is victory.
Second Period: English and the Tyranny of Proper Grammar. Mrs. Weininger’s classroom was a different world entirely. Where Mr. Allen’s room smelled of chalk and anxiety, hers smelled of books, paper, and whatever floral fragrance she favored. There were reading assignments, essays, and the ever-present expectation that we should express ourselves in complete sentences.
I liked English.
Mostly.
Reading was agreeable enough, particularly when the story involved something more interesting than the emotional development of a character who spent forty pages contemplating a tree. Writing, however, was another matter. Writing required thought, organization, and, according to Mrs. Weininger, punctuation.
Punctuation was apparently important.
“Your essays,” she announced, holding up a stack of papers, “are improving.”
That was encouraging.
“Some of them.”
Less encouraging. She began returning our work. When mine landed on my desk, I examined the red markings decorating the page. There were commas, arrows, circles, and several comments written in the margins. One sentence had been underlined twice.
I read her note: Run-on sentence. I considered this criticism unfair. The sentence had been going somewhere. It simply hadn’t arrived yet.
“Remember,” Mrs. Weininger said, “a paragraph should contain one central idea.”
I looked down at my essay. Mine contained approximately seven, several of which had wandered in uninvited. There were also a few sentences that had begun with one perfectly respectable thought and ended somewhere entirely unrelated. I considered this evidence of a versatile imagination. Mrs. Weininger apparently considered it a grammatical emergency.
We spent the remainder of the period reading and discussing a passage from our textbook. I participated when necessary, listened when convenient, and spent a considerable amount of time wondering whether the cafeteria’s Salisbury steak was worth the risk. Outside the classroom, footsteps echoed along the hallway, occasionally accompanied by the unmistakable squeal of sneakers against polished flooring.
The bell eventually rescued us. And with that, the day became considerably more interesting.
Third Period: Physical Education and the Quest for Garnet Glory. Physical education was not merely a class. It was a proving ground, a place where reputations were established, athletic abilities were measured, and adolescent boys discovered that gravity was not particularly interested in their ambitions.
We were in the middle of physical fitness testing.
The previous day had been the mile run. Four laps around the track. One mile. A simple enough proposition, unless you happened to be one of those unfortunate souls who regarded running as an activity best reserved for escaping dangerous animals.
I, however, could run. At ninety-five pounds, I was built less like an athlete and more like a collection of coat hangers held together by determination. There wasn’t much of me to transport from one place to another, and my legs seemed perfectly happy to oblige. I was narrow enough to slip through a crowd without disturbing the air and light enough that a sufficiently strong breeze might have required me to grab hold of something.
The day before, I had run the mile in four minutes and forty-one seconds.
A school record.
I remember crossing the finish line with my lungs threatening to resign, my heart pounding against my ribs, and my legs feeling as though they belonged to someone else. The track seemed to continue moving beneath my feet even after I had stopped, and for several seconds I concentrated entirely on the business of remaining conscious.
“Four forty-one!” Mr. Tessada called.
For a moment, even the usual assortment of hecklers went quiet. Then someone shouted, “Damn! You got somewhere to be?”
As a matter of fact, I did. I was headed for the garnet shirt.
Now, the garnet shirt was no ordinary article of clothing. It was a badge of distinction, a symbol of athletic superiority, the Holy Grail of junior high physical education. To earn one was to announce to the world that you were among the best of the best. It wasn’t simply something you wore. It was something you had earned, something that separated the ordinary mortals from those who had successfully subjected themselves to a series of increasingly unpleasant physical requirements.
Or at least among the best of a few hundred thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Still, glory is relative. The mile was behind me. All I needed now were six pull-ups and twenty-five push-ups.
Six and twenty-five. Those numbers occupied my thoughts with the intensity usually reserved for matters of life and death.
We didn’t have a gymnasium. Such luxuries were apparently reserved for schools in more civilized climates, where the weather occasionally made outdoor physical activity impractical.
