Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers

prologue

at least they can’t shove me in

You can eat french fries for lunch every single day, if you want. There’s something really cool, too, about having a locker, your very own parcel of the earth to which nobody else knows the code. In middle school, you don’t have to walk through the halls in hushed, prissy lines. You get to cook food and saw wood and still make it home in time for the end of CatDog.

What else the kids filing into the half-lit cafeteria have heard about middle school: If you stand in the long line for fries, you might not have enough time to eat them before recess. The teachers can be mean, and the homework so hefty it really cuts into your valuable time. You have to change for gym, in front of everyone. Barely any fun stuff, like the gingerbread house your fifth-grade class made last Christmas. Worst of all: The eighth graders like to jam sixth graders inside lockers.

As the two hundred almost-sixth graders—girls with wet ponytails or freshly knit braids, boys with gelled spikes and droopy shorts—find their friends and settle into rows of blue plastic chairs for Wilde Lake Middle School orientation the Thursday before school starts, they greet each other loudly and think silently:

After finally persuading Mom to replace my dorky snakeskin binder with the black kind you can write on with milky pens, will those all of a sudden be out of style, leaving me one step behind the school-supply trends yet again?

Should I risk getting my butt kicked in lacrosse this year, since all the other boys look like they gained four inches on me this summer?

Can I wear my American-flag shirt from Old Navy on Monday, even though Dale insists it really only works on the Fourth of July? We have to go in looking cool, she said. We have to go in with style.

Could I rig some sort of basket inside my locker door with suction cups, so my friends can drop notes in there? Will my friends be in my classes? Will my friends be my friends?

Am I really going to start thinking, Eww, Mom, you’re weird, go away? Is middle school really my last chance to be a kid?

The parents share those last two concerns, and others. Their minds are filled with equal parts worry and nostalgia about their children’s entrance into this baffling no-man’s-land between child and teen. Most adults say the most humiliating experience of their lives¹ took place in middle school (or junior high, as it was called then), and many parents in the cafeteria remember their own preadolescence as the worst time of their lives: The awkward changes of puberty and the obsessions that entailed. The fumbling steps toward independence. The cliques. Being too embarrassed to sneeze in public. Constantly checking the armpit. Thinking everyone else was smarter, happier, better.

The men remember the time they asked out a girl they didn’t want to be seen with, and the women remember the time they showed up at school to find all their friends wearing matching jeans and matching sandals and matching blazers with matching patches on the elbows. Guys, today’s mothers pleaded, why didn’t you call me? They remember blindly joining the boycott of the benevolent redheaded girl who went, in one school year, from eating lunch with the most popular clique to eating lunch with the special-ed students, for no reason she (or anyone, for that matter) could discern. They remember when they stopped doing homework for a month, because they discovered that in the all-important world that revolved around their friends, there was nothing cool about getting A’s. They remember telling their classmates that they’d been sick for a week instead of the truth—that they’d been in Greece with their parents—because if you’re eleven, there are seventy-three ways you can make fun of someone just because he went to Greece.

How strange they were then. When they were twelve, they couldn’t believe Styx would ever be oldies music; they were appalled at the gauchos they wore even one year before but couldn’t imagine that what they had on at the moment would ever go out of style; they actually wanted braces and glasses, until they had to have them.

Maybe they don’t remember. Maybe they’ve blocked it out. But at the parent meeting in the spring, they heard Wilde Lake’s principal, Brenda Thomas, warn, There are some poor decisions made at this age. If anyone gets through unscathed—I don’t know them. When puberty’s all over, she said, you’ll get back a person much like the one you used to know, in personality much the same as before. Eventually that child is going to be exactly who you raise it to be, she told them. But in the meantime … The meantime. While her own daughter was in middle school, Thomas called her Regan, after the possessed child in The Exorcist. Horror-movie mood swings, sudden demands for privacy, defiance, pushing away. Each public hug the parents have gotten this week is, they fear, the last. Will kids be mean to their child? Or worse: Will their child be the mean one?

Most of these parents have read the newspaper. They’ve read that middle school is an academic wasteland, the new ground zero for state and national school-reform efforts, the point at which a child has to start thinking about college. In some ways, America’s twelve and a half million middle schoolers are growing up faster than ever, their workload piling on as quickly as their distractions.

