***A/N- There is going to be a lot of time skips, please be patient with me... SPOILER: this story does not have a happy ending

1 year later

I know, time flies fast, but it only does when you are having fun. Asides from my extreme dislike for my fifth grade teacher, I ended up getting decent grades, and I had simply looked forward to starting the first year of MIDDLE SCHOOL! At the end of fifth grade, the PTA* had arranged something called a sock-hop, and some girls went all out and specially ordered things called “poodle skirts.” I honestly had no idea what a sock-hop was nor did I ever want to go anywhere near a thing called a poodle skirt, but the event ended up being quite fun. For the girls I mean… I got to hula hoop, and eat as much ice cream as I wanted, so I was pretty much satisfied. As for Miss Perfect, she went to some fancy art school, where she most likely will lead a life of a noble prize winner.

Well, onto what happened to him. I have not seen much of him lately, and even if I did, he ended up academically intimidating me, so I liked to keep my distance from the genius boy. I mean, he was nice and all, but I really looked up to him academically, and it was kind of embarrassing, since he seemed kind of inapproachable for me. (little did I know that that would change later) Since I really did not speak to many of my fifth grade friends and acquaintances as much as I used to, I decided to immerse myself in the world of academia and try to get on even grounds as him. Being the competitive person that I was, I tried and tried to beat him in something educational. After taking the Math benchmark test (MAP), and receiving my score, I was so happy that I became proud. Too proud to be exact. Although I was ecstatic about my score, I failed to realize that people like him most likely did much better. I mustered up a lot of my courage to go and finally talk to him. Me, being the annoying grade oriented person that I was, had went up to him after school, and walked right in front of him and exclaimed, “I got a 260 on the math MAP test, what did you get?” He looked at me a little hesitantly, and I thought, hmm, maybe he is doing that since he got a lower grade then me hehehe, but what he said after that was, “No, now I feel bad revealing my score to you!” Being the pushover that I was, I pressed him to tell me, so he reluctantly spoke up, “I got a 270.”

….

Wow! After facing my mini humiliation, I put my head between my feet, inched away to another hallway, and reassessed my academic situation. I was so embarrassed, that I decided that I was never going to go up to him to share my grade ever again. (That eventually changed later too) I decided that I was going to try a lot harder, and study like I never did before.

Two weeks after the first day of Middle School

Sixth grade, was when I was introduced to the wonderful world of orchestra. Since I started playing the violin when I was halfway through fifth grade, I was able to skip a level in orchestra, and was able to just start playing pieces with the rest of the 7^th and 8^th graders. 6^th grade was the first time I experienced the rich and full sound of the violins, violas, cellos, and basses playing together. It was wonderful. The awesome combination of the deep tones and high shrill ones while playing the D major scale was so amazing, that I used to think that I would never ever get used to the loud sounds. (I eventually did though) But what does orchestra have to do with him? Well, he was also in orchestra. Even though he did not have my same class, nor my same teacher, nor did he even play the same instrument as me (he played the viola), for some reason the mere fact that he was part of the same club that I was in, made me a slight bit more competitive. As you can probably tell by now, I was pretty much gloating in the fact that I was a level higher than him in orchestra. I know, I seem like an annoying and competitive try-hard, but honestly, in retrospect, those characteristics ultimately explained what I was.

Sixth grade was also the first year that I was part of the gifted and talented program. I had a teacher, and I was not so excited about her. I always thought that the gifted and talented program would involve a lot of logic and reasoning, aka math and science, since that was what GT was at my old school before I moved. However, I could not have been more wrong. PACE (the accelerated program) was all about history. I hated history with a passion. He loved history with an even greater passion. Within the first week, the teacher had told her classes that they were going to have to do a project for History Fair, and she gave the prompt. A lot of people immediately started struggling, since she gave out the first assignment right away. Me being on the major strugglers. Although I never had a single class with him that year, I heard a lot about him from some of my friends merely talking. Rumor had it that he was doing extremely well in the class. So much for my competitiveness…

Math honors, was one of the only classes that I could genuinely say that I was excited about. Not only because of the subject, but also due to the fact that there was a group of people (like me) who were very excited about math. In that first period math class, I was able to meet a really great friend (my fake uncle) who managed to understand my mixed up math talk, and translate for the others. He seemed like that wise voice in the back of my mind, telling me whether or not I was on the right track. The other guys and I were joined by the shared love for Maggi, hatred for corny Indian Soap Operas, and polarized attitudes towards chai. Ironically, those people just like me, had interests very similar friends, him being one of them. I honestly had heard more about him from them, then I had heard myself. However that group in first period math was ultimately defined the type of friends that I would acquire in the rest of my middle school years. Now, I guess we refer to ourselves as the “brown group in math,” but the name was deemed years after that class ended.

*PTA = Parent Teacher Association