We had locker rooms, a collection of outdoor exercise stations, and an abundance of sunshine. The locker rooms smelled exactly as one might expect a building occupied by several generations of adolescent boys to smell: a formidable combination of sweaty socks, damp towels, neglected athletic shoes, and whatever mysterious biological processes occurred inside lockers that hadn’t been properly cleaned since the Nixon administration. It was an aroma that could stop a charging rhinoceros in its tracks.
Fortunately, most of our physical education took place outside, where the occasional breeze offered some relief from the accumulated fragrances of developing masculinity.
The exercise stations were scattered around the area adjoining the locker rooms. The pull-up bars stood beneath a pair of enormous trees, their branches spreading overhead and casting a patchwork of shade across the hard-packed ground. Every so often, a breeze stirred the leaves, sending little flecks of sunlight dancing across the metal bars and the students waiting beneath them.
Along the shaded exterior wall of the boys’ locker room, the push-up mats had been arranged in a neat row, their surfaces worn from years of elbows, palms, and assorted adolescent bodies being subjected to the indignities of physical fitness testing.
The sit-up station occupied the ramada adjacent to the locker rooms, where the female PE teachers supervised the proceedings. There, students lay on their backs with knees bent while partners held their feet, counting repetitions and occasionally offering encouragement that ranged from genuinely supportive to openly insulting.
We rotated through the stations amid the usual commotion. Whistles pierced the morning air, teachers called out numbers and instructions, and sneakers scraped against the concrete. Somewhere, someone was already complaining about a pulled muscle that had almost certainly not existed five minutes earlier.
We rotated through the stations amid the usual commotion. Whistles pierced the morning air, teachers called out numbers and instructions, and sneakers scraped against the concrete. Somewhere, someone was already complaining about a pulled muscle that had almost certainly not existed five minutes earlier.
The boys performed full pull-ups, the girls did the flexed-arm hang, and everyone eventually found themselves beneath the ramada for sit-ups. And everyone, regardless of gender, faced the possibility of public humiliation at the sit-up station. Because someone always farted during sit-ups.
Always.
It was as inevitable as sunrise.
A student would be halfway through a particularly determined repetition when an unmistakable noise would escape into the otherwise respectable atmosphere of physical education.
Pfffft.
There would be a moment of silence, that peculiar instant when everyone simultaneously recognized what had happened but needed a second to fully appreciate its significance.
Then absolute pandemonium.
“OOOOOOHHHH!”
“WHO WAS THAT?”
“THAT WAS YOU!”
“NO IT WASN’T!”
Occasionally, the culprit was a girl, which somehow elevated the event to near-mythological status among the boys. The idea that girls possessed digestive systems was apparently still a developing scientific theory in eighth grade.
The teachers, seasoned veterans of adolescent digestive indiscretion, would simply sigh.
“Keep counting!”
Civilization, such as it was, continued.
My turn at the pull-up bar arrived.
I stepped forward, rubbed my palms together, and jumped. My fingers closed around the cold metal, and for a moment I hung there, feeling the slight movement of the bar beneath my weight.
“Ready, Velez?”
I nodded.
“Go.”
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
My arms began expressing serious reservations.
Six.
My chin cleared the bar.
“Six!” Mr. Bartow announced. “Come on, Velez. I know you have more in you. Keep pulling!” I had already qualified, but something about being told I could do more made stopping seem entirely unacceptable.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
My arms were now openly protesting. My shoulders burned, my grip tightened, and the muscles along my back seemed to be reconsidering their association with the rest of my body.
One more.
I pulled. My chin rose toward the bar, stalled just short of its destination, and refused to negotiate further.
Nine and a half.
I dropped to the floor. I was tapped out. Mr. Bartow marked his sheet.
“Good job.”
I nodded, attempting to look as though nine and a half pull-ups were something I did routinely before breakfast.
One requirement down.
The push-ups came next. I lowered myself onto the mat, placed my hands beneath my shoulders, and stared at the polished floorboards. They were close enough that I could see scratches in the finish and a small dark mark that might have been a scuff or the fossilized remains of something best left unidentified.
