I pull my hand back at the last moment. I immediately hate myself for doing that. --- For my first year and a half of middle school, I got on the bus most days wearing one of two or three pairs of sweatpants and one of a handful of t-shirts, picked on a whim and much of time up from off the floor where I had left them a few days earlier. My shoes were budget velcros from Volume Shoe Source. My hair was short, barber-cut, greasy and unbrushed. I had a view of personal fashion and presentation that was apathetic bordering on antipathetic: to the extent that I cared at all about the idea of dressing for others' sake, it was in a kind of seething, visceral rejection of what struck me at the time as a lot of fuss and time and energy and money wasted on falseness and superficiality. I was content to wear those same sweatpants, those same shirts, those same cheap velcro shoes, every day, to save myself the effort of being choosy about clothes or bothering with my hair so that I could spend that time on books and video games instead, so that I could roll out of bed just in time to put on whatever was in reach and slurp down a bowl of cereal and get to the bus stop. It was simple. It was efficient. Given how little I was enjoying middle school, I think I felt that there was some sort of justice in refusing to reward the institution with any more effort than was strictly required. In grade school, I had been a distractible, ebullient kid with no fashion sense but a good sense of humor; I huddled under bushes with friends and argued over who had what cybernetic ability; I made jokes in class; I streaked around the blacktop during recess, lining up for games of Wall Ball or doing cherry drops off the high bar or getting into (and usually losing) games of King of the Hill on the balance beam. I lurked at the periphery of drama, more commentator than participant when a girl chased a boy or vice versa, taking in the spectacle of my friends and classmates co-authoring simulacra of adult narratives in small klatches by the tireswing. I was fascinated but also aware on some gut level that this was turning into something different from what I had always thought of the playground being. But it was the fifth grade, we were getting older, and these new things were interesting to watch unspool even if they were somehow unsettling to me at the same time. I was deeply uncool but it didn't particularly matter; a few people might care, but they were too busy being friends or enemies of each other to worry about the bulk of kids just being kids. Uncoolness was mostly an unremarkable fact of life, something I wasn't even forced by circumstances to recognize at that point, let alone to worry about. --- It's middle school commencement; we're eighth graders for another couple of hours. We're lined up in a broad hallway in Franklin High School, a couple hundred 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls dressed up for our parents, for posterity, boys in dress shirts or less formal, more stylish things, even a few ties, girls in dresses or skirts or dressy pants. No uniform, but everyone on the same page: dress nice. Not like a school kid. Dress like a young adult. Dress like you're growing up. I'm in a white button-down long-sleeved shirt and black trousers, what I have come to think of as my Band Concert clothes, what I'd put on three times a year for a seasonal recital with sixty other kids in a middle school assembly space. I don't like the outfit, not when I'm dutifully plowing through the 2nd Clarinet part for some holiday medley and not while lined up in that high school hallway with the rest of the eight grade student body. The collar chokes me, the shirt tucked in looks foolish to me, the pants feel too airy compared to the jeans I've taken to wearing. I untuck the shirt at my first opportunity and let the tails hang out, a minimal rebellion against the formality of the situation. We're waiting to file into the Franklin auditorium, where our families are already finding their seats and checking the batteries on their cameras and camcorders. By whatever chance of grouping, I am standing near a friend of mine and two other boys who are far cooler than I am. My friend is cooler than I am as well, but he is a social bridge here; we have known each other since I moved to town at seven, played together as grade schoolers, sat next to each other as clarinetists through years of band rehearsal. The friends of my friend are at least friendly, in this context where we are all nervy and waiting and contemplating an end to middle school and the next year as freshmen scattered to the various high schools in the area. And so we stand around, joking and watching our classmates and pretending not to be nervous, and I am elated by this sudden social miracle, this extension, however temporary, of the borderlines of cool to annex me into this small group. We talk about music I don't listen to, movies I haven't seen, clothes I don't wear, and I nod along with it all and make the occasional safe wry comment that doesn't reveal my ignorance of the details. The salutatorian walks by, a girl I have a tremendous secret crush on, whip-smart and beautiful and beyond all that a girl who never seems to notice how uncool I am, a girl who laughs at my bad puns in history class not out of politeness but because she actually gets them. She's a poised olive-skinned figure in a simple straight white gown, looking like some elegant ghost of a Gatsby party. My heart races. One of the guys I'm standing with makes some shitty remark to her as she passes. I say nothing, and watch her disappear into the auditorium to get ready for her speech. --- There was a day in the seventh grade when, out of class for a minute with a hall pass, I ran into a new kid in the hall. He was a transfer student, confused about where he was supposed to be going. I gave him directions. I ran into him again a couple times in the next few days. He was friendly enough; I considered him a safe bet for social interactions on the strength of having helped him out and his not having treated me badly in response. Safe bets were hard to come by. Later, in the cafeteria, an older girl cut in line ahead of me. Whether I muttered "bitch" soundlessly under my breath or just thought about it I can no longer remember; what I do remember is being bothered by the unfairness of people cutting in line, and the taboo thrill of trying to use cusses to balance the scales if only