In the Crumbling Halls of Kagenshlaft Middle School

Looking back on some of the worst years of our lives

When it comes to age, I just feel like puberty is, like, the most horrible time of anyone’s life. — Sam Smith.

My middle school housed grades six and seven. After six years of nurturing in any one of the town’s eight elementary schools, roughly 850 11-year-olds were ritually plopped into a building erected during the early days of the Cold War, where air conditioning was nonexistent, tiles cracked below our feet, and hallways were just about as wide as walk-in closets. Kagenshlaft Middle School, named after a prominent US-Swedish diplomat who was assassinated prior to the school’s opening, was made up of nine wings connected by a maze-like set of corridors. Backpacks were not permitted to be carried during passing periods due to the high frequency of hallway jams at each asbestos-filled corner. If caught in the halls with a backpack after the first or prior to the last bell of the day, a hall aide would determine the severity of your offense against the honorable backpack safety code. This infraction was usually met with the ever-popular, detention — all to preserve the sanctity of the crumbling hallways.

Just as my class entered Kagenshlaft, construction on a completely new building started to take place on the outside field. This state-of-the-art middle school was set to open right after my class finished seventh grade. By then, the hallowed halls around us were to tumble by the force of a wrecking ball. We would never experience the new school, but we would be made to watch its every stage of construction through the barely openable windows of our half-century-old labyrinth.

At Kagenshlaft, students were separated into groups known as houses. Administrators put the house system into place to ease the transition from elementary school. In elementary school, you had the same class of 25 students all day and all year. In the middle school house system, you rotated among the same 50–150 students throughout the day and whether you liked it or not, were stuck in your house with the same group of people for the entirety of each school year. Your classes had little to no variety of outside-house people, save in the one elective you could take.

Cliques seemingly formed by osmosis during the first days of sixth grade. The popular crowd, as they came to be, comprised the boys who played sports and were disruptive in class, and the girls who were the first to grow breasts and use that to their advantage with these boys. This crowd all seemed to know each other before they stepped foot into the building (possibly from some camp) and as a result gave off a confidence yet to be seen in preteens. Their group somehow crossed between houses too.

Their leader, simply known in conversation as “Shelly,” was spoken about daily, but I never actually saw her. I imagined what this enigmatic person looked like and why the girls befriended her and the boys did nothing but talk about her. As I would later find out, Shelly was the nickname of Michael Shelikosta — a boy.

Many of the popular boys dealt in the gum trade. Gum was a hot commodity in middle school, and if you had it, you were somebody. Boys came to school stacked with dozens of packs of the stuff, and covertly sold it between passing periods like street-corner drug dealers. For just $2.50, you could get a thick pack of sugar filled Cotton Candy Bubblicious — my personal favorite. However, being caught in the gum trade by any staff member could land you in In School Suspension (ISS) — a punishment which involved sitting in a supervised room for the entirety of the school day as teachers brought your missed assignments. While I often enabled the gum dealers by secretly buying from them, I never dared sell a pack as I was in complete fear of any disciplinary action.

At the time, I found the school’s underground gum market to be mildly amusing. Here were these middle school bigwigs, taking part in the free market by breaking the sacred school policies of “no selling of anything” and “no gum whatsoever.” I imagined what it would be like for these dealers when gum was no longer in demand by students. How would these kids get by? As it turned out, once in high school, most of the gum dealers did switch to selling something else — marijuana.

On the topic of policies, Kagenshlaft had more than could be counted. Two of those policies involved assigned seats on the bus and assigned tables at lunch. The cafeteria was split into a north section and a south section. The north section, reserved for seventh graders, was in front of the stage where miserably awful drama club productions would take place each spring. The middle of the room had garbage cans, ketchup dispensers, and ever-present lunch aides, and beyond that was the south section, reserved for sixth graders. The whole room wreaked of ammonia from cleaning fluid mixed with the aroma of soggy chicken fingers and likely expired Domino’s Pizza. Its odor burned the nostrils of us youngsters and made eating there each day rather unpleasant. But the odor was not the only problem in the cafeteria.

