You're Invited to My Birthday Party!
How I realized I wasn't one of the "cool" kids.
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In first grade, when we were given the assignment to build a ‘robot’, my classmate Joshua had a fully-functioning, motorized creature that could be operated by remote control, and I brought in a shoebox wrapped in tin foil. During a spelling test in second grade, I sneezed and farted simultaneously, and writing ‘cornucopia’ hasn’t been the same since.
Despite those momentary embarrassments, I still had the kind of unbruised confidence that all children should have by fourth grade. I was unabashedly playful and confident. In fact, I thought I was pretty rad! Why wouldn’t I? I could do an amazing impression of Forrest Gump, and I read all the Animorphs books. I could do front handsprings, and my big brother was in middle school. I had a surfboard with an alien on it, and my Dad owned a bar. I was in the accelerated reader program, and the year before, I made it all the way to the Young Author’s Conference with my children’s book The Twisted Twister. There was no reason for doubt; the radness was objective.
When the time came to pass out invitations for my birthday party in fourth grade, I confidently invited the entirety of Mrs. Taylor’s class. That’s what you do when you’re in elementary school; you invite the whole class. In fact, if you are in the same classroom, it is not just a suggestion or politeness - it is basically the law. I think you can find it written in the constitution, right after the bit about the guns but before the prohibition nonsense. Regardless of the legal ramification, inviting the whole class wasn’t in question. I was inviting the whole class because they were my friends, I was rad, and they would be thrilled to come to my party.
I labeled each invitation’s envelope with extra-swirly cursive (yes, we actually learned cursive back then) and arrived early to school to distribute them. I carefully laid them across the top right side of each desk, hanging ever so slightly off the corner. That’s right. I was a fourth-grade boy taking pains to ensure that the aesthetic of my party invitations was on point (a shining example of inherent queerness at nine years old). When everyone arrived at school that day, the first thing they did was open their invitations, and I basked in the glory of knowing that all thoughts were on my party and me.
Tammy also had a birthday in October, but we’d never been in the same class until now, and I looked forward to attending her party. I knew from gossip in years past that she had a pool. I looked forward to showing my class my very impressive backflips. When the first weeks of October passed, and there was no invitation from Tammy, I assumed that she would not be having a party that year. I figured that maybe she was going on another one of her family’s fancy cruises to the Bahamas instead.
One day, Ashlee F and Ashley C were talking by the large swing at recess. I overheard them mention something about Tammy’s party and tried to correct them.
“Tammy didn’t have a party this year.”
“Yes, she did…” Ashlee F chuckled.
“What?... I didn’t get an invitation.” I said.
Ashley C laughed in my face.
Tammy did have a party. She even passed out invitations in Mrs. Taylor’s classroom. She was so slick about it, though, that I had no idea.
This revelation caused my brain to spasm.
“A party? But…that doesn’t...There is a rule. A code. It’s in the constitution, I think probably! Or, at least, the school’s conduct code? The by-laws? Isn’t there a requirement? Surely it’s at least frowned upon?? What. The. Fuck!?”
(Yes, I did start cursing in fourth grade...Blame Florida, not my Mom.)
Do you know how in movies, when a character sees something of particular betrayal and their world flips upside down in slow motion? The edges blur, the voices around them become an indistinguishable din, and it becomes almost impossible for them to move without bumping into some additional horror. Like in Mean Girls, when Cady Heron sees Regina George kissing Aaron Samuels. For me, this moment was very that. Ignore the fact that the timelines do not match up and imagine me at nine years old, wearing a Lindsay Lohan wig, lip-synching to a sound-bite from the movie while recording myself on a VHS-loaded camcorder in my Mom’s garage.
“I had never felt this feeling before. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. My stomach felt like it was going to fall out my butt. I had this lump in my throat like after you dry-swallow a big pill. I hated [Tammy]. I hated her!”
Tammy and I sat right next to each other. I gave her one of my erasers once! Why on earth wasn’t I invited to her birthday party? The science did not make sense. No matter how hard I tried, there was nothing I could think of that would justify her extremist behavior.
Eventually, I started to see a bit more clearly. Though we were in the same class, our relationship wasn’t founded on anything substantial. She’d never come over to play at my house, and we didn’t talk about the Spice Girls together. She played softball, and I played Basketball. There were more differences than there were similarities, and we weren’t really friends. We were simply classmates.
Not friends. Not…friends. I was friends with everyone else in the class, but not Tammy, and the thought of her disliking me made me sick to my stomach. Unfortunately, I was still about thirteen years shy of practicing healthy communication during high-stakes situations, so I didn’t handle it great. It would have been crysp if I’d approached Tammy and said, “Hey queen, what’s the sitch?” Instead, I started to work really hard for Tammy’s approval. I let her cheat off my school work. I tried to talk to her during lunchtime. I tried to get her to teach me how to braid hair. None of it worked. She’d cheat off my test, but she still didn’t actually want to talk to me. She did not teach me how to braid hair.
I watched from the small swing-set as Tammy and her real friends went about their recess. They would sneak out to the edges of the field to whisper secrets or play volleyball, which always “had to have an even number of players” and therefore I couldn’t join. They would lay on the picnic tables doing hair or join in on kickball games with the boys towards the end of the semester. It took months of over-eager effort for me to realize that no matter the situation, I was never welcome to be her friend. Not by Tammy or anyone she was close to.
For some reason, I had been quietly written off without commentary or feedback.
A social pecking order had been established sometime in the micro-moment of my generation’s transition from The Reading Rainbow to the WB Television network. Those at the top were those like Tammy: unsurprisingly athletic, stylish, and possessing of fancy things like swimming pools. They were kids like Justin and Mandy, the first to start dating (in the way that fourth graders tend to “date”), Corey, who played baseball, Michelle, who could do back walk-overs, and my quiet-nemesis Max, a basketball star who was also cast as the lead in our class play about Ponce de Leon.
Those were the cool kids, and, as was made evident by my not being invited to Tammy’s party, I was not one of them.
I don’t know when exactly the memo went out detailing which people were cool or uncool because I didn’t get it. Probably because I was the silly kid flipping around on the monkey bars while the rest of my class had moved onto truth or dare. Or, because I was the boy staying up late to perfect the cursive on invitations for a birthday party that, ultimately, only two people would attend.
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