A few of the parents have even read what little literature is out on middle schoolers. They’ve learned that their children are about to go through the greatest period of physical and emotional growth, after infancy, that humans experience—years during which no significant part of themselves will go unchanged. They’ve read that the irresponsibility, the selfishness, the boredom their kids are about to exhibit are signs of progression, not regression—no, really. They’ve read to expect contradictions²: Children start to fix their values³ and figure out who they are independent of their families, at the same time they are too timid to set themselves apart as individuals. Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don’t have the cognitive skills to win them. They are at once submissive and defiant, idealistic and materialistic. The titans of commerce have started rearranging their world around the shopping habits of tweens—who are thrilled to be targeted, except they don’t make their own money. They want to be cuddled. Except when they don’t.

More than anything, middle school pulls in children⁴ and pitches back teenagers. It is a time of change, which means, at this age, many things.

For Eric Ellis, an eighth grader, change means going from striving to please his teachers and mother to realizing that there’s not much room in his life—what with skating and video games and dealing with his family—to aim for A’s, and that if work is boring, which it often is, it is in his power to simply not do it.

For Jackie Taylor, a seventh grader, change means going from someone who not long ago invented a playground-wide inoculation against boy germs to spending a major chunk of time obsessing over and writing notes about her and her friends’ serial crushes, recounting soap-operatic plot lines that are agonizing to them and utterly mystifying to everyone in their lives (usually over the age of thirteen) who thinks you actually have to talk to a boy to be his girlfriend.

For Elizabeth Ginsburg, also a seventh grader, change means going from chattering on about life’s rich details in the car to swim practice and asking her parents for help with just about everything to all of a sudden shrugging off their suggestions, demanding to be left alone, invariably answering Nothing to the daily and now useless question, What did you do at school today?

For Jimmy Schissel, who is starting sixth grade, change means living through strange, uncomfortable alterations to the way his body works—inside and out, from sleeping to eating to thinking to sitting to running—and forever wondering both what is normal and what comes next.

For Lily Mason, also in sixth grade, change means experiencing a new intimacy with her friends and a new absorption in where she stands among them, such that to peek underneath her easygoing persona is to witness a constant effort to wear the right clothes and say the right things and not make one single move to stand out, lest she drop a notch in the eyes of the girl she considers her best friend.

The teachers in their matching white polos take the stage one by one to lay the first of a year full of transparencies on the overhead projector and lay down the laws of sixth grade: You may go to your lockers only before school, before lunch, and after school. No sticky book covers—they ruin the textbooks. Travel at all times with your agenda, a spiral-bound date book that serves as both assignment log and hall pass. Classes rotate every other day, four on A-days, four on B-days, eighty minutes each—don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. The kids are given orientation folders, and page through them.

What’s on the next page? a mother says to her daughter, who clamps it shut. What, is it a secret?

One little brother, a third grader with a sitcom child’s knack for one-liners, is not too young to sense the tension. What if I skip middle school, he suggests, and go straight to high school? His mother is one of the many who linger at the sides and back of the cafeteria, clucking their tongues, shaking their heads, smiling frowny smiles: "It seems like yesterday he was graduating from kindergarten." They make mental notes to take a photo this weekend, in case their children grow that fast. They look around and are not quite able to picture gangs in this cafeteria, arson in the trash cans, like the rumors had it. Wilde Lake lies at the heart of Columbia, Maryland, a suburb between Washington and Baltimore created in the late 1960s as developer James Rouse’s original planned community⁵, a tree-thick, sidewalk-lined town made up of individual villages where people of all races and social classes would live in harmony and chat and swap tools at communal mailboxes. Even though it’s relatively progressive, things haven’t quite worked like Rouse envisioned; Columbia has been suffering from a nationally pervasive suburban white flight, whereby more prosperous residents flee the core for the outer, more pastoral, less eclectic villages. The parents who remain have heard that this place is a little rough for a suburban school in such an affluent county, and parents with children still uneasy about cooties wonder if this is where it all starts: Drinking. Smoking. Drugs. Sex.

Not to mention indifference to schoolwork.

She’s worked so hard, one mom tells her friend. I don’t want her to lose any gains.

Is she going to get so defiant, the other says, and not be my quiet, studious little girl anymore?

