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Memoir: Eighth Grade

Eighth grade: My public middle school had a pool, and that pool doubled as a nuclear fall-out shelter. Maybe that sign was just a relic from a more troubled era? In any case, the sign remained.

On days when you had mandatory swim class, you had to strip down in front of your peers, which was its own special trauma. Then you would shiver in a long line, and eventually, your turn would come, and you would race against classmates. Lengths, lengths of the pool. When you were inevitably last, by a wide a margin, your failure would be on display; it would be something visible to all.

“My brother met this girl,” said my classmate, K, as we waited for our relay turn, “and she said she gives blow jobs.” She gives blow jobs--like cool drinks at a lemonade stand! K’s brother had arranged to meet the girl after school--this week!--to obtain his blow job. I didn’t really know what a blow job was, but the story seemed unbearably exciting, and then of course there wasn’t anything like follow-up. You wouldn’t ask for an update on a story like that. The words would just appear, and they would change your life, and then they’d float away.

K seemed to know more about life, generally, than I did. He would have me over, and we’d play “Magic: The Gathering.” While listening to Aerosmith, the late-career CD about “Armageddon,” we’d discuss porn. I didn’t initiate these discussions; mostly, I didn’t know what K was talking about. But I admired his wisdom and authority and verve.

At the end of swim class, you would have to pack your soggy, chlorinated trunks in a plastic Tops Friendly Markets bag, and then the trunks would emit foul odors in your locker for the rest of the day. I so thoroughly detested this “class,” I started lying about my trunks. “Forgot them again!” ...I did this so much, I started to risk failing the program, and to this day, I still have dreams in which I have missed a full year of swimming, and the authorities have finally located my number.

No one worried about school shootings at this time. There weren’t any lockdown drills. There weren’t tornado threats; we weren’t in the midwest. There was never a time when one needed to cower under one’s desk, in a pantomime of crisis-response. Where was the crisis? It had not found its way to North Tonawanda.

I’m having these memories, thanks, in part, to Bo Burnham’s often-terrific “Eighth Grade.” There’s so much to admire in this script. I especially like the vapid mean girl, whose mother requires her to invite the uncool protagonist to a swimming party. (“My mom told me I have to invite you to the party, so this is me doing that.”)

Our protagonist wants to ingratiate herself with the mean girl, who has been voted “Best Eyes--Female,” so she selects a card game as a gift. (“It’s like Go Fish, but way more fun!”) Other girls have presented the mean girl with items that appear to be lacy negligee? “Oh my God, that is so you!!” But when the mean girl gets to the card game, she can’t even bring herself to smile.

(The special nastiness of “superlatives” is given exquisite attention here. How can schools still get away with this? In high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Go Down in History,” which was a coded reference to my obvious homosexuality. In the ensuing years, I have been happy to fulfill expectations.)

In the big climax of “Eighth Grade,” the protagonist confronts the mean girl. Without making eye contact, she says, hurriedly, with a notable absence of self-control: “I’ve always been nice to you, and that Go Fish game is really fun. And you just ignore me. It’s not that hard to be nice to people.” We might wish this kid had taken a few deep breaths, first, but we can’t help but share in her triumph, and the moment has more moral oomph, and seems more exhilarating, than anything you’ll find in the (apparently) high-stakes plot of “Mission: Impossible VI.”

As adults, we sometimes think that eighth grade doesn’t matter. How could it? We have busy lives. Our interactions now have real consequences.

But Bo Burnham is here to let us know we’re wrong. How could we not be wrong? If we were right, then I wouldn’t still have occasional dreams about missing swim class. As Lorrie Moore has said, your early years are buried, eventually--but buried alive.

I passed swimming, somehow. I’d like to think that that’s because of some kind of crazed tenacity--present, there, in the eighth grade, and still, now, showing no signs of going away.

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