Enemies

I was not popular in middle school. I was a nerdy little boy, always trying to endear myself to a teacher, or proclaiming my indifference to what other people thought, or talking about the violin. I only listened to classical music, a source of great tension with my peer group. I remember one nice girl trying to understand my musical taste: “Have you heard the theme song to Fresh Prince of Bel Air? You’d probably like that—there’s violins in it.”
Yes, I fell into a trap that my parents, like so many other well-meaning adults, had set for me. I was convinced that if I would only “be myself,” then friends would follow. In truth, this strategy doesn’t apply to middle school. Nobody is themselves, and those that try are mercilessly torn down until they conform.

Early in my middle school career, before I’d been beaten into a certain amount of conformity, I knew a boy named Jermaine, and we hated each other. Jermaine was in my gifted class, and he would roll his eyes at every word I spoke, and I would do the same. When I sucked up to our teacher he would call out to the class that I was doing it. When he asked to go to the water fountain in order to go to his locker and get a piece of candy, I would announce his true intention to the teacher. To him I was a sniveling little ass-kisser, and he called me “Fat-ass.” To me he was a bad kid, a rule-breaking future criminal who probably stole from the school store, and I called him “Douchebag,” something I heard my father say while he drove sometimes.
Our class took a field trip to Baltimore to visit some ridiculous seminar for sixth graders at Johns Hopkins University. The trip involved a stay at a hotel in Baltimore’s inner harbor, and Jermaine was put down as my roommate, to our mutual dismay.
We approached our hotel room bickering and arguing about petty things, tired and cranky from a long bus ride. Before I turned on the light Jermaine ran in and jumped on the bed, and immediately cried out.
“What is it?!” I cried, turning on the lights.
The bed he had jumped on was soaked in urine.
We found our teacher, who secured us a new room, and while we waited discussed what a shitty hotel we were staying in.
“What kind of hotel has pee on the beds?” I asked him.
“A crappy-ass hotel, that’s what kind,” he answered.
Crappy-ass. I liked that.
Later, in our new room Jermaine let me see an X-Men comic he had bought after dinner.
“Wow, did that guy just kill Magneto?” I asked him.
“Nah, they always try to make you think somebody died but they always come back like an issue later,” he told me.
We discussed video games, television, movies, and discovered we had lots of mutual interests. Then Jermaine went to the phone. Before I could ask what he was doing, he picked up the receiver and punched in four random numbers. There was a pause while it rang, and then a voice said “Hello?”
“BIAAAHTCH!” yelled Jermaine and hung up.
This was the greatest thing I had seen in my entire life. We didn’t stop laughing for several minutes, and then I had to try it. Four random numbers, and--
“BIAAAHTCH!” I yelled.
We rolled on the floor.
“BIAAAHTCH!!” we yelled into the empty stairwell.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!” we yelled running down the hall past open doors.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!!” we called out on the bus the next day.
How we didn’t get in trouble for doing this is a mystery to me, but we didn’t.
When we got back to Norfolk we said good-bye, and went our separate ways.
The next Monday at school I saw him in the hall. Neither of us said hello, but we grinned at each other, and though we were never exactly friends, we didn’t hate each other either. I would kiss the teacher’s ass, and he said nothing. He would go to his locker for candy, and I said nothing. And when his friends started to pick on me, he changed the target to someone else. Friendship might have been unrealistic, but peace was enough.