“Ready?”
I nodded.
“Go.”
One. Two. Three.
The first ten were easy. By fifteen, my arms had begun negotiating. At twenty, the negotiations had collapsed.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.
My elbows trembled.
Twenty-four.
For a brief moment, I considered remaining on the floor and accepting whatever fate awaited me. Then I remembered the garnet shirt.
Twenty-five.
“Good!”
I collapsed. Not gracefully. Not heroically. I simply ceased being upright. But I had done it. Four minutes and forty-one seconds in the mile. Nine and a half pull-ups. Twenty-five push-ups. The garnet shirt was mine.
At the end of class, I collected it.
There it was, an actual garnet-colored shirt, tangible proof that ninety-five pounds of bones, caffeine, and stubborn determination could accomplish something remarkable. I held it in my hands for a moment, admiring the color and appreciating the undeniable magnificence of the achievement.
I had earned this thing. Not borrowed it. Not purchased it. Not acquired it through some questionable arrangement involving lunch money and a classmate of flexible moral character.
Earned it.
I folded it carefully and carried it with me. Naturally, the rest of the school had not received official notification of my greatness. I would have to see what could be done about that.
As we left the gym, Alfonso glanced at the shirt.
“Got it, huh?”
“Yep.”
“You’re gonna carry that around all day?”
“Probably.”
He shook his head. I considered his reaction entirely understandable. Greatness often makes others uncomfortable. And somewhere behind us, at the sit-up station, another unfortunate soul produced a noise that sounded suspiciously like a duck being stepped on.
Junior high was magnificent.
Fourth Period: History, or the Continuing Education of My Pencil. History class presented an entirely different challenge.
Staying focused.
Mr. Cuevas spoke about dates, treaties, conflicts, and the various ways human beings had spent centuries making one another miserable. I found much of it interesting, at least in principle. The trouble was that history, as presented in a classroom, occasionally lacked the dramatic visual elements I believed it deserved.
Fortunately, I had a pencil.
My notebooks were archaeological records of my imagination. Between the legitimate notes and occasional vocabulary definitions lived an entire civilization of drawings: faces, animals, elaborate lettering, strange creatures, and whatever else happened to materialize while the teacher discussed the Louisiana Purchase.
That day, I was drawing a particularly elaborate figure in the margin of my notebook. A man in a long coat, standing dramatically against a landscape that existed nowhere except in my head. There was something wonderfully satisfying about the way a few pencil lines could become a face, a shadow, a fold in a coat, or an entire scene that hadn’t existed moments before.
My newly acquired garnet shirt rested beside my books, carefully folded and positioned where it could remain free of pencil shavings, eraser crumbs, and the general indignities of classroom life.
I was working on the shading when a shadow fell across my desk.
“Is that part of the assignment?”
I looked up. Mr. Cuevas stood beside me. I looked at the drawing. Then at Mr. Cuevas.
“Not exactly.”
“Then perhaps you’d like to join us in the nineteenth century.”
I considered pointing out that the gentleman in my drawing appeared to be dressed appropriately for the period.
Wisdom prevailed. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Cuevas moved on. I wrote down three historical facts to establish a respectable academic presence. I even underlined one of them, which gave the impression that I was deeply invested in the subject. Then I returned to the drawing.
One must have priorities.
The garnet shirt remained beside me, a silent reminder that although my attention to American history might have been questionable, my physical fitness credentials were beyond dispute.
Lunch: A Question of Geography and Appetite. By lunchtime, the school had become a restless organism desperate to escape its own walls. Lockers slammed. Students poured into the hallways. Conversations overlapped in a chaotic symphony of laughter, shouting, and urgent discussions about things that would be completely forgotten by dinner.
The question was simple. Home or downtown?
Going home meant familiar food, a comfortable place to sit, and the possibility of a proper meal prepared by someone who understood that growing boys required substantial quantities of nourishment.
Downtown meant freedom. Or at least the junior high version of freedom.
