Sixth grade was the start of middle school for me. Now here’s where the action starts. As the year started, I continued hanging out with my same friends from Aiken Elementary, and my small group began adding friends from other elementaries as well. The beginning of middle school is a new experience, with everyone trying to figure out all the rules and guidelines and dos and don’ts. In sixth grade, racial segregation hadn’t set in, and the whites and Hispanics still all hung out together without reservation. So, because of who I was friends with at Aiken, I acquired a large base of Hispanic friends. This lead to my first boyfriend of middle school—Luis Vega. Who is now a convicted sex offender and was at some point in time on the Malheur County’s Most Wanted list. So thus far, my boyfriends consist of a devil worshiper and a sex offender. But at the time, Luis Vega was cool. He was boyishly cute, even for a twelve-year-old, but was a rebel—a perfect combination. It’s not that any of my friends did anything actually bad—they weren’t doing drugs or in a gang—but they were definitely headed in that direction (as noted above). Luis and I went out for a long time—months, I’m sure. We held hands at school and walked home together (okay, partway home, since my house was not in the same neighborhood as his) and sometimes hung out together at Leann Johnson’s house, whose parents never seemed to be around. Then it happened. My mom dropped Maria and me off at the movies to see Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Luis met us there. After the movie we were the last ones to leave. Standing at the top of the stairs at the Pix Theater, we kissed. A real French kiss. My first. The next evening, at Religious Education, Maria and I made a big deal of telling Ramiro about it. We giggled and laughed and waited for just the right moment to break the big news. “So,” he replied. Like French kissing was no big deal. Like people just do it all the time. Like Luis just did it all the time.
Sometime after Luis, I went out with Samuel Feeney, who was my most frequent boyfriend of all time, us going out and breaking up a total of six times. The fifth time we broke up was because I talked to Carlie, who said that she had just found out that her boyfriend was going out with some girl from Payette. Who’s your boyfriend, I asked. Sam Feeney. Well, let’s both go break up with him together, because I’m going out with Sam Feeney, too. She and I waited for the next break between classes and both walked up to Sam. You could see the realization in his eyes as he registered the two of us together, walking toward him. “Um, we’re breaking up with you,” we said together, and walked off. For some reason, I went out with him again after that. But the sixth time was it, and after that we were just friends. A recent online article from my hometown news station informed me that Samuel Feeney was arrested on charges of video voyeurism—he had a hidden camera placed in his bathroom, despite being married. Apparently one woman still isn’t enough for him.
In seventh grade, I went out with Joe Snyder, who was in the eighth grade, for a week or two. I’m sure he was a great guy, but we quite literally never talked. I’d see him at lunch, or before or after school, but we never ever spoke. I wanted to, but I was embarrassed—what if he didn’t like me? Of course, the notion that he wouldn’t have asked me out if he didn’t like me never crossed my mind. I was afraid and self-conscious, nervous to approach my own boyfriend. He asked someone to ask me out, then a while later, I asked someone to tell him I wanted to break up. After Joe, I went out with Aaron Jensen, who sometime after this supposedly told his friends that he wanted to lose his virginity soon so he would be able to have sex with one of us girls who didn’t yet have any pubic hair. Classy.
Let’s tally here—devil worshiper, sex offender, cheater, mute, and pervert—I’m on a roll, baby!
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