Sixth-grade graduation wasn’t a big deal, but felt like one. We were moving on from elementary school to middle school, a demarcation that many institutions don’t even have. We felt so important, at age 12 – like we’d reached the top of the social pyramid at our little school. We were high on the achievement of it, paired with the anxiety about splitting up and going off to middle schools where our entire mental database of social experiences up to that point could mean nothing in the face of new, shifting dynamics.
We didn’t get drunk at the 6th-grade graduation, because, well, we were 12, and it happened during the daytime, supervised by teachers we'd known since we were 4 years old. But the energy crackling between us did have a drunken fizziness to it, that disinhibiting sense of “this could be our last chance” and “will any of this matter tomorrow?”
I wore a black dress with white piping and an asymmetrical hem, plus some high heels I’d bought for the occasion that were made to look like high-femme Converse sneakers. I’d let a girl I barely knew put blue eyeshadow on me at a pre-graduation gathering where it seemed like all grudges had been forgiven, all childish things had been put away. I’d never worn eyeshadow before and it made me feel simultaneously like a cosmopolitan adult and like a messy kid who’d gotten into the finger paints.
The graduation event itself was a dance in the gym, similar to the darkened-gym dances I’d attend over the next couple years in middle school, but with far less grinding. They had put up a divider that stretched across the center of the gym; on one side, the lights were lowered, the music oozed from speakers and the girls’ modest dresses twirled. But when you walked through the door into the other side of the gym, on your way to the bathroom or the buffet of soft drinks, you saw that it was just a gym, the same one in which we’d played volleyball in third grade or landed splat on our faces on a gymnastics mat the year before. A passageway through childhood, into adolescence, and beyond.
When the dance was over and elementary school let out for the last time, a bunch of us trudged over to the abandoned playground of another, local school. In retrospect, it seems odd and yet apt that we did this: our mood that day was all about escaping the familiar, moving on from places where we’d felt small and young. So we snuck onto the grounds of someone else’s childhood, trying to feel rebellious and above it all.
I remember that the girls were in dresses, without exception, but the boys had taken wildly varying approaches to their graduation outfits. Some were in proper jackets and button-down shirts; some were in rock-band T-shirts and cargo shorts, as if to signal that they didn’t care about any of this, even though it was quite obvious that they did.
I don’t know who suggested a game of Spin the Bottle. I’m not quite sure why we even had a bottle. Maybe someone had picked up a Gatorade from a convenience store on our walk over. But as soon as the suggestion was made, the energy changed between the eight or so of us who had gathered in that otherwise-empty playground. It was impossible to tell how many of us actually felt excited about the game versus just apprehensive, because we all had our game faces on. None of us wanted to seem like the odd one out, the child amongst burgeoning adults, so we all said yes and began to play.
The trouble was that we were barely even at an age where physical attraction had begun to register, or at least that’s how I felt. I knew there were boys in the circle who I wouldn’t mind cuddling with, holding hands with, or being asked to dance with. But the idea of kissing them was foreign, gross. Put my lips against someone else’s lips? I didn’t even understand how it worked, what you were supposed to do. I certainly didn’t understand what the appeal could possibly be.
When it was my turn, I spun the plastic bottle and it landed on a boy whose position in our social group was sort of peripheral – he was “cool” because he listened to AC/DC and had an affected disrespect for authority, but he wasn’t considered “cute” or “hot” exactly. He wasn’t the type of boy who other girls would be jealous I got to kiss, or at least I didn’t think so. Maybe I was just too focused on my own social anxiety at that moment to register how other people were reacting to it.
In any case, he seemed to feel the same way about me – that he would engage in this kiss begrudgingly, because it was what the game had told us to do, but he wasn’t going to enjoy it or anything. We smushed our lips together for a second or two while our friends hooted and hollered around us. I remember his greasy hair, his black graphic tee, the way I wished I was kissing one of the cute basketball boys instead.
The thing is, the guy I kissed grew up to be a total babe. I saw him around the neighborhood for many years after that, even though we ended up at different middle schools and high schools, and was amazed at how he seemed to get more handsome every year, like a buff butterfly. I just looked him up on Facebook while writing this and he’s apparently graduated from law school now. It really makes me reflect on how, when we let our minds stay small and judgmental, we shut people out who we might’ve had a genuine connection with. Or at least, we keep ourselves from enjoying kisses that could’ve been sweet, by insisting on seeing them as bitter.