During the same week where my vision of a mighty fist was destroyed by a teacher, I also had to dress up as a girl.

Because it was homecoming, there was a tradition where the girls played a football game against girls from other grades and unfortunate group of boys got to dress up as girls and be cheerleaders. I was one of those unfortunate boys.

I do not remember how the unfortunate were selected but I vaguely remember there being  some version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I think this has to be true because a couple of the popular guys were also cheerleaders.

Now, in other classes, it appeared that the cool and popular guys had volunteered. In a couple cases they also had acquired cheerleader uniforms from some of the girls playing football. Another class had acquired tremendous balloons to give them tremendous, um, appearances.

We, the unfortunate, however, rigged up something resembling, um, appearances and stuffed our shorts to give us something resembling “back”.

Unfortunately, the “back” appeared more like “accident” and many present suggested we needed a trip to the restroom.

Once the game began, we, the unfortunate pretty much stood around and did nothing except stand around. Eventually, it was our girls versus, I think, the seniors, and pretty much the entire school decided to support the seniors. (Including, if I remember correctly, a substantial portion of our class.) Despite one of our unfortunate members encouraging us to actually do a generic cheer, we ended up not doing a single cheer.

None of us wanted to be there and we weren’t going to pretend to have fun. I don’t know if that makes us cowards, rebels or jerks incapable of having fun. Either way, we were just a bunch of unfortunate unfortunates standing around with fake “appearances” and “accidents”.

That pretty much sums up all the class spirit we had. At least that year.