A few coins in your pocket, a walk through familiar streets, and the possibility of buying something greasy, salty, sweet, or preferably all three. There was something especially appealing about leaving school grounds in the middle of the day. For a brief period, we were no longer students under constant supervision. We were independent citizens conducting important personal business.
Mostly involving food.
Alfonso appeared beside me.
“Where we going?”
I considered our options.
“How much money you got?”
He reached into his pocket and produced a small collection of coins. I did the same. We examined our combined fortune. It was not impressive.
“Downtown?” he suggested.
I looked at the coins again.
“We might have enough.”
“For what?”
“Something.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“Neither is our budget.”
There were really only two destinations worth considering: Lupe’s Market, just three blocks down, or the Oasis Chilidogs, all the way downtown.
The Oasis held a certain appeal. It was the more ambitious destination, requiring additional walking, additional time, and, most importantly, additional financial resources. The sort of place one might visit when fortune had smiled upon him in the form of a few extra dollars. Fortune, on this particular day, had apparently been looking the other way.
Lupe’s it was.
We headed down the sidewalk, our sneakers scuffing against the concrete, backpacks bouncing against our shoulders. The sun had warmed considerably since morning, though the air remained pleasant enough to make walking enjoyable. Cars passed with their windows rolled down, radios playing music that drifted away almost as quickly as it arrived. Somewhere nearby, a screen door slammed, followed by a voice calling something in Spanish.
The streets were familiar in the way only the streets of your childhood can be. You knew which sidewalks were cracked, which yards had dogs, which corners offered a little shade, and which houses belonged to people who would tell your parents if they caught you doing something particularly stupid.
There was comfort in that familiarity. There was also a certain inconvenience. Small towns had a remarkable intelligence network.
Lupe’s Market offered the sort of modest abundance that appealed to boys with limited financial resources and enormous appetites. There were snacks, cold drinks, candy, and enough inexpensive possibilities to make choosing something feel like a serious economic decision. We examined the merchandise with the concentration of two investors evaluating a major acquisition.
“How much you got left?” Alfonso asked.
I counted my change.
“Enough.”
“For what?”
“Something.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
Eventually, we made our purchases, whatever combination of inexpensive food and drink our collective fortune could support, and stepped back into the sunshine. There was no particular urgency to the moment. We ate, talked, laughed at things that probably weren’t nearly as funny as we believed, and enjoyed the simple pleasure of being away from school while the school day was still technically in progress.
Then one of us remembered the time.
“What time is it?”
I looked around as though the answer might be written on a nearby building.
“Don’t know.”
“We better go.”
There was always a delicate calculation involved in lunchtime freedom. How far could you go? How long could you stay? And how quickly could you return before the bell announced that your independence had officially expired?
We started walking faster. Then faster still. By the time the school came into view, our leisurely excursion had become a moderately urgent athletic event.
We made it back.
Barely.
A respectable achievement. I was beginning to think that the garnet shirt was already paying dividends.
Fifth Period: Wood Shop and the Destruction of Perfectly Good Lumber. Wood shop was one of those classes that made junior high worthwhile.
There were tools. Real tools. Saws, sanders, clamps, routers, and enough machinery to make any responsible adult question the wisdom of allowing thirteen-year-olds to operate them. In 1984, however, the prevailing educational philosophy seemed to be that young people learned responsibility by being entrusted with equipment capable of removing a finger.
Preferably someone else’s.
The shop smelled wonderful. Freshly cut pine, sawdust, varnish, paint, and the faint metallic scent of machinery. Fine wood particles floated in the sunlight streaming through the windows, settling on workbenches, clothing, and the heads of students who had not yet learned the importance of standing away from the sanding equipment.
The room was alive with activity. A saw whined somewhere toward the back. Sandpaper scraped against wood. Someone dropped a clamp with a metallic crash, prompting several heads to turn and the teacher to issue a warning without even looking up.