On the first day of sixth grade, barely knowing anyone in my house, I was given a mere 20 minutes to decide who I would be sitting with for the rest of the year. In a supposedly good-willed effort to integrate the genders, each circular table was required to have four boys and four girls. I managed to pair up with my close elementary school friend, Max, and we sat ourselves at a corner table which had two open seats. At this table were two other boys and four other girls — none of whom we knew. A lunch aide who “led” our section soon walked over and made us each sign our names on a contract, thus permanently assigning us to Table 18. Perhaps the administrators thought us sitting at the same table for the whole year would bring us closer together with our tablemates. Instead, for myself and Max, lunch became an awkward exercise in ignoring and being ignored by the others at our table. We never made friends there.

Additionally, at the end of each lunch period with a few minutes to spare, someone had to clean the table — a different person each week in a rotating system. Despite a large janitorial staff on site, Kagenshlaft administrators believed the exercise in sponging down our tables with some ambiguous cleaning fluid helped us build character. All it ever seemed to do for me, however, was make me nauseous. It was bad enough that I was stuck at a table with the aloof troop, but to add insult to injury, I had to clean up their messes every few weeks with a filthy sponge likely infected with a beta version of COVID.

On the bus, a similar type of assigned system prevailed. Unlike the cafeteria where you had a few minutes to choose where you would sit for 10 months, on the bus, that decision was made for you according to your last name. We were seated alphabetically from day one, which meant in sixth grade, I was next to my brother — a seventh grader. At that age, we did not get along too well and had typical sibling rivalry. Regardless, we were forced to be with each other side by side on the bus for 40 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon.

Our bus driver Connie was a woman who we all assumed to have been under the influence of crack cocaine. She seemed to be pulsating with hyper energy and had a permanent scowl affixed to her face paired with bloodshot eyes, always wide open. When any of us made the slightest movement on her bus, she barked with a singular word — “siddown!” To her, my block friend Thomas was one of the worst offenders. He was a bit of a class clown, and I often took amusement in his antics such as cracking dirty jokes and arguing with Connie. I think my being friends with Thomas made Connie grow to hate me. She yelled at me for sitting the wrong way, not getting off the bus quickly enough, and merely existing.

On a cold Monday afternoon in February on the way home from school, my brother was being particularly annoying on the bus. I cannot recall what he was doing or saying, but Thomas, speaking for the rest of us, groaned, “Can you shut him up?” I immediately thumped my fist into his abdomen, and he let out a loud “Ow!” Connie’s bloodshot eyes looked straight up through her mirror and landed on my brother.

“Do you want me to write him up for this?”

I was frozen. Did I hit him that hard? It was a love tap, I thought, yet he yelped. Do the right thing, I thought. Do not throw me under the bus (literally) for this minor nothing.

“Yes.”

I was stunned. My brother’s moralizing nature got the best of him, and in turn, me. Why would Connie ask him? Why would she make a 13-year-old boy the moral arbiter of the school bus? I thought that was her job. But I affirmed, surely, that Connie would not actually report this incident to the school. This was an intimidation tactic to show that she saw what happened and I should be nicer to my brother. Lesson learned.

The episode quickly went out of my mind. I went to Hebrew School that afternoon, practiced for my bar mitzvah which would be the following year, and neither my brother nor I ever mentioned the altercation to our parents. On Tuesday, things went as usual at school. The popular crowd gossiped, kids sold their gum, and Max and I secluded ourselves at the lunch table full of people we did not like.

Wednesday, however, was different. Sometime during my second period social studies class, a voice rang over the intercom. “Will Elijah Reiss please report to the main office? Elijah Reiss to the main office, please?” Oh no.

Immediately 25 pair of eyes were staring at me. Why was this kid being called to the main office? I was hardly the usual offender. In fact, that previous summer, I had had a relevant conversation in a car ride with my mother, my best friend, and his mother. I recounted how my fifth-grade teachers had warned us about the discipline we would be facing in Kagenshlaft. We were told they would hand out detention slips like Halloween candy. Both my mother and my friend’s mother shared how they never received detention in the entirety of their schooling career. I was shocked. I imagined it was a requirement to serve detention at least once during one’s time in school, yet here were two goody two-shoes who had survived without a single infraction. I was clearly about to get my first, and it would likely be detention.