Homerooms are announced by surname, and after packs of friends bless or curse the accidents of the alphabet that keep them together or separate them, they are sent to walk through their class schedules and—finally!—try their lockers. The lockers aren’t even six inches wide, so everyone can’t fit at once. Some parents crowd in, some force themselves to stay back. Kids bounce on their heels, trying their combinations ten times in a row. The parents stand mute, until they can’t any longer.

We’ll stay here until you can do it five times by yourself. (Sucked teeth.)

Abby, can I come in and help? (No answer.)

Why don’t we walk your schedule and come back and try when there are fewer people here? (One more time.)

From inside a classroom, an eighth grader who came to spy on the new kids perches on a desk, swinging her long legs, and watches. As the kids in the hall talk about skateboards and locker combinations and summer camp and the ’N Sync concert—they look so small—she tilts her head side to side. I’ve been waiting for this day for years, she says. I’m going to own this school.

Lily Mason tries her locker combination several times as her best friend, Mia Reilly, sits next to her on a high ledge, paging through the papers they’ve been given. A newsletter called Middle Years gives instructions on Backpack Safety. Please, Mia thinks. Lily’s face practically touches the dial as she spins slowly—right, left, right, stop—and each time she tugs on the little metal handle, nothing.

My camera makes little sticky pictures, she tells Mia. If she ever gets her locker open, she can paste them inside. Her father, standing a few steps behind, asks, Do you want me to help? Since it’s a matter of the locker being stuck, and not a matter of getting the combination wrong, Lily figures it’s not immature to let him unjam it.

The girls make plans to meet right here the moment middle school starts for real, and Mia goes to open her locker. Eight times she tries, quiet and serious. The crisscross of her swimsuit straps shows above her tank top. Her mother, Leigh, would like to help but can tell Mia wants to do it herself—which she finally does. Such an accomplishment, Leigh thinks. A bigger accomplishment is when Mia tries to sidle into the locker. All that fits of her four feet nine inches is one tanned leg.

Well, she announces, at least they can’t shove me in.

autumn

chapter one

i can’t believe the day’s almost over

On Monday morning some mothers drive their children to the bus stop, where they achingly resist the urge to hug their babies. Instead they settle on forehead kisses so quick as to be nearly invisible. One boy stands slumped, breathing in the muggy air slowly, tired from being kept awake most of the night by lingering images from The X-Files. A mom rolls up in a Suburban and leans out the window: Brittany, did you remember your keys? Brittany scrunches her face, mortified, and rolls her eyes to Mia. Mia’s got on a camouflage tank top, khaki shorts, two old string anklets, and white, silver-striped Adidas with the laces tied under the tongue. (White Adidas are the best shoes you can wear; Vans or Skechers are okay, too. If your Adidas are colored because your mom says white gets ruined too soon, you may as well be wearing Stride Rites.) Having decided that a sixth grader has to care more about her looks, Mia took a while to get ready today. She had her mom blow-dry her shoulder-length chestnut hair pouffy, but not too pouffy.

As Mia pushes her hair behind her ears, the seventh graders, weighed down by enormous backpacks, grill her:

Do you like school?

Yes.

Well, you won’t by the end of sixth grade.

One of the most popular kids in her elementary school, Mia has the confidence that comes with having popular jocks as older brothers, plays soccer (the coolest sport), isn’t afraid to try a never-before-seen hairstyle, and sasses just enough to crack the class up but still get away with it. She was the only girl not to cry at the end-of-fifth-grade pool party. So none of her classmates would guess that Mia Reilly has worries, too.

The only reason she didn’t cry at the pool party was that she got it all out in private, the day before. She’s anxious about middle school. If only she could wear her tall hidden-roller-skate shoes—then she might not be the shortest in the school. After being with the same group since kindergarten, she’s looking forward to meeting new kids from the two other elementary schools, but that’s also what scares her: How will I know I can trust them? She’s concerned about times tables and about teachers from the Black Lagoon.

Another huge issue: Mia has to broker peace between Lily and their friend Alexandra, who aren’t speaking after a fight this summer. They ended fifth grade best friends—quite an accomplishment for Lily, who arrived, quiet and Southern and with no Adidas, in the middle of December. Lily and Alexandra spent practically all summer together, until one day Alexandra wanted to go outside to dance and Lily didn’t. They argued and stopped talking to each other completely. Alexandra has to be the boss of everything, Lily says. Seems to Mia like a stupid thing to fight over, but there it is. Getting them to make up might take a little bit of time, she says, but it’s crucial, because I can’t spend time with just one.

