Mom of the year

 As long as I'm on the subject of Jr. high trauma, I may as well note another amazingly tragic, almost too horrifying to believe drama. This one also occurred in 7th grade, but this time it involved menstruation and the 100 or so kids that rode the bus home.      In our bougie Jr high we had a pool. And those fucks they called coaches made us swim in P.E. class, because child torture was totally their kink. They didn't make us shower, thank the gods, but we did have to change together in the locker room, and the bathroom stalls did not have doors that locked. That means that privacy is not a thing, especially if you didn't have a friend in class to have your back and block you while you changed, or peed or whatever. My clothes and shoes got stolen a few times that year. They also didn't clean the stalls often enough, so that teeny little trash bin that's meant to hold 10 used menstrual pads/tampons per day, usually had 30 piled on top by 3rd period, and was not usua...

     Few moments illustrate the tone of my Jr. high years quite like the Simpson’s T-shirt incident. My dad bought it for me from Spencer’s in an uncharacteristic apologetic moment for one of his drunken episodes. The show had just started that year, 1990, and it was pretty risque for us 12 year olds. EVERYONE loved it. And I had yet to see anyone at school with Simpson’s merch yet, so I was sure I would finally be the trendsetter I was meant to be.           So far in 7th grade, I was pretty invisible. Most of my friends from elementary school had changed and we could no longer relate to each other, or they found new friends that better matched the personas they were trying to achieve. The few friends I had left were players in a never ending game of 3 way calls and shit talk that none of us really wanted to participate in, but the act felt like survival. There was no way out, and being at the bottom of the social totem pole was like death. It wa...