This is a collection of very very short stories about my fourth grade year. It’s part of a thing I’m working on, and I promise you that they are funny and heavily pop cultured, but if you don’t want to read about the woes of 11 year old Gynomite, I won’t fault you for that.
I had the dubious honor of being in our little school’s Academically Gifted program, which meant that at the beginning of the day, someone would come and get me from my regular class and take me to a classroom with the 20 other “gifted” kids in the school. Ten minutes before the end of the day, I would be taken back to my class again. I don’t know why we couldn’t just be in our AG classroom all day, but I think it was to maximize our torment from other kids. The AG class was mostly boys, so I managed to just barely make the cutoff for an actual girl clique! We called ourselves The Sensational Six, as there were six of us, and we would have never hung out were it not for our collective ostracism from other kids. The most ambitious of the group, Christine, made us all matching sweatshirts covered with buttons and bows. We wore them. A lot.
Some of the Sensational Six went to the mall together one day. I crimped my hair special for the big outing, and my sister helped me put it up in a banana clip. Of course I wore my denim jacket with the fringe and checker pattern, covered with buttons. It was one of the best days I had ever had. We made asses of ourselves, screeching at boys twice our age and acting embarrassed in stores that sold bras. Then I bought George Michael’s “Faith” on tape, and made the mom who picked us up listen to it on the way home. Everything was fine until the little diddy “I Want Your Sex” came on. Then we all tried to pretend like we were deaf, and I felt like a pervert.
It was decided that we would put on a “Historical People Fair” for the rest of the school, thus sealing all of our doom socially. We were all to pick a famous person in history and put together a monologue as that person. On the day of the fair, we’d all dress up like our people, stand in our specified area, and deliver our monologue over and over as other students walked by. I picked Princess Diana. I read up on her endlessly, and in one book, I saw that she had a pet guinea pig growing up. Ever the showboat, I decided to wow the other kids by adding a prop sure to bring authenticity and excitement to my Princess Di. So on the day of the fair, I showed up wearing a dress, a plastic tiara, and carrying my hampster Clyde in a cage. My teacher kept asking if I felt ok as I repeated my speech about how much I loved my hampster in a horrid British accent.
One day during some lesson that involved us being out of our seats and sitting on the carpeted floor around our teacher, a classmate started fidgeting and insisting he had to go to the bathroom. The teacher asked him to wait, and he kept whining that he couldn’t. He kept interrupting her to go “PLEEEEEEEEEEAAAAASE”. We were all giggling like the little assholes we were. Finally she let the poor guy go, and he took off running. We all insisted there was a wet spot on the carpet where he was sitting, though there probably wasn’t. It was like Lord of the Flies in there.
For another project, we were paired off and asked to create a product and then make a commercial for it. My friend and I decided to create “Madonna-Os”, a cereal that would make you sing like Madonna. We made a box for the cereal, and for the commercial, held up a poster of Madonna on which we had drawn an open mouth where her closed mouth had been, and made it sing along to her song “True Blue”. Why we did not think to lip sync to her song ourselves, I’ll never know.
The teacher really liked for us to sit on the carpet around her rather than in our desks, and one day she read almost an entire book to us little geniuses gathered at her feet. I was sitting with my legs folded up tight underneath me, and after the second hour, I realized that my legs were completely and totally asleep. I was fairly fascinated with this, so I didn’t think ahead to when storytime would be over and I would have to stand up. She stopped reading a few minutes after this, and without a care in the world, I stood up to walk back to my desk and promptly fell over with one of the most spectacular crashes known to man, taking down classroom plants and chairs with me. Worse yet, I couldn’t get up as my legs were still asleep, so I had to lie there waiting for the blood to return to my limbs, while my classmates laughed hysterically and my teacher exasperatedly suggested that I was needing some attention.
Book report time. My classmate Scott decided to do his book report on the movie Beetlejuice. Now, you might be saying to yourself “that’s not a book!”, but Scott had found a book of movie photos and behind the scenes info (common back then, in an Internetless and Special Featureless world), and claimed that it was his book. So basically, he just retold the plot of Beetlejuice to us, with one twist: for theatrical flair, he decided to use the movie plot feature that saying Beetlejuice’s name three times makes him appear. When Scott was about to say his name for the third time, he looked around nervously, paused for maximum drama, then said “BEETLEJUICE”! He then pretended to melt, sliding down slowly to hide under the podium. We all stared at him, confused as hell, as melting was never a part of the movie. Scott continued hiding for a few seconds and then awkwardly unfolded himself from under the podium to a smattering of applause.
Our class was asked to write essays on the topic of “Which is better: artificial trees or real trees?” for the Christmas edition of the local paper. In my essay, I boldly asserted that artificial trees were better, and suggested that if you wanted your house to smell like pine, you should clean it with Pine Sol. BOOM! It was printed in the paper along with the rest of the classes’ essays, and that night, I got a call from a man with a French accent named Monsieur Day. Monsieur Day said that he read my piece in the paper and loved it, and he wanted me to write a book for him. I was so excited I started shrieking, and when my dad came to take the phone from me, I continued to dance around the house yelling about my book deal. My dad had to break the news that Monsieur Day was actually Harold Day, our smartass neighbor and my new enemy.
I still call him Monsieur Day to this day, and it still hurts.
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