I made my way through the silent, dim-lit halls. Clearly this was an important matter, as my class time was interrupted so I could meet with whomever in the main office to likely discuss what had transpired on the bus two days earlier. I had never been to the main office nor had I ever met either of the vice principals who would likely handle such a case. I was a good kid and played things on the safe side — or so I thought.

Mrs. Everston was a tall, thin lady of 65 with short, spiked blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and well-defined cheek bones. She was the vice principal who oversaw the sixth grade and dealt with all disciplinary matters. I surmised that she would soon deal with me. I sat in the main office waiting room and began to stare at the faded posters all around. “DO YOUR BEST,” “CHARACTER COUNTS,”, and “READ” come to mind. While caught in one of my stares, a voice called, “Elijah?” and I proceeded down a hallway to an open door.

Mrs. Everston had me sit in an uncomfortable chair which had likely come with the building’s construction 50 years earlier. She looked at me, perplexed, and caught me with her lake-like blue eyes stare until it felt as if my very soul was in her grasp.

“I heard about the incident with your brother in the bus.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“As you know, hitting and physical violence of any kind is completely against school policy.”

“Yes, I know. I am really sorry.”

“I want you to write down exactly what happened,” she took out a form, “on this sheet of paper. And then we can decide what to do next, okay?”

“Okay.”

I was told to go back outside and fill out the form in the waiting room, as if I was in a doctor’s office filling out paperwork with my medical information. On the form she gave me were a series of questions:

1. Explain the incident. Who was involved?

2. Explain why the incident occurred.

3. How will you act next time?

4. Explain why you feel sorry.

I wrote my story. I explained that my emotions and peer pressure got the best of me, and I inflicted the light thump on the torso of my older brother. I felt I was as genuine as I could have been. Hopefully, that would help in my sentencing by the almighty Judge Everston.

After 15 minutes or so, I went back to the room where the vice principal sat. I handed in the form and Mrs. Everston read it over line by line. She looked back up and me and sighed.

“Okay. Being that you broke the school policy against physical violence of any kind, and it occurred on the bus, I am assigning you two consecutive days of Bus Suspension and two days of In School Suspension, to be served tomorrow and Friday.

I immediately started to disassociate. I had heard what she said, but had a hard time processing those words. Here I was, the mostly innocent, average grade receiving, under-the-radar sixth grader and I had found myself in the throes of the second-worst punishment one could receive in middle school — ISS. I was a marked man, with a record that would likely follow me into high school. Mrs. Everston refused to look at the fact that the incident was with my own brother, and not a random student. If they could only see what went on between us in my household! But the George W. Bush Era’s ever popular “Zero Tolerance Policy” had made its way into Kagenshlaft Middle School, and I fell victim to its clutches. My Kafkaesque nightmare had begun.

By the time our meeting ended, social studies class was over. I reappeared at the beginning of science class, where I told Max what had transpired. He was on my bus as well and had witnessed the incident. He was as shocked as I was.

“Two days of ISS and Bus Suspension for barely hitting your own brother?!”

“Yep.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I thought the same. On the bus that afternoon, I failed to disclose my punishment with my brother. I also did my best to avoid eye contact with Connie. I am sure she felt I deserved whatever I got. When I got off at the bus stop, thoughts raced through my head about how I was going to break the news to my parents. What would they think about their youngest having been a convicted school policy breaker?

My clammy hand turned the knob to my front door, and in I walked. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table and looked up at me as I bowed my head in shame. I waited for my brother to go upstairs and then spoke.

“So… I lightly hit — ”

“I know. I spoke with the school.”

How dumb was I? Did I really think that the school was going to keep this incident and punishment from my parents? Of course, they were going to tell them. My mother continued.

