After the passing of my father in the summer of 2002, I was faced with a far greater challenge than learning to cope with death. This challenge was the eighth grade (Bring in the horror movie soundtrack!), where the girls got prettier over summer time and developed some sort of attractive features (i.e. ass and tatties), and the popular crowd was becoming far more accessible for people like myself, or so I thought. I never really belonged to any specific crowd before; I have always been an individual that for the most part, most people seemed to usually like me overall. I never been one of those people to address that fuckery of a noun HATERS…what the fuck is a HATER?! That was a bit rhetorical; I know what the hell a hater is. Do I have them is the question. Do I care is the bigger question, and if I have had them fuck them. I think our generation is too obsessed with using people who dislike them as an advantage to gain popularity. That is all you hear in these damn rap songs these days “hater nigga this, hater bitch that…” shut the fuck up! You don’t hear Lady Gaga talking about haters and nonsense like that. She has plenty of people, who hate her and cannot stand her, but you don’t see her addressing them; she does her thing and puts out more and more good music unlike the ones who address em. Side note, you don’t see Jay-Z doing it either, well blatantly at least. But, the eighth grade was a year I swore up and down was going to be different from all the rest unlike sixth and seventh grade. I think eighth grade year was the first time I had set goals and accomplished each and every one that I had laid out. I remember during the first month of school in my science class, which was a BEOTCH, we did not have a permanent teacher yet, so the school gave us a sub for the first month of school. When I say Mr. Ward was by far one of the coolest substitute teachers I have ever had, I ain’t lying! (50 Tyson voice). Mr. Ward was a young dude, made hip hop beats, and never dressed up for class…he always had on jeans n shit. I remember one class I met one of the most intimidating yet awesome female MC’s ever! Her name was Esra; she rhymed with the logic of Nas with the pace of Bizzy Bone. She was awesome. We were doing introductions in class and Mr. ward was reading over our hobbies, and he saw that Esra like to rap; he immediately asked her stand up and “spit a lil somethin somethin” for the class. Looking at her, you could easily see that she was nervous and very timid in her approach to the front of the class. Mr. Ward asked for somebody to make a beat on the table top and he was going to beat box along with the beat. The beat got started and Esra began to nod her head to see where she was going to start in accordance with the beat. Her head nodded harder and harder, and then it came out! She sat there nodding her head in all sorts of directions and these awesome combinations of words started to come out, and they rhymed brilliantly! I felt chills run through my body bar after bar. At Key Middle school, it was not uncommon to get in trouble for having freestyle sessions at lunch. It caused such a lovely riot, yet at the same time a ton of hostility if you got roasted while battling somebody. The table I sat at with my friends, primarily my neighborhood friends (Good Hope!) and a few other random people, but it was all cool. I remember the table that was behind us was an all girl table that we constantly got into shit with! It’s funny how things turn out, because one of the girls who sat at that table is now one of my good friends. During a lunch table freestyle session it really didn’t matter who went, as long as they said something funny or cool. I remember one day my friend Donny asked me did I want to battle Esra for fun…I said “hell no!” I could not fade getting embarrassed at lunch again in middle school! It was already bad enough that back in eighth grade I cried when a white girl dumped me on the first day of class. One of my most specific goals that year was to make the basketball team; it had been almost like a dream of mine since the sixth grade. The coach from sixth and seventh grade was an asshole that wouldn’t let sixth graders try out for the team, or was that the school policy? Eighth grade was full of basketball! I played for the rec. team, I played street ball daily, our rec. team was damn near unbeatable so we had to play Boys and Girls Club, and when we won a championship there we upgraded to AAU (the Mecca of youth sports). I remember the day tryouts were held…you want to talk about being a nervous wreck, sweet lord cheeses! I was sweating bullets before we began the drills. Everybody wondered why I was so damn nervous, I mean my gym teacher was the basketball coach and anytime we got to play basketball in gym I tried my hardest to show off and showcase my skills. I remember the day we got called to coaches office where Coach Rey gave us our slips telling us if we made the team of not. I think that day had to be the most nerve-wrecking day of my life thus far! I left his office with the piece of paper folded in my hand, thinking to myself “you made it, you made it…don’t worry, you made it.” I hit the corner that led to the stairwell and opened up the folded sheet of paper and there it was, I MADE THE TEAM! I was now a Key Eagle! After that all I could think about was how proud my dad would have been of me that day. He always pushed me to go after what I wanted even if I do not succeed at least I can say I tried my hardest. I’m not going to give the details of practice, how much playing time I got (which was minimal), my first basket, or who we played each game. All I can say is this, our team made Montgomery County history as far as Middle School sports go. We were the first team to go undefeated and average seventy plus points per game, even though we did not face our rivals, Banneker Middle, which was a game everyone on the team and within the student body wanted to see. Being on the basketball team had a bit to do with that newfound popularity that I had gained that year too. It was almost overwhelming in a sense. The next thing I knew is that I could not walk down a hallway without getting a handshake from the dudes or a hug from the girls. It was one girl that I had wanted to hug for the longest time though, her name was Laila. My friends use to clown me all the time for having a crush on her…I think she is the reason I have a thing for girls with braces. It all started in the sixth grade when she asked me to hold her books while she figured out her locker combination, we didn’t exchange names or anything…I just took the books and glanced at her here and there. It took me three years to say actual words to her and get some sort of positive response. I had my few run-ins with her before. The first time was at outdoor-education where my friend Diego ran over to her and told her that I said her and went out. She came over and BOMBED MY ASS OUT by repeatedly telling me that we WERE NOT A COUPLE; the public humiliation sucked. The funny thing about Francis Scott Key Middle School’s dances that were thrown every couple of months were that once you bought a ticket you were handed a school directory. The school directory was such a gift and a curse when communicating with the opposite sex. I remember one day, calling Laila up unexpectedly and asking if she wanted to go see a movie Saturday…I immediately got hung up on. Then the eighth grade rolled around, and ironically I bumped into her and her friend Lauren at the movies. My friends and I were walking back up the hill to the mall at the movies and she and Lauren were headed to the Checkers that sat on the top of the hill as well. I got into the mall with my friends, and then acted like I was hungry. Now being that I had just ate a few minutes before, my friends looked at me like I was insane and taunted me and called me FAT! I went into the Checkers and pretended that I did not see her or Lauren sitting there eating, and then it happened! She asked me to sit down with them. I had never been so happy and nervous at the same time, but I felt like after years of trying and trying to get this girls attention that this was my moment! I sat and conversed and forced myself to eat this food that I honestly did not want to eat, but oh well. The conversation lasted so long that my friends had actually left the mall to come look for me. These fools stormed in and already knew what was going on. The teased me a bit but they were not blatant enough to get Laila or Lauren to understand what was going on. I think Lauren knew though. After we left the mall I went home with the biggest smile on my face. I got home and laid down for a bit and then thought about resorting back to that damn directory and calling her just to see if I could squeeze some more conversation out of the evening. I called her, she picked up, I could hear Lauren in the background talking or doing something, and Laila said that she was going to call me back. At this point I was like “oh I know what that means” I had already learned from older kids that when someone says “they’ll call you back” it typically means that they won’t call you back. But too my luck a few hours later, while I was sleeping, my phone rang! I woke up, talked with this awesome girl I had had a “thing” for since the first day I met her. I do not remember exactly what the basis of the conversation was or how long we talked, all I know is that on Monday I got my first hug from her and on that Saturday we hung out at the movies for the first time, not by coincidence. It was the beginning of one of my most memorable and cherished friendships...
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