7th grade

I enjoyed 7th grade more than 6th grade, although I was definitely more introverted. After finishing his year at MIT, my dad moved on to Michigan State. East Lansing, Michigan is an extremely boring town. Moreover, since I had just moved there, I didn’t really have any friends. 7th grade was also the start of my mathematical suicide, something that makes me sad to this very day. Believing that I was very smart (I was), my dad decided that I should take the hardest math class my middle school had to offer, algebra, which was filled predominantly with 8th graders. The problem was that I was unused to actually doing work; I had simply never done any up to that point. Most of my time was spent reading, playing Starcraft and various MUDs (Multi-User Domains, the predecessor of the massively popular Massively Multiplayer Online games), and emailing my friends from home. I got by because the material that I was being taught was blindingly simple; I didn’t need to do anything except pay attention in class. My math class in 7th grade was different. In the face of actually working for the first time in my educational career, I crashed and burned.

As I said, I was an introverted child in 7th grade. Along these lines, I tried to find friends in the safest way possible – by emailing random people. I somehow started an email conversation with a woman named Kate. Kate was a lot older than me. She said that she was in her mid-twenties; I have no idea why she spent her time responding to emails from a 7th grader. She lived in East Lansing and we sent almost daily emails to each other. Kate was definitely real – we talked about stuff happening in the town and I remember her mentioning that she stopped by my dad’s department and saw his photo hanging on the wall.

One day, she invited me over to her house and, just like that, I stopped responding to her emails. I didn’t respond to that email, nor the emails asking me where I had gone, why I had stopped responding, and what she had done wrong. Maybe I did the right thing – maybe “Kate” was a child abductor and, had I accepted, I wouldn’t be writing this today. Or maybe she was just as lonely as I was and wanted a friend.