MamaKitt, do you remember our eighth-grade language arts teacher showing us Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” video in class? Do you remember why she did that? Do I have the right song? For some reason, every time I hear that song (as I did yesterday morning) I think of that almost-subterranean classroom, and Ms. E, and you, and (natch) Josh.
Oh, Ms. E, I loved her so much. Eighth grade was such a weird year, was it not? I remember so many random little moments from that year.
And then there’s kind of a big one that I’m not sure I fully processed at the time — or since. It is entirely possible that I will tell this wrong, but this is how I remember it.
There was this boy I was “going out with,” which mostly meant making out with on the bus after basketball games, but which also featured actual conversations and hanging out at school (a first for me). The first thing that was a little weird, I guess, about our high school was that a lot of the boys lived at a local home for boys who for one reason or another couldn’t live at their real homes. Kind of an orphanage, except most of the boys weren’t actual orphans — they just had terrible or absent parents and/or other problems. (MK, do I have that right?) So, I guess that’s a little odd, except we were used to it, and I don’t remember much being made of it.
My little eighth-grade boyfriend lived at this home, and over one school vacation all the boys (some of the boys?) were taken to Florida on a vacation. My bf brought me back a Minnie Mouse t-shirt from Disney World. It was adorable, and he was adorable, and all was right with my world.
Until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Days (the day?) after he gave me the t-shirt, the boy dumped me with no explanation. I was stunned, and sad, and commenced with the moping and weeping and huddling with girlfriends that are the birthrights of the teenage drama queen.
Our teacher, Ms. E, took note. One day that week she pulled me aside after school and told me a) to stop feeling sorry for myself and b) that my boy dumping me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him. My boy’s mother, she told me, had just been killed by her boyfriend.
I think of this today and can’t get over how horrifying that fact is, how impossible it must have been to handle for the boy, and, finally, how appallingly little the whole thing has really registered in my consciousness over the last few decades. Did my parents even know about it? I don’t remember ever talking to them about it, and I barely remember discussing it with my friends. MamaKitt and I clearly rehash our childhoods on a regular basis, but neither of us really remembers ever talking about this. Can it possibly really have happened?
I do remember walking into the gym the afternoon after Ms. E told me the story to find the boy shooting hoops. He put his hand in mine and we walked out into the lobby and just hugged and hugged, while he cried. And that’s the last I remember of all that.
That poor boy. What a thing to experience. We never “went out” again, and didn’t stay particularly close, though every recollection I have of him in high school is of him laughing, or teasing someone, or playing basketball. I don’t know what became of him, but I hope he did, somehow, come to terms with that terrible event in some kind of healthy way.
Anyway, that’s the rabbit hole of thought “Man in the Mirror” sent me down.
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