Chapter 4: Matucket Middle School

1996 to 1999

In August, football started up again. Matucket Middle School didn’t have a real football team, only flag football, so I was still playing Pop Warner football. I turned twelve on March 1, so I changed to the Midget League team, the Spartans. At twelve I had jumped over the Junior Midget team, which was ages ten, eleven, and twelve. The Midget team was ages twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, so I could probably play there until I got to high school. I knew Matucket High played real football, and that was what I was looking for. Dad once said that Pop Warner was the farm team for Matucket High.

For Christmas, my parents bought me a set of weights. I wanted to get in shape for the summer. I really liked being a linebacker and getting to tackle guys, and Coach Washington had told me that when I got to the Spartans, I was going to be facing some really big guys. I needed to put some muscles on my muscles, he told me. Dad had to show me how to lift the weights. It was a set of lightweight junior barbells with five- and ten-pound weights you could combine on the end of the bar. Jack couldn’t even lift the bar, but I could do that, along with a five-pound weight on each end. I couldn’t lift them very far, but I could get them off the floor. I had to promise Dad that I wouldn’t work out unless he was there to help me.

Then I asked him if junior barbells grew up to become adult barbells. He called me a smart-aleck and swatted me with the dishtowel.

I guess it worked. I lifted those weights all through the end of winter and through to the summer. Coach Fusco knew I played linebacker from my time with the Cherokees, but he told me he thought I was a little small. I asked him (pleaded with him) to give me a shot during our first practice, so he did. He put me in as a middle linebacker during an inter-squad scrimmage, Spartan offense against the Spartan defense. The ball snapped, the quarterback stepped back and looked around to throw it, and the offensive line came apart because they screwed up their assignments. I ran through a hole in the line and was still accelerating when I sacked him. I hit him so hard I lifted him up off his feet before we slammed to the ground!

The quarterback, a guy named Darrell Johnson, was cussing up a streak from underneath me and the offensive and defensive lines were pushing each other around. Coach Fusco stepped into the middle and yelled at us to shut up and knock it off. “What kind of football was that? I ought to send the lot of you back to Tiny-Mites so you can tear flags off each other! Reaper, this is your own team! He’s your quarterback! Try not to kill him! Johnson, quit your whining! What are you going to do when somebody your size hits you?” He pointed at the offensive line. “What happened with you guys? You’re supposed to keep those guys away from your quarterback. You’re not supposed to be napping on the ground!” He pointed down to the opposite goal posts. “Everybody gives me a lap, and while you’re running think about how you’re going to do your jobs in the future! Now RUN!”

We ran! We also got better. We simply had to come together as a team. That we managed to do by the first game, which we won, 6-0. It wasn’t much, but it was a win. I stayed as a linebacker, too, though you had to sit out a bunch of plays in Pop Warner. Everybody on the team got to play, no matter whether they were a Hall of Famer or Joe Fumblenuts. They had rules about how many plays everybody had to play. Still, when I was playing, I was a linebacker. I wasn’t big enough to be a tackle on the line, but I was fast enough and strong enough to take somebody down if I could get to them.

Football took up all of August, but it wouldn’t be over until October. School had started and I was going to Matucket Middle School. That was in downtown Matucket, near Matucket High. Matucket Plains was outside of the city of Matucket, in the town, at least that’s what Dad told me. He said there was a difference between the city, town, and county lines, though everybody went to the same schools. He showed me on a map that the Matucket School District covered all Matucket County. Inside that there were six districts for elementary schools. Three of them fed into Matucket Middle School. Matucket Plains Elementary was in a suburban area south of Matucket, Martin Luther King Elementary was right in the middle of Matucket and was all the city kids, and Joseph Wheeler Elementary took care of the kids outside Matucket on the northern and western sides. Then he pointed out East Matucket. They had three elementary schools feeding them, East Matucket, John F. Kennedy, and James E. Carter. To further confuse things, Saint Catherine’s was in Matucket also, and they had both elementary and middle school grades there. Then there were several really small Christian schools, which were different from Saint Catherine’s. The craziest part was when he told me that not all the school boundaries aligned exactly. You might have gone to John F. Kennedy over in East Matucket, but your address might be for Matucket Middle School, not East Matucket Middle School.