Dropped off by the buses but not allowed inside until the eight-forty-five bell, the students swarm outside the school building, a flat, cream-brick hexagon that lies in view of the big high school and the strip mall. A few eager boys peer through the front doors. They half shake hands or don’t touch at all. The girls touch each other’s hair. Fine, don’t say hi, one girl says to another. "I did say hi." The bell goes off and the students push their way inside, where Ms. Thomas snatches hats off heads. Teachers stand in the hall with homeroom lists, filtering kids down one hall or the other.

In homeroom Mia finds her assigned seat, up front. Lily sits in the back corner, wearing turquoise-plaid shorts, a white T-shirt, and a navy cardigan from The Children’s Place. For an eleven-year-old she rarely slouches, conditioned from the discipline of ballet and gymnastics and a desire to one day be Miss America. Her dirty-blond hair spurts from a little ponytail; she hates the way it styles and wishes it were thinner. Her blue-gray eyes are always either cast down bashfully or (when she is sure they are not looking) studying the people around her, for clues on how to act. When her face is at rest, like now, it is inscrutable, but she will tell you she’s pretty happy today. Last night she and Mia went to the Aaron Carter concert and screamed. Middle school all sounds interesting to her—the lockers, the teachers, getting to sew in home ec—and anyway, she doesn’t fashion herself a worrier. Her answer to an annoyingly large number of questions is I don’t care, whether it’s her mom asking what she wants for dinner or a friend asking what game she wants to play.

Split personalities are common among middle schoolers, Lily included. At home she is chatty and confident, not a hint of self-consciousness about her. She is an able caregiver to her siblings, nine-year-old Gabrielle, five-year-old Sean and the foster newborns who arrive one, two, three at a time without names. Among the neighbor kids she is something of a mother hen, leading the skit-writing and fort-building and chalk-drawing. When she is alone with Mia, hyperactivity takes over. Heady with the companionship of a true friend, Lily gets wacky. She cannot stop moving, talking, touching, goofing. At school—in any large group, in fact—Lily rarely speaks, so her teachers would laugh if you told them this. Not Lily! Since she got to Maryland it’s only every two months or so Lily figures she has something amusing to add to a lunch-table conversation. In the rare instances when, having appraised the sentence thoroughly in her head, she judges it worthy of emitting, everyone is like, Uh, yeah.

Whereas Mia looks forward to meeting new kids, Lily’s friends are set and she doesn’t much care about making new ones. She learned the sign-language alphabet so they can communicate during class. Mainly, when Lily talks about friends, she is talking about Mia. We’re best friends, she’s explained, and we’re the same height and same age. Our noses come up to the same place and so do our eyes. Her birthday is the day after my birthday. We were born twelve hours apart. So when my mom was having me, her mom was in labor. I call Mia ‘M’ or ‘MM’ or ‘Mi’ or ‘Mia.’ She calls me ‘Lil’ or ‘Lily.’ I have four names for her and she has two for me.

Lily has only one name for Alexandra—Alexandra—and though the two saw plenty of each other during orientation last week, she didn’t use it once. When Alexandra came into the cafeteria that day, instead of seeking out Mia and Lily, she bounced over to Tamika, one of the few other black girls from their elementary school, which was somewhat of a relief to Lily, because she sees Alexandra as competition for Mia’s attention. At the same time she was a little insulted. Today Alexandra is late; she is supposed to occupy the empty seat in front of Lily, who eyes it nervously.

The school computer has run Lily’s first and middle names together: Lilyelise. During roll, when the rest of the kids are offering up corrections and nicknames to Mrs. Stokes, Lilyelise is too shy to say anything about it. The students are silent, and efficient Mrs. Stokes is already going over schedules—no warm Hi! or Welcome to middle school!—when Alexandra walks in, wearing a white button-down, a plaid miniskirt that wouldn’t pass the fingertip test, and chunky black-heeled loafers. She finds her seat in front of Lily, who watches and then tilts her head down and keeps it there, through morning announcements, through Mrs. Stokes reviewing all the papers that need to be signed, through the questions about gym shoes and recess and what if my backpack doesn’t fit in my locker, through the explanations of Homework Hotline and hall passes, until the bell finally rings and the kids set out on their favorite task of the day: unloading backpacks into lockers. The girls walk through the hall with Mia in the middle, Alexandra and Lily talking to her from either side, but not to each other.