in some small symbolic way. What I remember is bragging to this new kid, this friendly lost-in-the-halls compatriot, that I had called this girl a bitch for cutting in line. I remember him challenging me on it, asking really did I do that, what girl? I remember suddenly regretting my brag, not wanting it to grow beyond a moment of discretely shared bluster, a little slice of coolness-for-two that no one else needed to know about. He asked, what girl; I nodded in the general direction of her table; he pointed, who, that one? I don't remember if I even looked. Looking seemed like a good way to attract bad attention. What I remember is this new kid going over to their table and trading up, selling me out for credit with these kids. They were the rebel kids, the specific stratum of middle school school cool distribution that dressed older than everyone else, cared less than everyone else, took less shit than anyone else. The new kid bought in to that circle with my stupid brag, and starting that day I was a target on the playground, those half-dozen grunge-styling older kids taking whatever opportunity they could to make me uncomfortable, to get in my face. To notice and mock my sweatpants, my velcros, my mussed hair. One day I decided that I could disappear by giving myself a makeover. I wore jeans. I wore a different shirt, something clean and a little more grown-up. I combed my hair. I wore a knock-off Starter jacket, Minnesota Vikings purple, that my aunt had given me. I did my best to be not me. I made an unstudied cargo cult effort to build up a moat of Cool, or at least of Less-Uncool. To flip some switch that would tell people to leave me alone, to play the game however much I loathed it if it would save me grief. It didn't work. The new taunt was that I was dressing up for her, for the girl I had called a bitch. That I wanted her to be my girlfriend. That became the newest game, worse somehow than even the generic mockery had been. I remember being confronted with hot-and-cold barbs and questions from the group of them, choked up with confusion and embarrassment near double doors into the school, wanting to find some way to just take it all back and knowing that wasn't going to work. I was an easy target. I spent most of the rest of that year killing recess time reading in the library, or using the practice room in the band room, or doing anything else that kept me out of sight. They were older kids, mostly. She was an older kid. The next year would be better; they'd have gone on to high school. But I kept brushing my hair, I kept thinking a little more about my clothing. I kept trying to build that moat, to play the game, to find some compromise between wanting to be myself and wanting to be let alone. The sweatpants went out of commission -- the mottled grey baggy ones, the bright red felt ones with the white piping down the sides that looked like a marching band uniform. I stopped wearing my favorite shirt, an oversized Redskins v-neck. I got shoes with laces. At one point, in what felt at the time like an unbelievable coup, I got a pair of Reebok Pumps cheap. Then I found out that nobody gave a shit if I had Pumps, that was so two years ago. But at least they weren't velcros. --- We're sitting in the Franklin high school auditorium, lights dimmed throughout except for the bright washes and spots lighting up the stage's assemblage of faculty in their academic gowns and hats, the stacks of middle school diplomas, the podium that the girl in the white dress has given her salutatory speech from telling us that we are moving on, growing up, proceeding along the path toward the adventure of adulthood. In the dark, me and my friend and his friends sit in the front row of the left-most column of seats, watching while our classmates walk one at a time across the stage to take their paper and shake the hands of the Principal and Vice Principal. We joke and cheer and bullshit and wait for our own section to queue up. Our front row seats put us along the path all the kids take as they exit the stage and return to their seats; when friends of the other guys come past, they lean forward, right hands extended, to deliver victory-lap fives. I lean forward with them, give some skin along with them. It feels like a pose, but it's a pose that has me making contact with cool kids, a pose that hasn't gotten me mocked all day by guys who I'd ordinarily expect mostly mockery from. Another kid's name gets called. He walks across the stage stiffly, determined and too quickly, conspicuously square in a tucked plaid shirt and trousers and with his hair combed down, and that's that kid's whole middle school experience in a nutshell: he is a withdrawn, unliked, uncool kid, mocked for as long as I can recall for, as much as anything, being mockable. He treats this walk across the stage like he has treated school: something to just get through and get over with. In three years as classmates, I never have a real conversation with him, never learn his actual story -- I hear rumors that his parents are dead, that that's why he's so gloomy and weird -- but I know him very well as someone who has the same caginess in his way of being that I feel inside myself, of a kid who is on the bottom rung of the social ladder and knows it as well as anyone, who gets reminded daily that he's social fodder that other people can trade against for a little cachet. When this kid comes down off the stage and heads along the return path, my friend and his friends lean forward with a hand out. I'm surprised at that, but it's not the first time I've been surprised this afternoon. I don't hesitate to lean forward as well, to hold my hand out, to smile at the kid, to think to myself in that moment that here we are, both of us lonely survivors of this whole strained mess of an adolescence. Both of us, so used to keeping our heads down and our eyes peeled for the latest bit of incoming casual cruelty from our peers, both of us having a stroke of luck on this last day, recipients somehow of the kind of decency and human kindness that had so consistently been absent from the average school day, week after month after year. And as he passes us, his own hand out held in what seems like as much surprise as I'm feeling myself, my friend and his cool friends pull their hands back at the last moment. And without knowing why I'm doing it, I follow their lead. I pull my hand back at the last moment. I immediately hate myself for doing that.