Because of this, I had a longer bus ride to Matucket Middle and the school was going to be a lot bigger than Matucket Plains. It had to be, if three elementary schools were feeding it! At Matucket Plains each grade had two or three classrooms, so if three schools were sending two or three classrooms to Matucket Middle, each grade might have six or seven or eight classrooms! Then we were supposed to move around to other classrooms! I sure hoped they had a map! All I knew for sure was that I was supposed to report to my homeroom, whatever that was, in Room 214, and Mrs. Blaine was the homeroom teacher.

I knew everybody on the school bus. The bus stop was still out in front of Kelly’s house, but we went half an hour earlier. Even the older kids I knew, since they had gone to Matucket Plains a year or two before me. Once we got off the bus at Matucket Middle, I was in Never-Never Land! There were a lot more buses, and a lot of kids I had never seen before. Most of the black kids had gone to Martin Luther King Elementary and there were a lot more than had gone to Matucket Plains. Some of the kids from Joseph Wheeler looked like real hayseeds, too. That part of the county, Dad had told me, was very rural.

Bo Effner found me staring at the school. “What the fuck do we do now?” he asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” I replied.

There was some sort of teacher standing near the door and he heard us. “Welcome to Matucket Middle School, gentlemen, and watch your language. Now, what’s your homeroom?”

“214,” I answered.

Bo said, “213.”

“And your locker numbers?”

We had to pull them out of our new binders. In my backpack I had a brand-new padlock.

“213 is right next to 214. Go inside and up the stairs and to the right. They’re about halfway down the hall.” He pointed us inside. “Your lockers are in the hallway outside them.”

“Thank you,” we both said, but by then he had turned away to help somebody else.

Bo and I went inside and up the stairs. The halls and stairs were packed with people, some of whom, the shorter ones, anyway, looked as lost and hopeless as we did. 213 was right after 214 on the right side of the hallway. We found our lockers and stuffed our stuff inside, and then split apart with a vow to try and find each other at lunch. If we could find the cafeteria. I hoped somebody had a map to the place!

A woman about Mom’s age was waiting in Room 214 when I got inside. She had a list of names in her hand and a pencil, but otherwise was smiling. She looked at me and asked, “Mister...?”

“Huh?”

“Your last name?”

“Oh! Reaper. I’m Graham Reaper,” I told her.

From the back of the class somebody laughed and said, “It’s the Grim Reaper!”

I knew that voice! I turned and waved at Braxton Bragg Hughes, known simply as Brax. He waved back. Then I had to return my attention to the teacher. “Welcome, Mister Reaper. You sit ... there ... third chair, second aisle.” She pointed to a seat in the middle of the room.

I headed to the assigned seat and sat down. It was a bit chaotic for the next ten minutes, as students trickled in and were assigned, sometimes getting their seats wrong and sometimes showing up in the wrong classroom. Meanwhile everybody was talking and trying to be heard over the din. Eventually we were in our assigned places and Mrs. Blaine called for silence. First thing that happened was we all had to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Then there was a long BONG sound, and everybody looked at the ceiling where a speaker was. So far it was just like Matucket Plains. The voice on the speaker was the guy who had told Bo and me to stop cussing, and he was the Principal! Oh, crap, what a way to start! He gave us a welcome speech and made a few announcements.

After that Mrs. Blaine explained how the homeroom system worked and that she was both our homeroom teacher and one of the English teachers, so we might have her for English class. She handed out photocopied school maps and went over school rules and then there was another BONG and she said that was the start of the first class. Everybody started searching through their notebooks for their schedules and we all scurried out.

That first day was a bit of a zoo, as we went searching for classrooms and stumbling around looking for things. A lot of our classrooms were on the same floor and wing, but not all. Likewise, for a lot of our classes everybody in a class would go as a group to the next class. That meant we didn’t get a lot of mixing up moving around. That night I told Mom and Dad about it and how confusing it was, and they gave me a bit of a smirk. “Just wait until you get to Matucket High,” Mom said. “By then you’ll end up taking classes with different people.”

“And some days the schedule will be different than on other days,” added Dad. That sounded truly horrifying! It was bad enough already even though most of what we did was the same every day, and Matucket High was four grades, not three, so it was even bigger!

I never did meet up with Bo during lunch. There were so many kids at Matucket Middle that they ran lunch in shifts. His lunch break was different than mine. Still, I was able to eat with Brax and a few other friends, and there were also some guys I knew from the Cherokees and Spartans. It wasn’t like I was lonely.

