The Story of Your 8th Grade Year

Scholars, today's assignment is to write the story of your 8th grade year.  Below are two examples of students' stories.

The Day I Returned 

By Emily B.

Lake Forest, IL

Fifty-three missed calls. I looked at my phone for the first time in two weeks. The hairs on my neck rose when my mother peered cautiously from the passenger seat of my father's car. I strained to read message after message of friends' questions and concerns, not daring to look at her. With a delicate sigh, she turned to focus on the street and watch the yellow lines flash by. 

The nervous clearing of her throat started as it always did when she felt like an inadequate parent. No words were spoken as we rounded the corner and pulled up in front of the school. The once-friendly ivory doors now glared at me with uninviting intent. My father cut the engine. This was it. My signal to open the car door and step back into a world I felt I did not know anymore. 

“No one knows anything,” my father reassured me. I nodded and reluctantly opened the door without a word. He warned me not to reveal the truth to anyone. With each step, my knees became weaker. I reached for the door handle, ignoring the red marks on my hand from clenching my spiral notebook. With a heave, the door swung open and I stepped into the setting of my teenage personality, though I had not exactly returned with eagerness to my old high school life. 

I ducked by the attendance office and climbed the three flights of stairs to my locker. As my shaking fingers twisted the combination, I looked at the clock. The tension in my neck began to build as I saw that class ended in less than five minutes. 

I opened the rusty, green metal door and stared at my books. They were exactly as I had left them, piled in the same slouching manner. I reached for my U.S. history text and placed it in my arm with the spiral. 

The moment I shut my locker, students began to flood out of their classes. I let out a breath, stared intently at the floor, and began walking toward history. Without warning, the hall became silent. I glanced up to find most of the student body staring at me, critiquing my every move. 

I clenched my notebook tighter, feeling as though the wires might break my skin. I caught sight of my old friends and smiled in hopes of beckoning them to my aid. They were huddled around the window where we always converged between classes. 

My crooked smile dwindled as they turned their backs on me. My heart screamed in agony. I had been betrayed – used and thrown away. As I quickened my pace, whispers trailed behind me.

“I heard she tried to kill herself. She cut her wrists” … “Well, I heard that she lied about it just to get attention” … “You guys are nuts – she just got back from rehab” … “For what?” … “I heard it was heroin” … “Well, I heard anorexia” … “She does look disgustingly thin.”

I waited for the assaulting word that to this day makes me cringe helplessly. But as this gossip party passed, they never mentioned anything close to what had really happened. There was nothing about that crummy apartment, the asylum-white door locked tight, the curly blond hair that torments my dreams – nothing. His nameless face flashed suddenly in my mind, halting my footsteps. 

My hand clenched brutally tight around my books as I struggled to stop the memory from coursing through my head.

I passed my classroom and bolted for the theater. As I neared the doors, my sprinting feet broke down. I entered the pitch-black room, looking for any signs of a teacher or student. My pace slowed as I approached the stage.

Setting my books down, I sat on the edge of the stage and peered into the pitch black. It was the same blackout color of that night. If anyone had been in the room, I wouldn't have been able to make out the face. I gazed down at the spiral marks on my hand. Feverishly I tried to rub the indentations from my skin, but they refused to go. 

I glanced at the door again, praying that someone would enter. My eyes watered from restraining the urge to raise my voice, to yell for help. I realized that the one thing I wanted wasn't possible. I was praying for someone to hear my nonexistent cries when I could do nothing more than talk with silence. 

In an attempt to release the tension, I shook my head repetitively. I glanced at my free hand and saw it pulling down the pleats of my dress with clenched fingers. I released the garment and cradled my cramping fist in my lap, stroking the indents that now seemed permanent. 

My eyes looked toward the edges of the room. Each empty seat seemed to symbolize the friends, family, and peers sitting opposite me, waiting for the mental breakdown they were all so sure would come. Looking to my right and left, despite the size of the stage, it was clear that there was no room for anyone but me and my ominous memories. I was alone, utterly alone. And the worst part was that no one knew.

