Sixth-Grade

Gilbert Humphreys slicked his hair to the side “just so” a final time before walking out the door. His compulsive state of struggle wore him to levels uncomfortable to him and anyone else in his bizarre eleven-year old orbit. Arriving from another town as a home-schooler the previous years, he remained a bit sheltered. All of the other boys used hair gel or mousse, and his plain, straight down bangs on the forehead looked more like a competition with Lloyd Christmas than anything that would catch the other fellow sixth-graders’ attention. He begged his parents for a trip to the dollar store. He would use his own allowance, the $2.50 a week that he earned would nearly be enough. With tax, he would probably need two weeks’ allowance.

…

He arrived at the fluorescently-lit dollar store. It was in a shopping strip that had once been a pillar of the community and had since turned to nothing but second rate shops and places that nobody really ever went into. The store reeked more of urine than it did cheap plastic and cardboard. That’s all those places were made of anyways-- cheap plastic and cardboard, that is. He saw the plastic squeegee bucket in the middle of aisle three and water dripping into it from the ceiling as if a faucet were slowly leaking from above. He observed the stocky, dirty blonde-headed cashier in the oversized black polo shirt looking him over as if they expected an adult guardian to be somewhere nearby. She was probably noticing the “Mo Fine” hairdo that he had come to embrace, just like everyone else. As he went down the aisle and strolled past the magazines and the Wooly Willy on the toy aisle, he found the aqua-green LA Looks bottle of hair gel. He peered at the price tag, $4.29. With tax included, his $5 would be just enough to cover it. He purchased it, and a feeling of excitement welled-up within him.

…

He’d gone to school the first two weeks and would wet his hair in the bathroom every chance that he had. He kept a comb with him at all times. The worst part of his pursuit of perfect hair was that he could feel it progressively drying as the class period would drag on. In between every class, he would enter into the restroom, carefully following the same ritual swooping his never greasy, brown hair to the left side. He was quite convinced that he could give the façade of using hair gel like all of the other boys with nothing more than water. The only ones that didn’t use the special hair goop either picked their nose or were the kind that flicked their scabs across the room. This was not at all whom he wanted to be associated with. He didn’t dislike these boys. He just never wanted to be seen as another “one” of them. They wore longer socks than the rest. This was complemented by cheap, Wal-Mart store-branded sneakers. He never realized how superficial he was in those moments... how much time and energy that thoughts about these kinds of things actually consumed... how vain he must have been to think that his hairstyle mattered that much.

…

He arrived home and began styling his hair with the new gel. He’d gotten the top of his head so wet with water, it looked like he had just come in from a rainstorm or a monsoon. Then, he added the gel. It was the early 2000s, and the wet hair look was in. He clogged his pores carelessly with the stuff. He did it so extensively that the early stages of male-pattern baldness would begin setting in at 18. Gilbert arrived at school the next day, convinced that he would fit in... just like all of the rest. No one said anything or noticed the drastic change that he had made, at least not directly to him. He no longer had to go into the bathroom to fix his hair in between classes. There was now a new problem. His well-coiffed mane would get so hard from the product that it would be easier to break a thick sheet of ice on a frigid morning than it would be to un-gel the baby-fine hair that laid beneath the first pint of goop that sat atop his head.

In PE class, he no longer worried about his bangs swooping down too far on his forehead. His newest anxiety was now all about what the other boys thought about the long tube socks that he’d brought in from the previous millennium. Of course they were “all the rage” in ‘97, but a lot had changed in 4 or 5 years. Gilbert went up to the plate for the co-ed game of kickball with the other sixth graders. He was four foot ten and precisely one hundred pounds. As the pitch came down the hot blacktop that desperately needed recoating, Gilbert kicked and missed the ball. He thought to himself pretty harshly, “Who gets a strike in kickball…? Only this loser.” “Gilby Long Stockings,” as the other kids would say. This was so embarrassing to him, even the PE coach, Mr. Zender, would call him Gilby Long (rather than Humphreys) by mistake.