Some things had changed. Gym was now something where you went to a locker room and had to change into gym clothes and then do stuff. That room simply reeked! Some kids refused to clean up afterwards, and at the end of the day they smelled bad! It wasn’t too bad for me since I had been playing football for a while now and knew about locker rooms. Some guys just wouldn’t get undressed.

Another thing that was different was that the school band was so much bigger. In fact, it was too big, and we had two bands, junior and senior. You only got promoted to the senior band if you were any good. I played clarinet, and I figured I would be spending three years in the junior band. The same thing happened with the school chorus, and I knew a few guys who would never make it out of the junior chorus, either.

One very strange thing about Matucket Middle School was that they had school dances! They were limited to the seventh and eighth grades, and they had a fall dance, a winter dance, and a spring dance. You were expected to go to a dance with a girl! I told my family that at dinner the night it was announced. Jack said he wanted to throw up, and I agreed with him. Mom gave us both an unpleasant look. Dad nodded and agreed with us, saying nothing good would come out of going to dances with girls! He got the ‘Mom’ look next, but it didn’t seem to bother him. At least I had another year to go before that happened, and maybe I could come down with the flu or something by then.

One HUGE change occurred after school let out! Bobbie Joe was five years younger than me, so when I went into the sixth grade at Matucket Middle he started the first grade at Matucket Plains. Mom went back to work then. She was already working three nights a week in the emergency room, but now that we were out of the house, she said she was going back to work full time. She and Dad argued about that, but she told him they needed the money and he agreed. She would pack us off on the school bus in the morning, and then go to the hospital, where she worked in the emergency room. The big difference was that we got home before they got home. I was the oldest and got home earliest, so Dad gave me a key to the house! I usually got home about an hour-and-a-half before Dad got home. That was kind of cool, I mean, they trusted me with a key to the house, but I couldn’t stay late after school or anything because then Jack and Bobbie Joe would be locked out of the house. I did miss the bus once and had to run home, about three miles, and Mom threatened to take the key away and make us stay with Mrs. Wrybel across the street if I did it again. Mrs. Wrybel had never smiled once in her life! No way did I want to stay with her!

In any case, we got used to Matucket Middle School after a few days, or weeks in some cases. It was weird going from the back of the school bus to the front again, just like we were little kids back in the first grade. Some of the kids, especially the eighth graders, were really big! Mom measured us against the doorframe between the kitchen and the dining room every year and drew a line across it with your name and age on our birthday. For me that was March 1, and in the past year I had only grown one inch! Some of the guys seemed like they were two feet taller than me! I complained to Mom that I was never going to get any bigger, but she just smiled and told me not to worry, that it would happen soon enough. I sure hoped so! The bus driver kept the big kids from picking on anybody, but some of them were real jerks. At least the weights and football made me stronger, even if I was still short. I was only four-foot-ten, although I did weigh about ninety-five pounds. Mom said that was a little above average, but since I wasn’t fat, it wasn’t a problem. Some of the guys on the back of the bus had to be at least six or seven feet tall!

Around Christmas that year I got off the bus in the afternoon and found a new sight. Out on the corner of the O’Connor’s front lawn was a FOR SALE sign, with some real estate company’s name on it. That night at dinner I mentioned it to Mom.

“Mom, there’s a FOR SALE sign out in front of the O’Connor’s house. Are they moving?” I asked.

“Really? I must have missed that. I’ll have to give Sharon a call after dinner.” She looked over at Dad. “Did you know about that?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “News to me. Maybe they just want to get away from Thing One, Thing Two, and Thing Three.”

Mom laughed at that. “I can’t imagine why!” Two summers ago, we had gone to Orlando for vacation and had gone to Universal Studios for a day, and we rode the Dr. Seuss rides, although that seemed sort of childish to me, and Dad bought us Thing One, Two, and Three shirts. Both Bobbie Joe and Jack had outgrown theirs, but mine still fit, just further proof I wasn’t getting any bigger.

After dinner Mom made Jack and me clean off the table, and she called Mrs. O’Connor. They talked for a few minutes, though I didn’t understand her side of the conversation, and then she told Dad, “They’re moving, all right. Seamus got transferred to Charlotte.”