We were making wooden nameplates for our houses. This was the standard project, apparently required by some ancient educational tradition. Somewhere, I imagined, a committee had decided that every American household needed a wooden sign bearing the family surname, and that the nation’s eighth graders were uniquely qualified to manufacture them.
The boys generally favored shields. The girls often chose hearts. There were exceptions, of course, but for reasons that remain unexplained, the shield and the heart represented the dominant architectural preferences of the eighth-grade population.
The process was straightforward. Choose your shape. Cut the wood. Sand the edges. Trace the letters. Use the router to carve the design. Paint the lettering. Let it dry. Sand the surface. Apply varnish.
Simple; In theory.
The router was where dreams went to die. A student could spend two days carefully preparing a beautiful wooden shield, tracing perfectly proportioned letters across its surface, only to have the router suddenly veer sideways and transform the family surname into something resembling an ancient language discovered on a damaged tombstone.
“Aw, man!”
That sound was common. So was the sound of Mr. Porter sighing.
“Slow down!”
“I was going slow!”
“Then go slower!”
Everyone was at a different stage of the project. Some were still cutting their shapes. Others were sanding with the concentration of master craftsmen. A few had progressed to painting their letters, while the truly fortunate were applying varnish to completed masterpieces.
The varnishing students generally carried themselves with an air of quiet superiority. They had survived the process. Their names were legible. Their wood was smooth. They could see the finish line.
The rest of us remained engaged in negotiations with lumber. I was working on my lettering. The router hummed in my hands, vibrating with enough enthusiasm to make me reconsider my career prospects. I had traced the letters carefully, taking particular pains to ensure that the family name would be represented with dignity.
Carefully, I guided the tool along the pencil lines. The first letter looked good. The second was acceptable. The third developed an unexpected personality. I stopped. Looked at it. Tilted my head. Perhaps, I reasoned, no one would notice. A classmate wandered over.
“What’s wrong with your letter?”
I stared at him.
“Nothing.”
“It looks crooked.”
“It’s artistic.”
He considered this.
“Looks crooked.”
Artistic criticism has always been a cruel profession.
I resumed working, attempting to persuade the remaining letters to maintain some semblance of uniformity. Every so often, I stopped to blow away the sawdust and inspect the damage. From a distance, the sign looked respectable. Up close, it possessed the sort of individuality that might require explanation.
Still, it was mine. And there was something satisfying about that.
My garnet shirt, meanwhile, had been tucked safely into my backpack, well away from the sawdust, paint, and general destruction taking place around me. Athletic greatness was one thing. Getting varnish on it was quite another.
By the end of the period, I had made respectable progress, inhaled enough sawdust to qualify as a small piece of furniture, and developed a healthy appreciation for the fact that professional sign makers probably deserved every penny they earned.
Then came sixth period. Science. And the incident.
Sixth Period: The Great Scorpion Escape of 1984. Our science classroom contained a collection of living creatures intended to inspire curiosity about the natural world.
There was a snake. A black widow spider. And an emperor scorpion.
Why anyone believed it was a good idea to keep an assortment of potentially alarming animals in a classroom full of adolescents is a question best left to the educational philosophers of the early 1980s.
Safety standards were apparently more flexible then.
We had survived leaded gasoline, metal playground equipment hot enough to cook breakfast, and bicycles ridden at reckless speeds without helmets. We drank from garden hoses, climbed trees with questionable structural integrity, and occasionally rode in the back of pickup trucks without giving the arrangement much thought.
A few venomous arthropods hardly seemed worth discussing. Until they escaped. The trouble began shortly after we entered the classroom. Someone noticed the scorpion enclosure. Or rather, noticed what was missing from it.
“Hey.”
Another student leaned closer.
“What?”
“Where’s the scorpion?”
There was a pause. Then someone checked the black widow enclosure.
“Uh…”
That particular sound, when uttered in a science classroom, rarely announced good news.
“The spider’s gone, too.”
Silence. The kind of silence that occurs when thirty adolescents simultaneously reconsider their relationship with the natural world. The teacher, Mr. Fletcher, approached, examined the enclosures, and adjusted his expression into something approximating professional calm.
