Spring Fever Part II

FOOD FIGHT!

This is part 2/3 of the [long] second chapter of my memoir about getting diagnosed with severe ADHD as a teenager and the resulting fall-out. Read part 1 here.

Part II: FOOD FIGHT!

In late April of the following year, seventh grade, the Spring Fever mutated.

I was late for lunch, digging through my black hole of a locker for the Ziplock bag containing my lunch money. It was a miracle I could ever find anything in that locker, filled with neglected textbooks, old sheets of notebook paper crumpled to a velvety softness, crisp notes from my friends folded into those little rectangles with the pull tab tucked into a corner (you know the ones), homework assignments I’d finished but never turned in because they’d crossed the event horizon and disappeared, those little troll dolls with gems for belly buttons, scrunchies, and a random YM magazine from months prior that I’d cut up to make collages on my notebook covers. As I dug through the mess, I discovered the Keroppi diary I’d gotten on a trip to the Sanrio Surprise store in the Galleria a year earlier.

“So that’s where you’ve been,” I said aloud to the diary, whose first dozen or so pages I’d filled with cringey stuff about some boy before tossing it into the black hole one day back in late autumn.

I grabbed the diary, revealing the plastic bag containing my lunch money underneath it. How on earth had that happened? I had just tossed the money in that morning, and now it was under a thing I hadn’t seen in months? Weird. I shrugged and shoved the money bag into my pocket.

Striding into the cafeteria, I scanned the space, the din of preteen voices and lunchtime noises washing over me. I spotted my tween-girl posse chatting in the snack-bar line. Andi Spangler, Jessica Ramon, Stacy Kidwell, and Grace Stone all shared my lunch period, and we had our own little lunch-time ritual: meet up in the snack bar line and gossip while we waited to order our Frito pies or cinnamon rolls.

On my way to join them, I passed the tray line, where I noticed Craig Martin, one of the cutest and coolest boys in the eighth grade, looking right at me.

I met his gaze, and he grinned, the twinkle of mischief lighting up his sea-blue eyes. My heart thumped beneath my training bra. Even though I’d been craving a cinnamon roll from the snack bar all morning, I couldn’t waste this opportunity. I had to get in line with him.

I floated over, all aflutter. “Hey,” I said, feigning nonchalance.

He leaned in, azure eyes wild. “Guess what?” he whispered. I felt my cheeks flush. He was so close to me I could smell his breath—a mixture of grape soda and fortune cookies. I wondered if he was an actual angel.

“What?” I whispered back.

“There’s gonna be a food fight today,” he hissed.

“A food fight?!”

His eyes went wide and darted to the lunch ladies. “Shhh!”

I glanced at said lunch ladies in their white frocks, aprons, and hair nets, paying us no mind. Phew. “Sorry,” I whispered. “It’s cool,” Craig replied. We inched forward in the line. “You should get in on the action, Neves!” the sound of my last name coming out of his mouth like we were already coconspirators nearly took me out.

I nodded, smiling and maintaining eye contact, wanting desperately to close the inches between our faces and kiss him. A sound halfway between a breath and a “yeah” escaped through my shit-eating grin.

He went on, “Tell your table, too. At eleven thirty, Hunter’s gonna blow a whistle. That’s the signal to start. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this excited.

Craig’s smile grew wider, and I noted how straight and white his teeth were. He’d just gotten his braces off a couple of weeks before. He grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking them gently back and forth. I allowed myself to be shaken, beaming, hoping my training bra would keep my heart from bursting out of my chest and flopping wetly onto the floor between us.

We were almost to the front of the line. Craig squinted at the food the lunch ladies were serving, then turned back to me. “It’s chicken fried steak day. Ask if you can have extra.”

I nodded, a pang of guilt I couldn’t quite name—something about the lunch ladies and the extra food—burning in my solar plexus. I shoved the feeling down.

I couldn’t not participate. This seemed like a rite of passage of sorts; the boys handing the baton of mayhem to us before they ascended to the high school realms. Who was I to turn from such sacred duty?

