by Mona Yasir

Created on: January 18, 2009

When you join Junior High School, you are at that wonderful, pimply age when you think you know everything and your body is invincible. The mundane humdrum of adult life and all its tedious issues, such as money, career, health, marriage or a sagging behind, have no place in your universe. Nothing more than punctuality and a willingness to listen is required of you in Junior High and the teachers are all so uniquely amusing. There's food to be had and fresh running water, not to mention entertainment and sports facilities, but all you want is to get out. Or at least, that's all I wanted.

When you're in High School you just wish you could leave and when you do leave and have to face the realities of higher education or even worse, the big W. O. R. K., you wish you could have that time in High School all over again. You know you would do everything differently the second time around because you'd know better. You wouldn't ask Melissa Burnhart to be your girl because she'd spend the rest of the year walking past you with her nose up in the air and snickering at you with her girlfriends. You wouldn't attempt to climb up to the top of the ropes in gym on a dare only to find yourself crying in front of the entire class because you're too afraid to come down. You wouldn't spend the days before an exam at the bowling alley with your friends and you wouldn't just pretend to read at the library whilst secretly flicking balls of paper around using your new bendy plastic ruler. How much fun was that!

But no, if you could have that time again, you would buckle down and make your parents proud. Or would you? It must be one of those immutable laws of the universe that every young teenager has to undergo the rites of passage into adulthood, and Junior High seems to have been specifically designed as a training ground for that purpose. The social order is very particular in its segregations. You have your run-of-the-mill science geeks and your potential candidates for Prom Queen, you have your sports jocks and the somewhat disturbing psychedelic punks. But you also have your grease-balls or as they were known to us - "The Untouchables'.

Bernie Fuller was an Untouchable. He was a short, paunchy, shy sort of kid with greasy hair and a heavy aroma that followed him around. He always sat alone in the dinner hall and never looked anyone in the eye. He had a fascination of anything electronic and built a remote control robot as one of his science projects for which he won some sort

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