Seventh Grade: A Comedy

By JP Grund

Seventh Grade is as close as youre going to get to Mark Twain. Had Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had the same technology and number of friends in the same school as did the bad class, they would have done the same things. Take an adventure back to 1975; to a time when freedom was easily attainable and the school system put education ahead of discipline, instead of vice versa like it is today. You may just laugh out loud!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456825287

JP Grund

JP Grund moved to Atlanta in 1964, when he was just two years old. He saw Atlanta grow from a train hub to the busiest airport in the world. JP got his public education at a time when education was paramount and punishments encouraged learning, rather than interfering with this main purpose of the school system: learning. Grund feels so strongly about our current national situation he has created a political party The American Change Party. Go to www.AmericanChangeParty.com and read the solutions to today’s national dilemmas.

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Copyright © 2010 by JP Grund.

ISBN:          Ebook                                      978-1-4568-2528-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was created in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

First Day

CHAPTER TWO

The Bus

CHAPTER THREE

The Humming Deaf Teacher Scenario

CHAPTER FOUR

One Winter Day

CHAPTER FIVE

Tiny Bubbles

CHAPTER SIX

Andy and Jo

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sally and Sam

CHAPTER EIGHT

Spring Break

CHAPTER NINE

Camping Out

CHAPTER TEN

Last Day

CHAPTER ONE

First Day

It was the first morning of seventh grade on the bus for Andy. Andrew Winston Harris had a good heart. He was kind to people, he had a good disposition, and he was happy. His parents were picture-perfect. Mr. and Mrs. Harris were much older than most other parents. Actually, they were in the age range of the grandparents of all of his friends.

They were their own reincarnation of Ward and June Beaver. While that’s a wonderful scenario for Hollywood and the 1950s, the midseventies were much different. Mr. and Mrs. Harris hadn’t made that change. It was so extreme that Mrs. Harris hadn’t progressed forward with styles and fashion since they were married just after World War II.

She had a tough time with her own clothes and styles, but trying to decide for a boy in seventh grade in the year 1975 what to wear to school had proven to have a difficulty factor slightly higher than balancing the national budget and just as unsuccessful. Andy loved his parents and always would wear what his mommy and daddy had told him to wear, but he was getting older. He had wanted to wear blue jeans to school, like everybody else, but Mr. Harris wouldn’t allow it, until recently. All he needed now was more hair; his father kept it as a crew cut, very short.

Mr. Harris was a wonderful man and one of the best, if not the best, fathers. However, he came from a small backwoods town in northern Wisconsin. During the frigid winters of the 1930s, the German families would sew their children into their overalls so they would wear them throughout the winter. It was only common sense. These people didn’t sweat the entire winter due to the temperature rarely getting out of the single digits, and if they got out of their garments to take a bath, they would catch their death of cold. Memories of the flu epidemic of the early 1920s still rang hollow down the streets of that small town. It nearly wiped them out, and they would not soon forget it.

With so many factors working against him, Andy had a tough time fitting in with the cool kids. It was all because he hadn’t been allowed to wear blue jeans, until now, and his hair was very short. Inside, Andy was a cool kid and even physically attractive, but the clothes gave him a nerdy reputation, and short hair kept it all hidden.

Sam Garner was the kind of bully that every father scoffed at as a foolish right of passage, and every mother remarked it not being the right thing to do. He was a big kid, standing a good half a head taller than anyone else in seventh grade. He was built solidly with muscles, but not the weight-lifting type. He was just genetically lucky. He never did any real damage to anyone. He just liked being the bully because it gave him the extra attention that his face stole away from him. He was not a cute kid. He had a square face with a flat bulldog nose. His eyes were big and blue, but tended to bulge a bit. Sam wore his brown hair parted in the middle and long enough to cover his ears, as was the style length of the midseventies. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t attractive to the point of ever having a girlfriend before the seventh grade.