“All right, everyone. Take your seats.”
Nobody moved.
“Where are they?” someone asked.
“We’re going to find out.”
“Are they poisonous?”
“They’re venomous,” Mr. Fletcher corrected.
This distinction did not improve morale.
“Can they kill you?”
“Sit down.”
We sat. Carefully. Very carefully.
Suddenly every chair became suspect. Every backpack represented a possible hiding place. Every movement beneath a desk was cause for immediate investigation. Students who had spent the previous five periods slouching comfortably in their seats were now sitting upright with the alertness of soldiers expecting an ambush.
I kept my feet firmly on the floor, although I briefly considered lifting them onto my chair. Then I reconsidered. What if the spider was already under the chair? There seemed to be no entirely satisfactory solution.
The snake, mercifully, remained inside its enclosure. I looked at it. It looked back. At least one of us understood the importance of staying home.
Mr. Fletcher attempted to begin the lesson. Something about ecosystems, if memory serves. He spoke with the measured determination of a man trying to restore normal academic conditions while privately wondering whether his career had taken an unfortunate turn. But it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a scholarly interest in ecosystems when two of the ecosystem’s more objectionable representatives are wandering freely about the classroom.
A student near the window suddenly jerked his foot away from something.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I thought I felt something.”
“What something?”
“I DON’T KNOW!”
Several students moved their feet. Mr. Fletcher closed his eyes for a moment.
“Everybody, please.”
Then someone looked up.
“THERE IT IS!”
Every head turned. High in the corner of the room, above Mr. Fletcher’s desk, clinging near the ceiling, was the emperor scorpion.
There it was.
A large, dark, armored creature with enormous pincers and a tail that curled over its back like a punctuation mark designed by Satan. It appeared perfectly content.
We were not.
“HOW DID IT GET UP THERE?”
“IS IT GONNA FALL?”
“WHAT IF IT JUMPS?”
I was reasonably certain scorpions did not jump from ceilings onto unsuspecting schoolchildren, but I was not sufficiently certain to volunteer as proof.
Mr. Fletcher stared upward.
For several seconds, nobody spoke. Then he said something that has remained with me all these years.
“Well.”
Just that.
“Well.”
A single syllable containing the entire weight of a science teacher’s professional disappointment. A ruler was produced. Then a longer ruler. Someone suggested a broom. Someone else suggested simply leaving the building and allowing the scorpion to inherit the classroom. I considered the latter proposal entirely reasonable.
The scorpion, meanwhile, remained in its corner, apparently enjoying the spectacle of thirty human beings behaving like idiots. It made no effort to escape. It made no threatening gestures. It simply existed, which under the circumstances was more than enough.
Eventually, through a combination of careful maneuvering, improvised equipment, and what I suspect was divine intervention, the scorpion was recovered.
There was applause. Actual applause.
Mr. Fletcher returned the creature to its enclosure and secured the lid with the determination of a man who had no intention of repeating the experience.
Order was restored.
Mostly.
Because the black widow remained missing.
“Did you find the spider?” someone asked.
Mr. Fletcher hesitated.
“Not yet.”
Not yet. Two words that transformed the remainder of sixth period into a psychological endurance test.
Every tickle on the skin became suspicious. Every dark speck on the floor required investigation. Every movement in the corner of one’s vision became a potential threat. Even the ordinary business of reaching into a backpack suddenly seemed like an act of extraordinary courage.
I glanced toward my own backpack. My garnet shirt was inside. The thought of a black widow taking up residence among my newly acquired athletic honors was deeply disturbing. Someone brushed against my shoulder, and I nearly launched myself through the nearest window.
“Relax!” Alfonso whispered.
“There’s a black widow loose!”
“So?”
“So I don’t want it making a home in my pants!”
He laughed.
I did not.
Mr. Fletcher resumed his lesson, although by then he might as well have been explaining the mating habits of extraterrestrial insects. Nobody was listening. Our attention remained divided between the floor, the ceiling, the corners, and whatever mysterious sensations happened to occur beneath our clothing.
