Future Mrs. Jennings, seven years later

At my middle school each student had a one-word identity. Kelly, who wore Green Day shirts and bracelets to hide her wrists, was emo. Chris wore a different striped Abercrombie polo every day; he was preppy. Katelyn read a million words a year and made perfect scores in algebra - that made her a nerd. Ocer wore stained-up wife-beaters and loved calling us dykes and faggots. He was a redneck.

I've only ever been to one middle school, but judging by the literature, movies, and stereotyping made about this stage in adolescence, I'm sure my school wasn't the only one like this.

 If I could do it over - middle school, that is - I would become obsessed with country music, with all the classics. Especially the Jennings: Waylon and Shooter. This way my principal would believe me when I told him my shirt, custom ordered online to say Future Mrs. Jennings, was not indeed an attempt to sexually harass my old language arts teacher. Rather, it was a tribute to my love of country music, to my appreciation of good guitar playing and the only song I've ever known by Shooter, "Fourth of July."

Unfortunately, by the time I found myself in the Principal's office receiving my second, and not final, school suspension, my singular identity was well-established. I was the girl who barked at people, belted the Charmin Ultra jingle through crowded hallways, got sent out of classrooms for being disruptive, and made life for teachers "hell," as one poor teacher told me after I filled in a practice EOG bubble sheet with colored pencils in a charming pattern of pink, purple, blue.

 In short, I was the class clown. And more than that, I was the class clown who perpetually pretended to be in love with her language arts teacher. After I wore the shirt, my teachers received a much-needed three day break from me.

It puzzles me now that I was ever this way. My parents told me a few months ago that as a child I had always been bashful, introverted. Right after middle school I went back to this. It took months for me to make new friends at the Early College. Hallie was my first, and she had to drag me - on a daily basis, for awhile - out of the lonely Algebra One classroom at lunch time.

Like most of us, in the later years of elementary school and the early years of middle school, I was bullied. My glasses - huge, dirty, and nearly always crooked - were what did it for me. And one day after I forgot my glasses at home, my lazy eye was discovered.

"Look at me," I remember people saying in our school cafeteria. And no matter how straight I tried to keep my eyes, one always wandered off to look at other things when it should have been looking at the person speaking to me. "I can't tell what you're looking at," they'd say to me. And a whole group would gather around after they noticed what was happening - a big group of kids wanting to see me half look at them.

If I had my glasses, I was four-eyed. If I didn't, I was cock-eyed. And being socially awkward, closest to lunch ladies and custodians, and unable to buy clothing from Limited Too didn't help.

This, in my mind, is why I became class clown in middle school. Although it may seem like an excuse, I like to think of it as a theory. A theory of self-preservation that could explain, but not excuse, my getting kicked out of three different homerooms. Not just for an hour, but for good.

Before I always blamed it on my friend group. I was friends with Victoria and Julie, two people who acted just the same as me and constantly had to be separated from each other and me. But the years I got suspended - sixth and eighth grade - we weren't close. In fact, I never saw them. And I was still just as bad.

Comedy has always been a good way to try to hide vulnerability. People "laugh to keep from crying," as the saying goes. My theory is that in middle school, I protected myself from the unkindness of peers by padding myself with layers of obnoxiousness. If they wanted to get to me, they'd have to go through my barking and singing and shouting first.

In the end, my method mostly worked. Of course rejection is bothersome no matter what the reason, but at least being class clown I had control over my own rejection. People were mean - probably even meaner than before - but it mattered less because I chose what they attacked. It wasn't my eyes or my (real) personality or the smell of  my mom's cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes. It was all the fun I was having with my best friends; it was the bubble sheet; it was the singing.