“I told them that I thought two days of punishment was unreasonable. I mean, he is your brother. Come on! They refused to cut the Bus Suspension, but I managed to eventually talk them down to giving you only one day of ISS. That school is really unreasonable.”

I was dumbfounded. Not only did my mother think the whole situation was ridiculous, but she stuck her neck out for me and reduced my sentencing from two days of ISS, to one. I would only have to spend one, seven-hour day in the confines of In School Suspension. Yet, my mother would still have to drive me and pick me up from school for the next two days. It was the best I could hope for.

That Thursday morning, I was dropped off at school with a friendly, “Good luck” from my mother. I did not know what to expect in ISS, but I figured I would not be among my school’s best and brightest.

The ISS room was directly across from the cafeteria near the school’s main entrance. It was significantly smaller than the average classroom at Kagenshlaft and was made up of a U-shaped perimeter of connected desks facing each wall, and a desk at the front of the room where the teacher would sit. Between each student seat were wooden barriers on the desks preventing one another from looking at each other. The air was silent as I walked in. The clock struck 8:03 AM, and the day began.

The first order of business was to fill out yet another apologetic form. In a paragraph or two, I summarized how my supposedly violent actions caused brief, unnecessary abdominal discomfort for my brother. I restated my apology until I felt I had sufficiently described the situation and how in the future, I would think before I acted.

There were three other students serving ISS with me, all boys. Each of them was in a different social sector of the middle school. The one sixth grader was possibly special needs, so I felt a little bad that he had been thrown into the hole, yet he was terribly annoying. The other two were seventh graders, one of whom was your run-of-the-mill, average popular kid, while the other was viewed as one of the toughest kids in the school. He was nearly six feet tall by the age of 13 and was a constant problem for the administration, always getting into trouble due to his insubordination and outspokenly crude sense of humor. He was a typical womanizer, joined a gang in junior high school, and wound up just barely graduating 12th grade through some sheer miracle. Today, he is working on his master’s degree and lives in Belgium — married to a zoologist and with child.

“What are you in for?” never came up in conversation. There was no conversation to be had in ISS since it was to be spent in silence. At the end of each period, the bell would ring, and someone would come by to drop off the day’s missed materials for each class. One period, my science teacher, Mrs. Carnes, came by to drop off my work. She had liked me and perceived me to be a model young adult, albeit with some difficulty in science. I was embarrassed for her to see me there.

“Elijah? What are you doing here?”

I quietly explained myself and my predicament. She shook her head with a disappointed sigh. I think she could tell it was an overreaction on behalf of the administration, but regardless, here I was in isolation.

The occasional, “Ayo miss” would be uttered from one of the other kids, and the teacher would respond with a quick, “I said no talking!” Some teachers were more sympathetic than others to helping us with our classwork, but I assume that none of them ever felt excited to serve as ISS proctors.

As the bells passed, I kept a look on the clock over the teacher’s desk. How many more hours until lunch? Food of any kind was forbidden outside the cafeteria walls, and I had not eaten lunch that morning. My stomach growled as I counted down the minutes to 11:17.

Lunch finally came. A teacher gathered the four of us and we made the two-step trek across the hall to the cafeteria.

“You are to get your lunch and return to this door immediately thereafter. You have 10 minutes”

We were not permitted to have a free, unsupervised lunch period. We were hardened school criminals and would be treated as such. Lunch that Thursday was the student favorite, soggy chicken fingers, complete with watered-down instant mashed potatoes, and 2% milk. I navigated myself through the pungent odors of that room, over to the assembly line buffet, and promptly took my food. I made sure not to look at anybody in the cafeteria, worried that I would be spotted among the degenerates.

Upon returning to the ISS room, I ate my lunch in silence. I then noticed something outside the windows overhead. Small flurries had started to fall from the sky. That was strange, I thought. Snow was not in today’s weather forecast, so this must have just been a brief passing shower. But as the minutes passed, the flurries became larger and thicker, until a white dusting covered the outside courtyard.