At one point, I felt something against my ankle.
I froze.
Slowly, very slowly, I looked down. A loose thread from my sock. I had nearly suffered cardiac arrest over a loose thread.
The bell finally rang. Never in the history of public education had the sound been so beautiful. We gathered our belongings with unusual haste. I retrieved my backpack, inspected it with the suspicion normally reserved for unattended packages, and made a rapid exit.
The black widow remained unaccounted for. As far as I was concerned, it could have the classroom.
And the textbooks. And the homework. Especially the homework.
Dismissal: Freedom, at Last. The final bell released us into the afternoon like prisoners granted an unexpected pardon. Students spilled out of classrooms, backpacks swinging, conversations rising into the warm October air. The campus erupted with the particular energy of adolescents who had spent six periods being told where to sit, when to speak, and what to do.
Outside, the sun had climbed high above the rooftops. The morning coolness had given way to a pleasant warmth, and the streets of Calexico stretched before us with all the possibilities a small town could offer. Cars rolled past with their windows down. Somewhere, a radio was playing. A bicycle rattled over a crack in the sidewalk, its rider standing on the pedals and weaving between the patches of shade.
Alfonso walked beside me.
“Pretty good day,” he said.
I considered the evidence. I had escaped a math quiz through an obscure numerical technicality. Survived English grammar. Earned the coveted garnet shirt after setting a school record in the mile and completing the remaining physical requirements. Produced a reasonably respectable drawing during history. Eaten lunch from Lupe’s Market. Nearly destroyed a perfectly good piece of lumber in wood shop. And spent the final hour of school sharing a classroom with a fugitive scorpion and a black widow spider whose whereabouts remained a matter of considerable concern.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not bad.”
We walked for a while in comfortable silence. Then Alfonso spoke.
“You think they found the spider?”
I looked at him.
“Don’t know.”
“What if it’s still in there?”
I shrugged.
“Then I guess it gets an education.”
He laughed.
I shifted my backpack and checked the garnet shirt tucked safely inside. I was looking forward to getting home, taking it out, and admiring it properly. Perhaps even wearing it around the house for a while. There was no reason to rush the experience. Achievements of this magnitude deserved a certain amount of ceremony.
“You’re really happy about that shirt, huh?” Alfonso asked.
“Yep.”
“It’s just a shirt.”
I looked at him. He grinned. There are moments when friendship requires patience.
We continued down the sidewalk, two skinny boys with backpacks full of books, pockets mostly empty, and the sort of energy that seemed inexhaustible at thirteen. There was still plenty of afternoon left. Homework could wait. There might be time to ride our bikes, wander around the neighborhood, stop by somebody’s house, or simply sit somewhere and talk about nothing in particular.
There was no internet waiting at home. No smartphones. No endless stream of notifications demanding our attention. If you wanted to find your friends, you went looking for them. If you wanted to know what was happening, you walked outside. And if you wanted something to do, you generally found it, even if the adults in your life would have preferred you find something else.
The world was small enough to walk across, yet large enough to contain an inexhaustible supply of adventure. At the next corner, Alfonso kicked another pebble into the street.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t forget your homework.”
I laughed.
“Don’t forget to study for math.”
He shook his head.
We went our separate ways.
I walked the remaining distance home, the afternoon sun warm against my face, my backpack riding comfortably against my shoulders. Inside were textbooks, notebooks filled with questionable artwork, a few pencil stubs, and a garnet-colored shirt that had made the entire day feel just a little more important.
Tomorrow there would be another six periods. Another lunch menu. Another opportunity to avoid a quiz. More homework, more laughter, more ordinary little dramas that seemed terribly important at the time. And somewhere back at school, presumably, a black widow spider was still pursuing its education.
I turned the corner toward home, already thinking about what there might be to eat.
After all, it had been several hours since lunch.
And ninety-five pounds of athletic greatness required constant maintenance.
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