Shoveling Manure

Once when I was in the seventh grade, there were two boys who sat on either side of me in every class: Sloan Starky and Drew Price. Sloan and Drew were just really nasty boys who enjoyed telling each other really nasty stories about drinking their fathers' beer and giggling about obscure sexual innuendo. Let me remind you that Sloan and Drew were in the seventh grade and must have been around twelve years old. 
For a long time, I thought nothing of their comments. I let them yammer on imitating girls-who-suck-dick noises and making crude jokes with Ryan Thomas until one day I mentioned something about it to my mother.
"What!?" It was like I'd said Adolph Hitler sat next to me in class. Like something out of A Christmas Story. "What did you say?!" 
I didn't know it was such a big deal. They were just being gross boys. And besides, I was almost sure Sloan kind of had a crush on me. But at twelve I just sat there not knowing what to say while he apparently thought sexist, raunchy jokes were funny, and the teachers probably thought I was a good influence. We sat alphabetically; the practice was accepted and 'right.' 
"We're turning around!" We had just come from school. "We are going to the principal's office right now!"
"Moooooom." I whined. Having a mother who was concerned about you was so lame. What would be even more lame would be if Sloan and Drew found out I had talked to my mother about them. My very concerned mother.

The next morning I had figured out a reason why I SHOULD go to the principal's office. They would probably let me out of group letter O. If I was lucky, and cute enough, and had just the right timing, maybe Mrs. Kuykendal would let me into group letters J or K with all my other friends who had higher math scores on their standardized tests. Sloan and Drew HAD done the things I'd said they did. It wasn't my fault they were getting in trouble for it. And I wanted into that group so bad. I wouldn't ever have a class with Sloan or Drew again. 
In the office, the two boys were already on the couch. They looked at me when I walked in and I felt like I had physically punched them in the face. I smiled weakly, sympathetically, I thought. I tried to think of something to do with my hands, to give them some sign that this really wasn't my idea. 
Drew's eyes were firmly planted on the floor. But Sloan was looking at me. He had short, spiked brown hair and deep brown eyes that were set back under heavy eyebrows. There was a light spatter of freckles across his nose. Drew licked his upper lip with difficulty because of his braces. 
Later, after the meeting, some popular girls would approach me in the hall and ask me why I got Sloan Starky suspended. Later than that Sloan's mother would call one day to say that she was sorry about what had happened and to assure us that Sloan was shoveling manure every weekend for a month. I would often get this image in my head years later when Sloan went sort of ghetto, got a fake diamond earring, sagged his pants, rode in lowriding cadillacs and hardly recognized me. Sometime before this, however, he would sit on the edge of my desk and say "Hi" like nothing had happened. Like I had never been the reason for his suspension, and he had never shovelled manure. I would say "Hi" back and continue working on whatever I had been writing, unsure of whether the Hi-on-my-desk meant he forgave me or if it confirmed all along that he liked me. I wonder what would have happened if I'd said anything more.
In the office that day the assistant principal treated me like a toddler. 
"We hear you're a writer! You like to write, don't you?" I felt like an idiot. I can't clearly remember why she asked me this, but it must have meant I wasn't really speaking. "Can you write out for us what the boys said to you that was inappropriate?"
She handed me a sheet of paper and a slightly used number two pencil. It occurred to me that she was exploiting my reputation. I wrote literature! What? Did she want me to write her a poem?
I can still remember what I wrote though. The damning evidence that they must have shown the boys.

"They talk about penises and sex and having ------->"

I specifically remember the arrow. Because I apparently couldn't bring myself to write the phrase "having sex." I just couldn't. The arrow seemed good enough for the principals though. On my way out of the office I saw Sloan and Drew again, waiting to go in. I knew they would hate me.

Sloan ended up suspended. Drew got a warning. Ryan Thomas was verbally reprimanded, but didn't go to the principal's office. I met with Mrs. Kuykendal to look at the list of groups and switch, but she told me to pick, "any group at all, except for J or K, of course."
I picked group M then. Because they had 3 out of 5 classes with group J. But within three weeks, the schedule changed and group M had no classes with groups J or K at all. 

It occurs to me now that sending Sloan and Drew to the office must have felt the same as when I went to the office at Lipscomb. One minute you're being pleasantly bad with your friends and the next moment your whole family knows and you're stigmatized. They must have felt the same hatred for me then as I felt for that RA when she ran off to find Laurie Sain inevitably getting me into the path that would lead to a long rap sheet of freaky failed relationships and mistrust. Maybe that path was partly my fault with them. Maybe thats why Sloan went ghetto that few years later. Maybe he'd been stigmatized and shoveling manure since he was twelve years old. 
Ah well. I hear he's married now.