Goodbye, South

My junior high burned down today. My brother and I joked about it when we found out, but as the night rolls on, I’m starting to feel the loss.

I’d have to double-check this, but I think South Ogden Junior High is the only school that all of my brothers and sisters attended, and I was always living in their shadows. My science teacher asked me on the first day of class which brother or sister I was going to be like. Thankfully, I said Tracy, which turned out to be the correct answer. It took Ms. Bertleson, the crusty old history & adolescence teacher, several weeks to realize who I was. She had encouraged me to join the yearbook committee, but then one day she caught me doodling on my desk with a pen. She snatched the pen from my hand, and as she used it to fill out a detention slip, she said, “You’re Jeff's brother.”

From then on, I didn’t hide my joyful derision when she would mispronounce the word puberty. “Today,” she would say, "We’re going to learn about poo-berty.”

I only attended South for two years, which has left me a little bitter, since I never got to experience having a locker in the coveted ninth-grade hall. But, looking back, I don’t know why it was so coveted. The seventh graders had much better real-estate on the second floor—the entire second floor, in fact, including the “lounge” at the top of the stairwell, which had built-in carpeted benches along the wall. Even though the skaters and stoners took over the lounge after the first few weeks of class, it was still a source of pride to know that no other grade had anything like it.

The eighth graders resided in the nether-regions of the school: that weird strip of mismatched lockers between the cafeteria and the wood shop. It was a high-traffic area, not just for students, but for teachers and staff, since this was also where history hall and English hall converged. I was perpetually late for class due to severe traffic jams. Merging into the fray was easy enough, but then it became a mosh pit. Sometimes this was just fine, depending on who I was smooshed against. But most days, by the time I got to my locker, I was missing a shoe and feeling violated.

Ninth-grade hall, really, was just a slightly smaller version of seventh-grade hall, directly beneath it on the first floor. It had its advantages, I suppose. It was darker, since there were no windows, and there were fewer classrooms, which resulted in fewer teachers milling around. And the bathroom had full-length mirrors. I always used this bathroom, even though it often required a lengthy detour, so I could make sure my pegged acid-wash jeans and neon-green T-shirt were working for me before sauntering out, clutching my Trapper Keeper, to rub elbows with the ninth-graders. I couldn’t get over how grown-up they were. These were the big dogs. The boys had muscles and facial hair. And the girls. The girls! They were practically women. My twelve-year-old heart could barely take it: bangs two-feet high, black eye-liner, and purses—not just backpacks, but purses. And they all smelled so nice, like perfume and body spray, not like the seventh-grade girls who smelled the same as they did a few months ago in elementary school, like strawberry lip balm and jelly shoes.

But I never made it to my glory days as a ninth grader at South. I moved to Sun Valley and spent my ninth-grade year as low-man on the totem pole at the high school.

As I look at the burned-up shell of South Ogden Junior High, I wonder where all of those teachers have gone. The middle-aged ones are probably retired now. The old ones are probably dead (except, of course, for Ms. Bertleson, who—I’m sure—is in her nineties, sitting on a front porch somewhere yelling at every neighborhood kid that walks by.”You don’t fool me!” She’s saying, “I know who your father is!”). I think most of all I wonder where Mr. Lewis is. He was still young when he taught my eighth-grade English class, probably in his 30s, and I saw him occasionally at the local gym, where he worked as a weight trainer and wore leopard-print Hammer pants and a purple tank top. He had hair like Uncle Jesse from Full House, and he would stand, unashamed, in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom of ninth-grade hall, flexing his biceps and running his fingers through his hair (I always wondered who he was trying to impress—Ms. Bertleson?). One day when he was calling role in class, a certain kid, I think his name was Eric, wasn’t there, and Mr. Lewis took advantage of the moment to make fun of Eric’s lisp, thinking it would make us laugh or make him seem cool. “Oh no,” he said. “I hope Eric’th not thick.” We all looked at each other, silently, wondering what in the world he was thinking, and his face flushed. From the back of the class, someone whispered, “That’s not right.”

What has become of you, Mr. Lewis, and where will you go now that your school is gone? Have you lost your hair? Are you on part-time disability with a bad back and a pot-belly? Do you still make fun of eighth-graders with speech impediments?