science, sex, & carnations

    In 7th grade, I was the Vice President of the science club.* The only thing we really did as an organization was sell carnations to raise money for ourselves. We would go from classroom door to classroom door at the beginning or end of each day leading up to Valentine’s Day. We would trade dollar bills for slips of paper to write messages on that would be attached to the flowers we delivered on the holiday. Our whole club would maybe split into groups to do this, but the whole club was just me and my best friends, so we’d usually just take advantage of the incredibly awkward task of selling carnations to middle schoolers to just hang out.

    One of us would hold the envelope for cash and messages, and another would knock and announce that we were in their classroom to sell them carnations. As the VP, I was often not the envelope holder. I ended up with the truly unpleasant task of interrupting a classroom to make a self-serving announcement. Two classrooms in particular stand out in my memory as nightmare-worthy and still occasionally show up on my list of shit to be embarrassed about whenever I can’t fall asleep at night.

    In the first, I knock and make my announcement. The teacher glares at me. I am confused. An eon passes before Rachel, a girl I didn’t even like, looks up at me and says, “We’re taking a test.” I leave without the teacher saying a word.

    In the second, I again knock and make my announcement. The teacher zeroes in on me and starts yelling her head off. How dare I interrupt her class? Who do I think I am? (This lady was truly a mean person, and I used to lay awake at night planning my revenge: I’d write a bestselling book and call her out for being mean to kids in the dedication.) Also I’d like to point out here that these were designated times at the beginning and end of each day for clubs and people to do stuff like this. I wasn’t really interrupting either teacher in a way that wasn’t already planned into her day.

    Pretty much everyone in that science club was a grade-A introvert, and we hated these carnation sales. So by 8th grade, we got up the courage to put our feet down and come up with a different fundraiser: a students vs. teachers science trivia bowl.

I was in charge of writing the questions, and I spent hours creating a slideshow on a chunky desktop that I’d begged my dad to put in my room. It didn’t have Internet, but I could use the CD drive to blast Friends: The One with All the Party Music soundtrack.

We charged $1 per ticket for admission. Looking back, I can’t imagine how cringe-inducing the whole thing must have been. We definitely owe a lot of now 25-27 year olds from my county a refund. The worst part for me personally was when I plugged in my thumb drive to pull up my slideshow of questions, and a whole auditorium of people saw the file The Family Times, a fake newspaper I’d created. For 14 year old me, that was basically like the whole school seeing the weird porn I was into, except instead of porn it was extra homework I’d given myself.

We used the money from our fundraisers to go on pretty awesome field trips. The teacher in charge of our club picked an island for us to go to, and her husband came as a chaperone. We all could not get over the fact that they were wearing matching sandals. And they were both chewing gum! At school!!

We had to ride a bus to get onto a boat to get to the island. The whole way to the island, Kevin, the only boy in the club, told us how badly he wanted to kiss Jane, his girlfriend, who was also there but not part of this conversation, the way middle schoolers behave with their very first boyfriends. We were a bunch of horny pre-teens who wholly delighted into this first foray into foreplay. On the island, Jane and Kevin pretty much ignored each other.

I remember sitting in the cafe part of the boat, eating a banana nut muffin and feeling like Tony Soprano in my booth, agreeing to help Kevin with this situation.

On the island, my teacher and her husband wouldn’t let us take off our shoes (the shoe-obsessed freaks!), and I found a dead horseshoe crab.

On the bus on the way back to school, my best friends and I created a barrier to block Jane and Kevin from our teacher and her husband’s view. We manipulated the seating so that they were sitting together. I can’t imagine a more awkward, less romantic setting for a first kiss because I remember us all actually turned around, watching them. Jane was the first of all of us. I was truly, madly jealous.

I ran into Kevin in my hometown grocery store 2 years ago. It was late, and I was buying an enormous sandwich and voodoo chips. He’d gained weight since middle school, when he’d been a twig. I’d gained more. After we said hello, he said, “That’s a healthy dinner,” and I haven’t felt that much anger before or since in my life. (This is a lie.) If I’d actually been Tony Soprano like I’d felt on that boat, I would have sent Pauline and Christopha to knee cap him for being a fuckin’ smart mouth, I swear to god.

    The science teacher who ran our club was also our 7th grade science teacher, which is the year you learn some delicate aspects of human anatomy for the first time in the state of Mississippi. Ms. T had to walk us through what genitals are for the first time. God bless her, she let us ask questions. My seat partner, the guy we all agreed was the hottest 7th grader at our school, was one of the very few who took her up on this offer. He raised a hand and said, “I’m not trying to be funny, but does that mean if you get in a hot tub, your sperm gets cooked?”**

    Other teachers took a less scientific approach to sex-ed that year. Our career discovery teacher showed us a video with a voiceover that said, “Our president might not know what counts as sex, but oral sex counts.” (This is bullshit, right?) I think the overall message of the video was that all genital stuff outside marriage is BAD. We got a lot of that abstinence only shit in school, and we also had girls become mothers before high school. I didn’t learn anything from that video except about the existence of the Clinton sex scandal. It took me a bit longer to learn that oral sex meant blow jobs and what those even were. I was too busy selling carnations, making powerpoints, and writing family newsletters to learn about blow jobs back then.

*I honestly can’t fucking remember if this is true. I might have been the president or the secretary, but you can bet your ass I held a leadership position in a middle school science club.

**I wish I could remember the exact quote, but I promise you, it involved a hot tub and sperm.