Hellish
At RMS, a school I do like, I had to go to an hour-and-a-half long 7th grade pep rally on Friday. Boys swimming in football jerseys and oversized street pants doing a dance/football moves thing (if you know you are going to need both hands to cacth, why would you wear the pants that you need a free hand to hold up?). Girls in ill-fitting maroon polyester cheerleading outfits. (Don't get worked up, guys: too big, mostly. The straight, nearly-to-the-knee skirts had a single pleat, or vent, that was white. Because, I imagine, of too-big waist bands, the bright pleat wandered to a different place on each girl. Very unfortunate.) Between cheering, booing (the tennis team, poor things), a pep band (pretty good)and the D.J., it was loud as hell. I exercised the right I did not have at 12: I snuck out.

Luckily, the students in the honors class I had for a double block of social studies and civics were not the kind of young people to run wild because of such a distraction. They had a ton of worksheets which I broke up with a few conversations on robber barons, the Gilded Age, philanthropy, etc. Ryan made my day by mentioning Rockefeller Center, after I introduced the topic of buildings named for these guys. I was thinking of my freshman year dorm.