As I was walking to work this afternoon with my music on shuffle, a song came on that reminded me of a girl I used to know: Message In A Bottle by The Police; she loved that song. She was an 8th grader and had that song on her pink iPod Mini. Worn out after being at school nearly eight hours, and sometimes up to ten, she'd listen to her music while lying on the cement and resting her head on her backpack until she saw her dad in the blue minivan or her mom in the old white Camry pull into the parking lot.
She was tall and thin, even lanky. Within inches of six feet, her height alone might suggest a full grown woman but her narrow frame would give her away as the young teen she was. She often wore printless cotton sweatshirts and jeans during the cold weather and Bermuda shorts with a t-shirt in the early fall and spring. She usually wore her short auburn hair down and clipped to the side but pulled it back into a half ponytail for basketball.
She was so proud to have made the JV basketball team as just an 8th grader, and looking back, I, too, am so proud of her. Her school spanned grades six through twelve and, while still part of the middle school, eighth graders had the opportunity to try out for high school sports teams. She had played basketball in grades three, four, and five, but her main sport had always been soccer. She had signed up to play basketball the previous year as a seventh grader but had changed her mind at the last minute. She only ended up at tryouts this year because her friend was going. She had her PE locker in the older east gym but practices were usually in the nicer west gym, so she would change into her practice uniform after school and then strut over to the other gym, basketball shoes still untied; she thought she was pretty spiffy.
She was sometimes intimidated by new things but also adventurous and quite competitive. At the beginning of the school year, her class took a multi-night trip to a camp a few hours away. While other students enjoyed activities around the property, she signed up to climb a mountain. On the morning of the trip, she woke up before dawn and hopped into a van with a handful of other students and some adults to get to the trailhead. The trail started innocently enough but by the end the group was climbing nearly straight up as they both walked and bouldered up the mountain. Many hours into this all-day trip, the sky grew dark and lightning started to strike. This girl stayed tough, though, and kept up with the group as they continued to ascend despite the scary weather. They eventually came back down and huddled under a roof in the pouring rain to wait to be picked up.
On the same trip, the students spent some time with their advisories, groups of about ten students assigned to a lead teacher who would serve as the students' advocate and the families' main school contact for the year. Amongst a myriad of group games and trust exercises was blob tag, a version of tag in which each person who is tagged becomes part of the blob that must stay connected while chasing other players. I remember that game mostly because her advisor snapped a great photo during it which ended up in her school yearbook, and in the short color section, no less. I sure love that photo of her, captioned "running for her life". In it, she narrowly escapes the blob of at least three other kids. I think it serves as a bit of a metaphor for her; while she was often bullied and feared the unknown, she also made excellent grades, played on the JV basketball team while still a middle schooler, participated in student government, attended weekly religious school, and was a Cadette Girl Scout. In short, she never stopped running forward with her life.
I sure enjoyed knowing this girl back then. She was a fun kid, both goofy and studious, opinionated and shy. While I haven't seen this 8th grader in nearly a decade now, it made me happy to remember her today with a song she used to listen to.