When they walk into the cafeteria for lunch, the swim-team girls at one round table, already making progress on their bagels and sandwiches and Trix yogurt, call out for Mia. They’ve saved her a seat, but she leads the way to an empty table. Everyone there except Alexandra brings lunch from home; when she returns with fries, they are dispersed, and enthusiastically approved of. Lily listens as the girls discuss Mia’s blue Kool-Aid, the classmate whose new house has closets the size of bedrooms, and Brittany’s mother’s bus-stop appearance. In the telling, Did you remember your keys? has become "DID YOU REMEMBER YOUR KEEEEEEYS?" but the girls still agree that this was preferable to a hug.

Ms. Thomas comes by the table and asks, How was your first day?

Good.

Did they stuff you in the locker?

Too small.

She laughs. New sixth graders are just the cutest. Later in the year they’ll turn a corner, and the teachers will wonder, Who are you? But for now most of them are overwhelmed, sweet, taking it all in soundlessly. In the cafeteria they raise their hands for permission to use the bathroom. The noise is one-fifth what it will be during seventh-grade and eighth-grade lunch. When Ms. Thomas counts down from five into the microphone, the room falls utterly silent, for which she congratulates them. Welcome, she says. It’s nice to see people from all the feeder schools, and all over the world.

At recess, some boys chase a shopping cart. Keith West, the assistant principal, quarterbacks a football game. Mia marches to the soccer field with the swimmers, where they play against the boys and her shoe keeps flying off. Alexandra and Lily are left alone on the blacktop to speak their first words to each other in a month.

What do you want to do? Lily asks.

Nothing, says Alexandra.

I can’t believe the day’s almost over.

Like my new watch?

Don’t tell me—you got it at Kohl’s. I put the pink one on hold, but I can’t decide. Maybe this isn’t so hard.

When the whistle calls everyone inside, the boy who played Robin Hood in the fifth-grade play passes by. Hey, Joel, Alexandra calls, nice tights!

Lily rolls her eyes—at the boy having worn tights once, at Alexandra taunting him, at all of it.

At eighth-grade lunch, Eric Ellis and his friends are discussing whether the plane crash that killed the R&B singer Aaliyah will affect the Video Music Awards and whether it’s okay to cry if you’re injured (only if there’s blood involved), when Mr. West sits down and asks what grades they’re going for this year. Liam, who always gets A’s, says A’s. Chris, who wants to stop being the class clown so he can play football in high school, says A’s. Shawn, who thinks he’s too dumb to get A’s but is not too dumb to know what the right answer is here, says A’s.

Eric figures he could make A’s if he really wanted to. But with skating and paintball and missing his mom and getting along with his dad’s girlfriend and improving at saxophone, he says, It’s too hard to get A’s. My brain is too full. I’m gonna get B’s.

Sixth and seventh grade, Eric pretty much lay back, did what he was told. This year, there’s a little excitement at being at the top of the school, an I’m not a little kid anymore feeling—for once, wanting to succeed not just for Mommy but for himself. This is a typical shift in attitude among eighth graders, as they prepare for the big league of high school. But in Eric and most of his classmates, it does battle with an equally strong attitude: ambivalence. The collective eighth grade of the United States could be labeled Doesn’t work to potential. Decline in motivation from elementary school to middle school is universal and documented. Thirteen-year-olds can’t get interested⁶ in anything that bores them, no matter how many times they’re told, This is important, you’ll see why in ten years. In the preteen years, the brain’s gray matter has almost fully thickened, but it is not yet pruned to its most efficient level of activity. All of a sudden there’s a vast overproduction of brain cells and connections—by the time puberty is done, only some will have survived—and quantity trumps quality. It’s not a particularly spectacular time to soak up information, because, even though emotional centers closer to the core of the brain have developed well by now, capacity for skills like logic, organization, and judgment, centered in the still-immature frontal lobes, is