Aunt Lina and I moved some of our stuff to NJ by car on October 20th, but we were waiting for her nephew Swift, and his truck and crew to bring in the heavier stuff. It was kinda cool, sleeping on an airbed and all, but Aunt Lina insisted that I go to school that Monday instead of helping her paint and stuff.
So I went into D.S. Whitsone Middle School and immediately got lost. You know that old joke “Ya can’t get there from here”? That’s DSW Middle School in a nutshell. It’s a maze of add-ons to an ancient former High School. The office gave me my classroom schedule and a schematic that was supposed to represent the school. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I tried asking directions from other kids, but they were rude. And the teachers were worse. One guy muttered something about the 5th graders getting stupider every year. I suppose that because I’m short for my age, he assumed I’m a 5th grader. Apparently, that’s lower than a pregnant slug.
By the time I figured out where the next class was, I was late. But the teacher, Miss Flemington, took the time to look at my schedule and ask the class if anyone had Science next. A thin girl with dark hair and a round, smiling face raised her hand. Her name sounded like “door” – I later learned it was Dor, short for Dorcas. She helped me find the gym, which I never would have located without her.
Apparently, you need to change into shorts in order to take gym, so I was exempt and got to sit on the bleachers. Thank God I’d brought a book along – it was the best part of my first day. Lunch was at 11, and by the time I got to the cafeteria the only seats available were in the back. One table had a few guys playing some sort of card game –Pokémon? – and there were a few empty seats at the other end of the table, so I sat down and ate my peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, then I tried doing some of the assigned Math homework. It was so easy that I was done before the bell rang. So I looked around at the other kids.
The entire sixth grade takes lunch together, so I got an overview of my classmates. There was a table near the front entrance, near the cafeteria cashiers, that was crowded with girls that were all dressed similarly. They all had long hair, most were wearing pink tops and starchy-new skinny jeans or “yoga pants” with the elastic waistband rolled down to show either the tops of their underwear or the crack of their butt. They had ugg boots, and bright colored leather purses. I guess they were designer purses, because they either had shiny metal tags or logos. Some of the girls wore make-up, (and had more in common with my ancestors than I did, what with the war-paint and all) while others had neon nail polish. They all smiled like barracudas and chattered like monkeys, yet somehow I knew which girl was the leader. In a beehive, you can locate a queen because she is entirely surrounded by her guard, like the center of a “bee flower”. The queen bee is longer and slimmer than her workers, and to beekeepers, it is obvious where she is because she stands out by being surrounded.
These girls seemed to surround one particular brunette, whose shirt seemed pinker and smile seemed wider than that of all of the other girls around her. I knew that this group was not for me, not because I wouldn’t fit in, but because I didn’t want to. They were a cliché, not a clique, and I was not interested in that type of “friend”. There was a matching contingency of boys, a few tables away, whose uniform was a certain type of high-top sneaker, cargo pants and sports or music themed hoodies. I would have liked to observe more, but the bell rang, and it was time to run around trying to find a classroom yet again.
I didn’t get a locker until the end of the day. I was exhausted. The next day was more of the same, except that at lunch, Dor motioned for me to sit at her table. I met her friends Ruby, Amelia and Carl. I’ll write more about them in another post. Let me just say that this group seemed more real than the plastic girls I’d observed yesterday. And between Dor and her pals, I managed to have someone to follow to class each period. So the week progressed. But the actual school part was nonsense. By the time the teachers took attendance and stuff, there was barely enough time to whet our appetite before the bell rang. Thank God I already knew most of the stuff that they were teaching – otherwise I’d be frustrated.
Learning this way is like schizophrenia! There’s no time to immerse yourself in the subject matter, no time to research a tangent that happens to hold your interest. Learning in a school is like being on a factory assembly line – add a little Social Studies here, tighten the Language Arts there, paint on a foreign language there (I’m taking French, because I already know a little), and after ten months, you’ve made a ready-for-the-next-grader!
It’s all so exhausting that by the end of the week I was so looking forward to a weekend of rest. I wished it were longer.
I should have been careful what I wished for.
On Saturday, October 29th, a slushy snowstorm started in the morning. Swift’s moving truck left the farm early, but the roads were so crazy, they didn’t get to us until after 6 PM. By that time, a tree had fallen across our front lawn, pulling down the electrical and phone wires. Icy snow had fallen on top of leaves in the road, making it tough for cars to pass. They were declaring a state of emergency for NJ when the truck pulled up. It was still snowing, but we had no power. The only reason we had heat was the wood-burning stove. We hung out in what should have been the coldest room in the house, burning rolled up newspaper, cardboard boxes and logs that we’d found piled in the back yard. We heated water for tea, and ate ramen noodles and soup. Swift and his crew, Joey and Max, had brought sub sandwiches. We took everything from the refrigerator and put it into coolers, then packed snow around it to keep it cool. We used candles and flashlights, until the batteries ran out. Then we turned in, expecting things to be fixed the next day.
Except they weren’t. We had no electricity on Sunday. Nor on Monday. The guys shoveled a path from the truck to the front door, and we managed to get our furniture and stuff into the house. Then the guys helped neighbors move a tree that was blocking our street, so that they could try to make it out to the highway. By 4PM, they were gone. The solar powered flashlight that Aunt Lina had was recharging on a windowsill, and we had more paper and cardboard to burn, from unpacking our kitchen stuff. One of our neighbors knocked on our door to tell us that there’d be no school tomorrow. As a matter of fact, there was no school on Tuesday and only a half-day on Wednesday. Welcome to NJ. We would have been here a month ago, except there had been Hurricane Irene. Now, the Halloween snowstorm. If I were superstitious, I’d say something was trying to tell us NOT to move to NJ. I guess it’s too late now. We’re here.
Until my next post…
Randi
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