After the arrival of his new nickname, he went home to his parents and explained the latest ordeal. Hormones were raging and adolescence for most of the students was undoubtedly at its peak. His mother and father laughed at him and told him that he was too sensitive about such insignificant things. Gilbert desperately needed to evoke more confidence and care less about what everyone else thought. “That was the key to success,” his father would say. Gilbert may have been short, shy, and clumsy, but he was thoroughly convinced that his perfect hair and shorter socks would be the solution to all of his problems. Finally, after two more weeks of his hard-earned allowance (a mere 5 dollars) were earned, he went back into the dollar store and bought a package of socks. His mother had purchased him a package of the shorter kind, but they were still too high on the ankle. After this, for some terrible reason, the kids only seemed to make fun of him even more. This must have been due to the orange band around the ankle that none of the rest of them would wear. It had seemed to go out of style overnight. Almost everyone in Oakdale got the memo except the Humphreys family, and a few select other families of scab-pickers. Gilbert was exhausted. He picked out a pair of the momentarily fashionable, no-show socks, and he went to the checkout counter. He had to go around the plastic bucket on aisle 3 again. Clearly, no one in this cheap franchises’ management gave a flying flip about repairing the leak in the ceiling, nor did the shopping strip owner seem to give a care. As he checked out, the clerk gave an insightful tip, “Come back on Thursday. It’s a buy one pack, get one free day.” Gilbert couldn’t wait that long. He bought the socks and took them home.

The next day he went to school sporting a new look. He had perfectly gelled hair and was now donning the no-show socks that every other popular student in the school seemed to be wearing. He went to PE again and began playing kickball with all of the rest, geeks and losers included. The scorch of the Texas sun beamed down on them harshly and the September afternoon heat was almost unbearable for the bulk of them to handle. Gilbert waited for the pitch. His leg came across the plate full force as he made contact with the ball. It finally looked like a chance for him to get on base. The ball popped up just over third base, and a little girl in glasses that could have passed for a fourth-grader caught the ball before it had a chance to hit the ground. “You’re Out, Gilby Long!” Coach Zender called out, almost enjoyably. All of Gilbert’s classmates began laughing at the fact that Zender had started using the nickname too.

He went into the locker room after the competitive game and sat down. As he began to undress, the tighty whiteys that he wore did not match the boxer shorts that all of the other boys wore. Gilbert Humphreys had a new nickname, “Tighty Whitey Boy.” This name left him embarrassed beyond belief. He only thought the hair and the socks were humiliating. This was a whole new league of awful. He went home and explained the latest situation to his parents again, and they offered to buy him some boxer shorts. It wasn’t a payday, so he would have to wait until then to afford the upgrade on his outdated Jockeys. Several days later, after arriving home, he saw a clear package on the foot of his bed. He was pleased to see that it contained boxer shorts. At least, all the way up until he realized that they had the same kind of elastic branded band around the top. The very same sort of band that would make them appear to be tighty whiteys if exposed in a moment of his shirt flying up in PE or recess. He was doomed, yet again. No one could have ever known what it would take to make poor Gilbert happy. The boy was anxious about everything. He would fold the elastic band down once over so that it only revealed a small hint of the tag that ran across the top. It was better than nothing.

…

As he struggled to fit in, a friend called him on the telephone and invited him over to hang out and play. He was one of the “long socks wearing kids” that just didn’t care, Billy Teague. He never had hair gel. He wore tighty whiteys, and his socks were longer than most of the other sixth grade girls’ pantyhose. He was smart. He spoke with a voice that sounded as if he was from another part of the world, but he wasn’t. Gilbert went to Billy’s home, and the two became friends. They found common interests in video games and computers. Gilbert and his family didn’t have the resources to buy a new video game system, so he would just study the newspaper ads for the games to keep up as best as he could in the lunchroom chats with the other kids. Gilbert and Billy would have great times together, but Gilbert was still hypersensitive to the other kids that he was convinced were “more popular” than he or Billy would ever be.

…

As the year went on, the other boy’s voices began getting deeper. The hair on their legs and arms grew in. They even got a few whiskers on their upper lip… and they grew the thing that most eleven and twelve-year-old boys were most excited about, armpit hair. Unfortunately, Gilbert’s soprano-styled voice was higher pitched than most of the girls as the school year continued to go by. The peach-fuzz under his armpits was so undetectable, he might as well have been used as an advertisement in a Gillette commercial for women’s razors. The other boys started to notice this too. They began to poke and to prod, and Gilbert again fell for the trap of caring too much.