My hands shook as I fished the Ziplock bag from the pocket of my Limited Too jeans and counted out an extra dime for the increased portion. Much to my relief, when I asked for more mashed potatoes, the lunch lady plopped a second mound from her ice cream scooper onto my tray without even looking up. “No gravy!” I blurted just in time. Dry steak and potatoes would be much easier to wield and lob. The lunch lady, a small, middle-aged woman with a sweet face, raised her eyebrows at the volume of my request, ladle full of gravy hovering mid-air. She shrugged, put the ladle back in the gravy well, and shoved my tray along.

Pretty much exactly what they were serving up in the MPJH cafeteria that day.

I paid and raced to our table, a few rows over from Craig and the boys, where I gushed to my posse about the plan, setting us all abuzz. This was going to be so amazing. The girls hurried to the snack bar and loaded up on ammunition.

They rushed back to the table, and a few tense moments later, we heard the shriek of Hunter’s whistle. Craig fired the first shot, tossing his chocolate milk into the air. I will never forget the sight of that little brown-and-white, Oak Farms carton spinning upwards, chocolate milk spraying in a circle, raining down on the table of boys.

And then? Pandemonium.

If it were a movie, this would be the moment where I’d pause and observe the slow-motion carnage while Agnus Dei by Samuel Barber played.

Here was Stacy, hurling Little Debbie cakes at Hunter, as Craig pelted him in the back with rolls; and there, Andi and Jessica, smashing cinnamon rolls onto each other’s faces, all of them having the time of their goddamn lives. I felt so free and alive, and in my heart of hearts I wished it could go on forever.

At this point I’ve got to call out my 14-year-old self for claiming, on the day of the Algebra fiasco, that I’d never thrown anything at a teacher’s head before, because my own carton of chocolate milk had indeed bounced off the forehead of a frantic Mr. Pavlovic, one of the teachers assigned to lunch-room duty that day (poor soul). I wasn’t trying to hit him, but he’d juked right to avoid a dinner roll and crossed the path of the Oak Farms missile after it had left my hand. To avoid being identified as the milk-thrower, I ducked under the table, eyeing Mr. Pavlovic from my hiding place, praying I hadn’t hurt him. I watched him wipe the grayish liquid from his cheeks and glasses. He seemed fine, if royally pissed off. Phew.

I emerged a moment later, grabbing and gleefully flinging my chicken fried steak like a frisbee, squealing with unhinged laughter.

The whole thing probably lasted three minutes, until the security guard descended upon the instigating table, grabbing Hunter and Craig by their shirts, grinding the chaos to a halt.

For a moment, none of the adults in the room knew quite what to do, but at last, they decided to round up all the eighth-grade boys at that table and march them to the front office to a round of applause. By some miracle, no one had noticed my table’s involvement (or so it seemed), and we wiped our hands and faces clean with the extra napkins the girls had gotten from the snack bar, then hustled to the bathroom to erase the traces of our crimes as best we could before heading back to class, reeling with power.

For about 24 hours, it seemed like my friends and I were going to get away with our part in the bedlam.

The administration called an emergency staff meeting after school that day, Wednesday. By Thursday, my mom had heard through the grapevine that during deliberations as to the appropriate punishment for those who had not been involved in the planning of the food fight but had merely taken part in the action itself, I had been mentioned by name.

That’s when I knew I was in deep shit.

I begged my mom to let me stay home the next day, a Friday, but she refused. “You are going to face the consequences of your actions, Little Missy.” I bawled and begged, but I could not convince her. I was confined to my room for the night and grounded for the weekend.

The next morning, I trudged through the school doors in terror. I somehow made it through the day, amazed that I had not keeled over and died from fear. The other shoe did not drop until eighth period, which was my Honors English class. That teacher, Mrs. Jamail, liked me well enough. She thought I was smart and a good writer, but she was perpetually frustrated by my class clownery. She had told me as much many times.

In my defense, Adam Clarke was in my class, and I was obsessed with him. He was good looking and hilarious, and I spent more time trying to make him laugh from across the room than I did paying attention, even though English was one of my favorite subjects.

