Can i ask you to tell a random story I’m bored
We had this social studies teacher in middle school who would just get bored and wander off sometimes. He was a fantastic teacher, and we adored him, but sometimes he would run out of steam and leave us to our own devices for a little while. Relatable: if I found myself at the head of a ship crewed entirely by twelve year olds, I, too, would occasionally succumb to the urge to hurl myself overboard.
Luckily for him, we were a fairly well-behaved group. Left to our own devices, we limited ourselves to hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling, sat down and organized an operation to smuggle away the whiteboard markers from every classroom over the course of a week, and, once, held an impromptu pop-and-lock tutorial session on top of our desks. (The teacher returned, took one look at the class clown mid-pelvic-thrust on top of a desk, the rest of us quietly observing, and turned right back around for another cup of coffee. Who can blame him?)
On one occasion, the boys started doing one of those “I bet I’m stronger” squabbles that seems to be contagious in groups of pubescent boys. The obvious solution quickly presented itself: an arm-wrestling tournament.
One cannot accuse tweenage boys of having organizational skills, so there was nothing even approaching a method to the hormone-driven madness, just pairs of boys straddling the conjoined desk-and-chair thingies that middle school classrooms and repeatedly slamming each other’s knuckles into the hard surfaces, while the other boys hooted like a pack of monkeys at the superbowl.
The champion of the boys’ tournament was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed jock. He was on the football AND hockey teams, and his hair did the justin beiber swoosh thing, back when that was cool. And he had actual muscle definition--unheard of in non-CW middle schools. All of this combined meant that while he was generally a nice enough kid, the current situation had him tripping on power like the dictator of a small island nation. There was cheering, there was backslapping--if someone had had a cooler of Gatorade, it would have been dumped over his head. We’re going to call him Brad. That wasn’t his name, but spiritually: he was Brad.
Brad sat at the desk of his victory and accepted the adulation of all his pimply conquered enemies.
And then Jenny sat down across from him.
Now, all of us girls, being much more naturally mature and less predisposed to stupidity, promptly reached a collective agreement that what the boys were doing was dumb. But also it looked fun, so we immediately started our own arm-wrestling tournament. With much less fanfare, we produced our own champion: Jenny. Jenny was an extremely quiet person--not quite shy, but sweet and pleasant to everyone. She had probably spoken less than four sentences to Brad all year, because the Popular Boy is always a little intimidating to someone that unobtrusive. But she sat down at that desk across from him and put up her hand.
With the air of lauded professional being asked to play along with an amateur, Brad allowed himself to be cajoled into one more round of arm-wrestling.
Jenny slammed his knuckles so hard into the desk they popped.
Brad asked for a rematch, claiming he hadn’t been ready. Jenny politely agreed.
He lost even faster the second time.
And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth.
Realizing a little too late that he was in over his head, like a dinosaur suddenly noticing the suspicious scent of tar, Brad claimed his arm was too tired to continue.
And so we had our reigning champion.
Jenny took the win as gracefully as a queen, but if we could have paraded her through the school like a returning general, we would have. I would wager that every girl in that room still remembers this, and I hope Brad never forgets it. I’ll always treasure the absolute bewilderment on Brad’s face in that moment.
And outside the classroom window, where nobody had noticed him, was our teacher, watching, holding his cup of coffee, and grinning.
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