It brought back nightmares…

Junior high was scary, to say the least. I had the option to go to the junior high in the sixth grade and did. It was an awful decision or I don’t have a filter. One of the two, because I managed to piss off a bunch of eighth grade girls. That made life scary.

This book did bring back a lot of memories though, some good and some bad. The funniest part was how seriously my girlfriends took ourselves back then. It’s funny because I grew up a tough cookie parading as a social queen. I didn’t get to go on the sixth grade trip because I couldn’t afford it. My dad was a single dad and we barely made ends meet every month. In a suburb of LA, barely making it doesn’t cut it. If you can’t keep up, you get cut off. It was rough, but I made it through.

Finders study put junior high literacy practices into a whole new perspective for me. Not only was I like Lauren, inserting myself into everything because I wanted to be included, but my name is literally Lauren. But I felt for the tough cookies too. The part about them all sitting around at a lunch table while the rest of their classmates signed yearbooks was heartbreaking. I never gave a second thought to why people didn’t get yearbooks, but I knew a few that didn’t.

I think the purpose of this book was to shine light on how, even at a young age, people get stereotyped and it’s hard to break out of them. The social queens are a dime a dozen, but the cookies are who stood out for me. The way the teachers even suggested that they were the nicest girls, the ones teachers dream of, or something to that effect. The cookies of the word are typecast as the underdog. Nobody has to stay in their roles that their given, but sometimes that’s easier.