Midway through eighth period, the principal’s aide, an eighth-grade girl I didn’t know, came in with a lavender slip, which was a summons to the front office, either to visit the counselor or one of the administrators. I was well acquainted with these little slips, whose lovely color belied their function as harbingers of doom. I had been handed a few dozen of them by that point in my two years at MPJH.

The aide spotted me and smirked as she handed the slip to my teacher. Crap, I thought, here goes. “Emily,” Mrs. Jamail said, “You’re being summoned.” The word landed like a punch to the throat.

The aide and I walked to the front office in silence, I a few paces behind her, my pulse throbbing in my temples, my jaw tight. When we arrived, the aide gave me a smug mean-girl look, but I was too nervous to even glare back at her. I spotted the chair closest to the front office’s tall counter and sat down, wishing I could turn to liquid and soak into the cracks in the cheap, brown vinyl.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Brandeis, the Principal, poked her head out of her office door and saw me. “Emily?” I nodded. “Come in.” I usually saw the Assistant Principal when I’d gotten in trouble, so there was no mistaking the gravity of the situation. I tried to look remorseful as I stood and crossed to her.

The back wall of Mrs. Brandeis’ office was floor-to-ceiling glass, which looked out into the school’s foyer. Her desk and office chair faced away from the glass, and I looked past her into the entryway reflexively, wanting to fix my focus anywhere but on her face. Mrs. Brandeis gestured to one of the two chairs before her desk. She closed the miniblinds. I took the seat closest to the door in case I needed to make a quick escape.

The overhead fluorescents were off, and a tall floor lamp in the far corner filled the space with a soft, warm glow. I was grateful for that, at least. Those evil, buzzing tubes seemed designed specifically to drain the life from me. I used to stare at them and think of a scene from my favorite childhood movie, Joe vs. The Volcano, and the speech Tom Hanks (as Joe Banks) gives the morning he finds out about his dubious diagnosis—a ‘brain cloud’—and flips out when he returns to work. “I can feel them sucking the juice out of my eyeballs—suck suck suck suck suck,” *gross sucking noises* (Still one of my favorite movies ever.)

Maybe Mrs. Brandeis felt the same way about the fluorescents as Joe Banks and I did. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

As the mini-blinds tilted into their closed position, I observed that the slats were a shiny bronze on the top side and dark matte brown on the underside. In the dozens of times I’d seen them as I passed the office window, I’d always thought they were beige.

Mrs. Brandeis sat down in her chair, and I watched the wand on the blinds swing back and forth with an unpleasant, rhythmic squeak.

When at last I summoned the courage to look at Mrs. Brandeis, I found her eyes fixed on me in a stern stare. Gulp. A tall and very thin woman with pale skin, short black hair, and a sharp, pointy nose, Mrs. Brandeis had always given me the impression of an ostrich, and right now, she seemed just as deceptively dangerous. (Those birds can sprint up to 45 miles per hour and hand a grown man’s ass to him.) I averted my gaze.

“Emily,” she began, “I got word that you participated in the food fight at lunch on Wednesday… Is that true?”

I couldn’t lie. “Yeah,” I replied, and her eyes narrowed in response. “I mean—yes, ma’am.”

“This is very serious. You know that, right?”

I nodded, my pulse quickening.

“Unfortunately,” she continued, “we have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to this kind of behavior.” (Gulp.) “And while I understand that you didn’t help plan this food fight, the fact that you chose to participate means that you will be suspended.”

I felt light-headed.

“Your face tells me you know what that means.”

It meant that once again, I would be disqualified from trying out for cheerleader. I choked back tears.

“If you wanted to be a cheerleader so badly, Emily, I would imagine you’d think twice before doing something as foolish as this.”

At this, I gave up fighting the tears. I couldn’t let myself breathe, lest I devolve into a sobbing, inconsolable mess. How the heck did Mrs. Brandeis even know what I wanted? Ms. Dingus had probably told her. Ms. Dingus’ face flashed through my mind, a smug smirk adorning it. She was a very small woman, not much bigger than me. I daydreamed briefly about beating her ass.

