I was stuck in social limbo. I was desperate to impress the popular kids, with whom I had very little in common, and desperate to differentiate myself from the unpopular kids. I quickly learned that the best way to achieve both goals was to bully the unpopular kids as loudly and obnoxiously as possible. Once I had demonstrated a talent for linguistic terrorism against the "nerds" of our 8th grade class, a group of slightly more popular kids adopted me as a sort of insult attack dog. When the popular kids needed to effectively insult a person of higher intellect (I use the term loosely, as all 13 year-olds are blithering idiots), I was the guy they turned to. It was kind of like doing their homework for them, only exponentially more deplorable.
So at this Valentine's Dance, I was unconcerned with finding another kid with whom to rub bodies, while trying not to mess up the choreography of Freak Nasty's "Da' Dip." Rather than have a good time myself, my task was to make sure the unpopular kids felt shame for the good time they were having.
One of these unpopular kids was a 6' 2", 350 pound monster of a man-child. This kid could have stomped us all to little grease spots if he wanted to. Fortunately for us, he either lacked the confidence for grease spot-stomping, or he had superhuman restraint. 'Cause if he ever got mad, none of us would have ever made it to 9th grade.
When I say that this kid was an easy target, you may think, Oh, of course. Because he was big and overweight. But you'd think wrong. He was huge. That's not an insult, that's just reality. But if he were huge and obsessed with football, and rap music, and titties, he probably would have been in with the popular kids. This guy was an easy target because he was huge and obsessed with Dragon Ball Z and Magic the Gathering, and had a 4.0 grade point average. Anime, role-playing, and scholastic achievement were not considered cool when your daddy was in 8th grade. This is one unfortunate lesson of being a teenager: The criteria for being popular or unpopular, admired or tortured; the attributes and qualifications that separate a bully from a victim are completely ARBITRARY. Who cares if you play sports or watch anime?! Teenagers do. And they are ruthless about it. There is no universe where I--all 5'6" of me--should be able to make someone a foot taller, and more than twice my size leave a middle school cafeteria in tears. But at the 8th grade Valentine's Dance, that's exactly what happened.
I don't remember what I said. And if I did remember, I wouldn't tell you. I'm not proud of ruining that boy's night, and I don't want you to have that kind of artillery in your vocabulary when you're 13 years old. I hope to hell that viciousness isn't hereditary.
Whatever I said to him that night, I didn't realize the extent of the damage I'd caused. I ran back--tail wagging behind me--to seek the approval of the popular kids. Several songs played before I even noticed the big kid was no longer there, towering over students and faculty alike. I asked someone where he went. They said they didn't know, but that they saw him run out of the cafeteria crying.
I realized in that moment, that all of my friends were assholes. And I was worse than any of them, 'cause I didn't even share in the popularity we were cultivating with our cruelty. I had become some kind of asshole court jester.
If you ever find in 8th grade that all of your friends are assholes, and that you're just as bad, or maybe worse than they are, stop.
Just stop.
You may find, as I did, that most of your friends will also stop being assholes. It's like a law of nature, that when one asshole stops playing along, it's less fun for the remaining assholes. And if your friends don't stop being assholes, don't worry about it. In less than a year they'll find themselves on the bottom rung of an even more rigid and brutal caste system, called high school.
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