Sam’s experience in the sixth grade, the previous year, was not a good one. He was constantly in trouble and distracting to the other kids. He kept them from doing their work, all the while being frustrated at being the largest kid in sixth grade, the lowest in the school. It was like being the tallest midget. The eighth graders had no problem bullying him around and figured, since he was bigger, they could wale upon him harder than the other smaller kids, in their infinite mercy to the smaller kids.

The morning of the first day of school found him running out of the house, gulping the last of his cup of coffee, to catch the bus. He made it to the bus stop as the bus was coming up the road. The other two kids standing at the stop were total sixth-grade nerds complete with horn-rimmed, bottle-thick glasses and pocket protectors. Sam ran up and lunged at them only to create fear and nothing else. Of course, the two nerds cringed in absolute cowardice of what Sam could do to them. As usual, he did nothing, except get on the bus first, butting his way ahead of the two nerds.

Sam walked down the aisle and found Andy near the back. An ensuing fist to the left shoulder found its way from Sam to Andy.

Hey, dude, said Andy as he moved over to make room for Sam to sit down, all the while rubbing his shoulder with a cringe on his face. Their relationship was wonderful. Sam would keep Andy around as long as Andy kept willingly helping Sam whenever Sam got into tight fixes. One day in sixth grade, Sam had squirted a teacher with a highly illegal squirt gun and successfully handed it off to Andy in a crowded hallway, thus clearing Sam in the complete body search immediately following the handoff. In reality, they made a good team, and nobody really knew it.

What’s happening, he replied. Sam considered Andy his best friend, for what it was worth, but Andy never knew it. Andy stayed around mostly because Sam was a good investment. Andy knew that by Sam being the biggest guy in seventh grade, good things should come their way. Besides, they thought a lot alike, which is the only thing that made them both think secretly that they were friends of sorts. They never really had ever hung out together, but they did live in the same neighborhood that the bus came through for school.

The bus came to its final stop in the neighborhood before getting on the busier roads. Matilda Josephine Murphy, Jo, was a very cute and very quiet girl. Jo had the air of knowing about relationships, but never indulged, though she was always looking. She moved down the aisle with her books pressed against her chest. Her long brown hair barely parted to see her pretty face. She looked down as she walked all the way to a seat across the aisle and one row up from Andy and Sam. Just before she sat down, Andy’s and Jo’s eyes met. They had known of each other distantly, but never even came close to hanging out together. This glance was different, but neither could figure it out nor come close to guessing they were thinking the same thoughts. Both dismissed it immediately.

Sam leaned over and whispered to Andy, I think she likes you.

Andy elbowed Sam, and he elbowed back.

The bus continued down Old MacInawe Road where the school was at the bottom of Old MacInawe hill. Ms. Chachich took the bus down the top of the S-curve making a sharp and quick left. She always liked to take the bus down this S-curve in a higher gear so she never would have to use the brakes, and the engine could successfully keep the bus at a controlled speed. The wiry old lady got a kick out of doing it. There was no real danger. It just happened to be a fun road to drive, and a bus made it more fun. Besides, the kids thought it was akin to an overweight roller coaster.

They arrived at school with just enough time to get to a new homeroom where they had only an idea as to where to find it. The only people that really got lost were the sixth graders, and Sam knew it. Andy knew it too, but their methodologies were different.

Sam got off the bus just before Andy as they both jumped into the swiftly moving traffic of students getting to their respective homerooms before the bell sounded. They walked in all different directions. A very nerdy-looking sixth grader complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a pocket protector merged close to Andy. The nerd looked confused as to which way to go. Andy looked down and saw the nerd holding an official-looking document with the room number of the kid’s homeroom. Oh, room 428? asked Andy of the nerd. The nerd nodded and wiped his nose. You need to turn around, make a left at the hallway, and go all the way down to the end. You’ll see the 400s there.

The nerd looked confused as he started to walk back where he came from slowly.

Hurry, yelled Andy. They’ve got doughnuts.

The nerd’s eyes beamed as he scurried off to the eighth-grade section of the school. The hapless nerd hurried down the