Reilly burst into Room 216 with the red-faced fervor of slutty, pubescent gossip. She halted and poised cockily in front of the teacher’s desk, lacrosse hair ribbons tilted to the side, a little bit of precious information ready to explode within her.
She did detonate: "Omigod! Omigod! Did you hear? Adam and Emma are going out! Again! That is totally awesome!" This was just any average introduction to fifty minutes of my untamed Red Team section 4 science class.
Mercer, our very own drama queen, strutted over to Reilly, her eyes wandering up to Broadway, to Hollywood, to relentlessly overcooked Adam-and-Emma-Land. "You know, Reilly Smiley, we should make lists of the hottest girls in the school!"
And that’s how it began.
"Mercer, sit down. Aviva stop talking. Tom, get back here. And Carissa, put the mascara away," our teacher ordered, sans any type of human emotion whatsoever. Aviva continued to blabber away while he directed the remote control to introduce a TV educational special on sexually excited insects. Most likely, he was praying for the Almighty One to keep Ms. Baack, the menacing teacher next door, from barging in and snapping at his "students." Guffawing jocks began to burst into hysterics as flowers enticed bumblebees, reeking of bootleg Axe and acting approximately their shoe size. Meanwhile, Reilly, Mercer, and all the other girls intensely passed notes, dug up the dirt on [insert name], and went on assignment notebook decorating sprees. (Mercer and Reilly had decorated my assignment notebook to the point of sheer highlighter-and-pen pandemonium.)
Well, having this teenage drama queen in our science class plus an incompetent teacher equaled screaming girls and ‘Top 5’s’. The latter result was Mercer’s very own adolescent phenomenon: Yyour innermost secrets swept away by the North Face wind – a.k.a. middle school gossip queens! Mercer’s plan evolved into a formal analysis of "The Five Hottest Girls in 7th Grade," lists (from both genders) recorded on crumpled edges of Reilly’s assignment book. At that point, I was utterly speechless at how open somebody like Reilly, who was relatively high on the social ladder, could blatantly express her personal thoughts of 7th grade sex appeal. Technically, we would seem mature with all our promiscuous attitudes, but we really weren’t so mature as I observed twelve-year-olds crawling on the floor in vaguely sexual positions, eating erasers, and the ubiquitous horseplay that highlighted my 7th grade experiences. Well, I was barely advancing from naivete to actual maturity, but Reilly & Mercer was just trying to determine the five hottest girls in 7th grade.
The experiment started suprisingly successfully, with comments such as, "Omigod! Marilyn has like the best list ever! I mean, totally!" or "Everyone’s putting down Ella! She’s like movie-star pretty!" and even "Taylor? You put down Jazmin! Is that just because you went out with her?"
Soon, I predicted that I would not be so blissfully exempt from the fervor of Top 5’s sweeping our grade, and I was correct. Why would I so willingly, straight out of my young heart, share my most intimate, deepest secrets about 7th grade sex appeal? I honestly, do not know.
As a balled-up scrap from November 2005 subtly landed beside me, a lump in my throat that had been forming since Mercer’s foreboding suggesting the previous day, iced over when I saw the five numbers with agonizing blanks beside them. My palms were sweating, as a single name floated around my head, begging to escape through my pen edge. Were they to banish me from their science class gossip thanks to my sheepish character? Would this propel down into the abyss at the bottom of the social ladder frequented by the lowest of the low? Frantic, yet carefully silent, I searched for a solution to my dilemma, as my peers around me exploded with laughter. Perhaps their cackling was directed toward a bee humping a flower, yet for me, they were in hysterics over my self-conscious nature coming to terms with Reilly’s sexual perversions.
Well, since having celebrity crushes is a perfectly normal trait at my tender age, I transferred that to the scrap. Angelina Jolie might not have been with us in 7th grade, but she is hot. I re-balled the scrap up, threw it back to Reilly, and waited for her response. Undeterred by the "You Have to Be Absolutely Silent During Educational Movies" rule, (and the fact that Kimberly Cabrera, who was serenely wrapped in Mercer’s orange North Face, was in Zzz-land), Reilly hissed, "Jar Jar," her nickname for me, "Angelina Jolie’s not a 7th grader, put down someone real."
My attempts at hiding my personal secrets proved futile. By the time that the video had finished, the guffawing jocks had trampled out of our classroom to flaunt their (not-so) lost virginity and such activities. The girls fluttered out the door, and left to gossip more. Except, Reilly and Mercer blocked an exit to Spanish class that I’d been eyeing for the last twenty minutes.
"Fine, have Ms. Trautner yell at you," spat Lauren Brown, who also referencing our strict-as-hell Spanish teacher. So, was it my fault that Reilly and Co. was holding me hostage? According to Lauren, duh.
"Jar Jar. Who. Do. You. Think. Is. The. Hottest. Girl. In. Seventh. Grade?" interrogated Mercer.
"And don’t say Angelina Jolie," added Reilly.
"I have to go to español, we have Science tomorrow," and on that note, I headed out the door to leave Reilly & Co. fuming haughtily.
Another movie in science the next day, and another Top 5 scrap from Reilly, begging me to declare 5 oh-so luverly names. By then, I realized that it was better to give in than get on Reilly and Mercer’s bad side. So, by the end of that day’s movie, I gave returned the scrap with one name: _______.
"Omigawd! ______! She’s on my list too!" Reilly shouted!
"Mine too! ______ looks just like Reese Witherspoon!" Mercer shrieked in selfsame enthusiasm. "Oh, Jar Jar, thanks, now that we have _____, we can get all the results!" And on that note, I practically melted as my naïveté morphed into an appropriate maturity that would last me through the more awkward moments of our burgeoning preteen sexuality.
Soon, my friend Kate was the third human being to learn of the not-so-secret crush on ______ (which she taunts me mercilessly about). Well, it turned out that ______ was on quite a few other people’s lists too. Some beauty queen like the aforementioned Emma Mahoney or Gabby Chudnow probably won the vote, but ______ high up there. And, contrary to what Laurie Halse Anderson states in Speak, "revealing a crush in middle school was like brushing your teeth with barbed wire," this barbed wire was soft, thanks to Reilly & Co. The entire school didn’t ostracize me for writing down ______, but instead I contributed to the Top 5’s. Personal information (especially dealing with sexuality) may be simply a matter of opinion, but the secret crush that I had so consciously hid ______ didn’t explode in the social echelons like some sort of gossipy supernova. I was no longer suffering in my tiny hole of unnecessary self-consciousness, for a window had been opened, letting the fresh air breeze in and out. Revealing ______ to be my Top 5 was just a hand flicking away a tick on my shoulder.
Jar Jar