Lost and Found 

By Anonymous

Westport, CT

I liked being a mess. The desk that should have been clear so I could do my homework was always covered with bowls of cereal and spoiled milk, old magazines, and Post-it notes I had forgotten to remember. My floor was a vacuum in itself, eating anything entering my room. It consumed sweaters, stuffed animals, socks, shoes. When I occasionally did laundry, I would dig up clothes I couldn't even recall purchasing. My shelves overflowed with containers of little odds and ends: hair bands, chapstick, matches, loose mints, coins, earring backings. I couldn't always see these things, but I knew that they were safe, nestled somewhere on a shelf. Like old friends in a phone book, I figured that someday I would find all the loose strings and tie them together.

One lonely day in August when all of my friends had yet to return from camp in Maine, visiting family in Florida, or some community-service trip in Mexico, something inside me began to itch. I tried taking a shower, scrubbing myself with every bodywash and bar of soap I could find. I brushed my hair and my teeth, but didn't feel any cleaner. I checked my e-mail, which was empty. I checked the DVR to see if any new shows had been recorded, but I had already seen everything. 

I went downstairs and found my brother playing video games, my mom on the phone, and my dad in his office – everyone in their right place. I told my mom that something didn't feel right, and she suggested that for once I should clean my room. The thought itself made me nauseous. I went upstairs to sulk, feeling so overwhelmed that I might as well have been floundering without a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

When I opened the door to my bedroom, everything was in its usual cluttered arrangement. A plate of half-eaten pancakes sat on my desk, soggy with syrup from the morning. My bikini hung lifelessly from my doorknob, dripping pool water. My heavy covers lay crumpled and cold across my bed, molded by the twists and turns of the previous night. Piles of dirty clothes sat unsorted, collecting dust. 

I stood in the middle of the cluttered room, breathing in the filthy air that I had become so used to. In the silence of that moment, I began to hear the clock ticking. I became aware of the moldy smell. I noticed that a spider had spun a shimmering line from my lamp to the top of my mirror. I shivered in disgust. I remembered that winter how my stuffed animal, Vanilla, had fallen behind my dresser and I hadn't noticed until I caught the repulsive scent of her fur burning against the heater, until it was too late and she was permanently covered in brown spots.

I suddenly felt sympathy for everything in my room that I had buried, never to be seen again. Lost items I had blocked out for years made their way back into my mind: my favorite yellow tank top, the picture of my mom and me on that boat in Jamaica, my baseball card collection. 

I had an urge to dive under my bed and uncover everything lurking in the murky depths of dust, and to climb up into the highest corners of my closet and rescue items that had been mingling with the spiders. The innocent piles were growing higher and higher until they were looming monsters before my eyes. They were threatening to swallow me whole. I had to get rid of them. And so I started to clean.

In a box buried under old textbooks, I found a letter that my Grandpa had written me at camp. I hadn't thought of him since his funeral. I suddenly remembered the thrill of running naked through cold sprinklers with my cousins, the spicy smell of barbecue mixing with the salty air at his beach house, and the distinct feel of his soft sweater rubbing warmly against my cheek each time he enveloped me in a hug. I remembered my dad rocking me to sleep the night Poppy died, and how the tears wouldn't stop. 

I sat with his picture, blocking out the rest of the mess around me. I was in the middle of a storm, but I sat there and studied him until I had memorized every line in his face. Tears began to roll down my cheeks again, and the relief was like the sound of heavy rain pounding on a roof at the end of a drought.

In the drawer next to my bed, I found a friendship bracelet my childhood best friend, Aubrey, had given to me before she moved to California. I traced the green and purple pattern with my thumb, realizing that I hadn't spoken to her in years. The next day I called her, and we talked all night, laughing about memories like dressing up as the Spice Girls for Halloween. She reminded me of the time we built a family of snowmen in my backyard and had a funeral for them when they'd melted. I had lost so many precious childhood memories over time, letting them slip away into the tide like grains of sand. It was the kind of conversation you never want to end because for each moment we talked, it felt like a bucket collecting droplets of water from a leak.

Under my bed I even found that picture of my mom and me in Jamaica. I had forgotten how turquoise the water had looked from our ship, but what really caught my attention, though, was my image. I had buck teeth, short hair, and pimples covering my face. I stared at that girl, barely able to recognize this person who had drowned in the mess of my room so many years before. I decided to completely re­organize and revamp my room so that all the books, belts, and baskets were in their right place. It was like finding the missing pieces of the puzzle. 

The finishing touch was framing that photo and hanging it high up on my wall. After all, it was me I had been searching for.

from teenink.com