“Now,” Mrs. Brandeis interrupted my violent thoughts. She was filling out a form. “I have to ask that you share the names of anyone who participated with you.” She looked up from the form, her eyes boring into mine. I said nothing. “It’s only fair, isn’t it? Surely you weren’t the only seventh-grade girl who made this choice.”

I felt queasy as I thought about Stacy, who had also been in pep squad with me that year. Unlike me, she hadn’t been disqualified the previous year, but she had been in competitive gymnastics, and the rigor of that meant it could be her only extracurricular activity. But Stacy had decided she’d rather be a cheerleader than go to the Olympics, or whatever, and quit team gym to join me as the only other seventh grader in the stands at all those games.

The idea of Stacy getting away with it, getting to be a cheerleader when she had participated, too, even if I was the one who had given her the idea in the first place, was too much. If I was going down, I might as well take her down with me.

So, in one of my worst moments ever, I blurted out my friend’s name. “Stacy Kidwell.”

Mrs. Brandeis wrote Stacy’s name on a yellow legal pad beside the Form of Doom. “Anyone else?” she said. I figured I might as well take them all down, or Stacy would think it was personal. “Andi Spangler, Grace Stone, and Jessica Ramon.” A cold panic set in. What have I done? I thought. But it was too late.

I was a tattler—a rat—willing to risk losing four of my best friends just because I didn’t want to be the only seventh-grade girl to get pinched. I wanted to shrivel up and die, like the lowly worm I was.

“Thank you, Emily.” Mrs. Brandeis looked at my pathetic face and gave a little smile, something like sympathy in her large, brown eyes. “I appreciate your honesty.” I nodded, the tears now streaming in fat tracks down my soft round cheeks. I felt more like a baby in that moment than I had in a long time.

She handed me the form. “You’ll need to sign this and return it on Monday morning with a parent’s signature. You will be suspended on Tuesday. I do hope this teaches you a lesson. Your actions have consequences, and maybe next time you’ll think of the custodial staff, who had to clean up that horrid mess you all made. Or Mr. Pavlovic, who got hit in the face with a carton of chocolate milk.” Gulp.

I nodded, feeling guilty about Mr. Pavlovic and particularly the custodial staff. She was right; it wasn’t fair to them, and people were mean enough to them as it was. I hadn’t thought about any of that when I decided to carry my dry chicken fried steak and extra scoop of potatoes into battle. All I’d wanted was to have fun, wreak havoc, and look cool to Craig and Hunter and all the other eighth grade boys.

Lost in a haze of shame and fear, I trudged back to class, knowing four more of those cursed lavender slips were on their way to my friends in their respective classes. I cried the whole rest of the period, staring down at my desk.

After school, I told my friends I was the one who’d ratted them out—I couldn’t hold it in. They were devastated. Andi’s mom told her she should think about who her real friends were, and even as a kid I thought that was immature for a grown woman to say to her preteen daughter. It wasn’t like I had forced them to participate at gunpoint, or anything. Grace’s parents told her she had gotten what she had deserved, and ultimately, she and I remained closer than any of the others through the years. I’m not sure if those two facts related or not.

They all forgave me eventually, but I still feel a pit in my stomach whenever I think about it, three decades later. I went against my core values that day, or at least the ones I currently hold. Back then I didn’t even know what core values were.

Later, I would find out that Aurora Blaine had been the one responsible for my demise. Aurora was the prettiest and most popular girl in the eighth grade, and I had a little crush on her. She was stunningly beautiful, petite and curvy with golden blonde hair and a giant, Pamela Anderson mouth full of brilliant, white teeth. Like most of my girl crushes, though, I didn’t even call it that. At this point in my young life, I was still deep in the closet—even to myself.

Aurora Blaine probably told on me because she’d gotten wind that I’d been gloating about not getting caught on the afternoon of the food fight. I was actually kind of thrilled by the fact that Aurora Blaine not only knew my name, but also harbored some little vendetta against me, if only for an afternoon. That knowledge made me feel wild and powerful, like some sort of preteen suburban crime boss.

me, basically