He began trying to do things to make his voice sound deeper. He loved the nights when he had gotten into a very restful sleep. In these instances, his voice always sounded a full-octave lower the next morning, much like the rest of his male classmates. The phase of impressive depth would last for about forty-five minutes. He figured out if he remained silent while at home before school and avoided speaking to his parents or siblings at breakfast, he would have better luck at showing off his deeper voice in first period. By lunchtime, he was back up in the high frequencies “pitch-perfect” with the rest of the girls. There was not a darn thing that he could do about it either. Nature would simply have to kick in.

…

Gilbert’s grades were good. Billy’s were too. The other popular students rarely talked about this or acknowledged it, but Billy and Gilbert always outshined them. One of them would become a geek, and the other a nerd. Rather than embrace the title, Gilbert tried as hard as he could to run the opposite way. He could not accept the idea that he was. He was absolutely and obsessively convinced that he just needed to be like everyone else. Billy, on the other hand, had it ALL figured out. He just acted like he didn’t notice, “like water off a duck’s back,” as they say. Never a visible anxiety or care in the world. Just good grades, his parent’s confidence, and a gentlemanly way. Even though Billy’s voice had also not changed, none of his classmates seemed to notice, because he never let on that it bothered him.

…

Gilbert ran fast. He always liked to show off his speed in the PE warmups. He didn’t have long socks anymore. There were no more tighty whiteys. His hair was perfectly glued down, just the way that he liked. The cheaply-assembled, Wal-Mart store-branded sneakers were starting to fall apart, but he toughed it out. He could still outrun almost every other boy in the sixth grade. One day, he pushed himself too hard. He lost his breath and began to panic. He fell to the ground in the grass near the playground while the other boys were having a chin-up competition on the monkey bars. Coach Zender rushed him to the school nurse, and he began begging for water. The nurse told him that he had hyperventilated and suggested that he keep a paper bag with him to blow into when he felt like he might faint. Nothing was as refreshing in these moments of utter terror as the coolness of water coming across his parched lips. All of the girls had seen him faint near the playground. He returned to class after he had calmed down and knew that everyone had been talking about him. He wouldn’t be remembered anymore as Gilby Long Stockings or Tighty Whitey Boy. He was now “Fainty Dainty Kid.” In his own eyes, Gilbert just never seemed to find the right chemistry to fit in and succeed the way that he hoped to.

…

He decided the next thing that he should try to do to aspire to greater things was to ask out, Aleah Garner, the third hottest girl in the sixth grade. They had been on a field trip to the science museum and were on a bus ride returning home as the school day neared its end. Aleah initially answered him with a simple but devastating “no” when he asked. Unexpectedly, she re-evaluated and said to him that they could go out for three days. This news left him on cloud-nine. Gilbert had his very first girlfriend. Shortly thereafter, he realized it was Friday afternoon just before the President’s Day weekend. No one would even know that they were a couple because school was out. It was at that point that he realized that there would be no sweaty hand-holding... no awkward attempts at kissing or braces interlocking…and certainly no squeaky-voiced one-liners. He didn’t even have her phone number. The digits listed in the school directory directed to her dad’s work phone. There was no chance on God’s green earth that he would be calling that line! He was far too frightened of the repercussions.

…

As the school year came to an end, he had corrected everything that he could possibly fathom that could help him to fit in better. It gave him some peace of mind as he went into the summer season, but he knew that as seventh grade neared, he would have a brand new list of things to overcome. With hormones in full bloom, he prepped for his twelfth birthday. He was just hoping that when August would hit, the hair under his armpits would be fully grown, and his voice would be a full octave deeper.

Gilbert Humphreys always cared too much about what everyone else thought about him. As he got older, he wished that he would have been less obsessed with being like everyone else and more genuine about just being himself. He would have blended in a lot better that way. Isn’t that what sixth grade is all about? Finding your own identity...your identity. Gilbert never learned this. He was only concerned with what everyone else thought.

Billy Teague never looked back or changed. He never flinched. He was always himself and confident in his identity. If Gilbert could have figured this out, he could have made the next six years of junior high and high school much simpler.