The snow persisted through noon as visibility went down. Suddenly, the principal’s voice came over the intercom at 12:10.

“Attention Kagenshlaft Middle School. This is Principal Peters. Due to the ongoing snowy conditions, we will have an early closing at 12:28 PM. Please wait to be dismissed by your current teachers. Thank you and have a safe rest of your day.”

I thought I may have been dreaming. Did the principal just say we would be having an early dismissal? Did I imagine that? My ISS sentence had gone from two days, to one day, to half-a-day. There was a collective cheer from the other delinquents who were promptly told to keep quiet. We were still in the hole, but not for much longer. I imagined I would have to make up the other half of the day the next week, but for the moment, I was thrilled.

The bell rang and I bolted. I came outside to a snowy landscape amid hundreds of ecstatic students. While making my way over to the buses, I ran into a kid from my house — Patrick Flannigan.

“Hey, Elijah! Where were you today? Maddie and I just became boyfriend and girlfriend! Pretty cool, huh?”

Maddie Ellison was my sixth-grade crush. Patrick Flannigan was a typical popular jerk who traded girlfriends every month. The news of their new courtship put a damper on my mood, but it was not like I had much of a chance with this girl anyway. She ran in the popular clique too, whereas I stood on its peripheries as a mere observer. Patrick Flannigan was popular and happened to be the biggest gum dealer in the grade. He was going places. I wished him congratulations and explained that I was at the dentist during our earlier classes. Two lies for the price of one.

I was still suspended from taking the bus, but I did not imagine my mother would be able to pick me up in the snow. Additionally, she was at work. I called her and she told me to just take the bus. She figured the bus driver would let it slide, but then again, she did not know Connie.

I walked over to my bus, parked on the east side of the building as always, and started to board.

“Woah! Oh no. You have Bus Suspension, remember?” Connie glared down at me as my left foot remained in place on the steps.

“I have no other way to get home. My mom is at work. It is snowing.”

Connie gave me her famous scowl and seemed disappointed that she really could not bar me from taking the bus home. She relented, and I boarded without issue.

“You will have to make this up, okay?”

“I guess so.”

I walked on with a hero’s welcome as my block friends and other bus riders clapped in amusement. Clearly word had gotten out about my fiasco. I was slightly embarrassed, but also slightly vilified, cracking a smile and giving a wave of approval. I sat down next to my brother who asked me how it all went.

“Fine.” I replied.

The bus engine roared and led us out of the complex amidst thick flurries and slippery roads. Kagenshlaft Middle School soon left our view, and all there was to see was a haze of white. I went home and played in the snow with the other neighborhood kids. Friday morning, I awoke to the news of a snow day. My luck extended further with this day off. Come Monday, I could not take the bus, but I never had to make up those lost hours of ISS. Nobody told me that I was in the clear, but the issue was never again brought to my attention. I was free for good.

I am not sure if I believe in divine intervention, or God for that matter, but it was a lovely coincidence that the only early dismissal to occur during that school year occurred on the only day I was to serve ISS. The weather gods looked down at Connie, Mrs. Everston, and the incompetent leadership at Kagenshlaft Middle School and spat snow in their faces. I think most of those administrators and far too many of the teachers had forgotten what it was like to be 11, 12, and 13 — to be going through so many physical and emotional changes in such a short period of time, all the while having to navigate a new and scary environment.

While I hardly suffered at the time, upon further reflection, I have come to realize that my middle school experience was mostly awful. Compassion and empathy were hard to find, discipline was too harsh, students at that age were too cliquey, and not enough staff members had the ability to understand their students. Maybe the popular clique looks back fondly on middle school, but for the rest of us, little good came out of those two years at Kagenshlaft. I wonder if Patrick Flannigan, who wound up getting busted and suspended for gum dealing at the end of the year, looks back fondly? After all, the administration seized roughly $300 in cash from his locker in that bust.

Today, a spacious parking lot stands over what was our Kagenshlaft Middle School. The new middle school rests over what was the outdoor field. It is air conditioned and has wide corridors. Backpacks are likely allowed to be worn in the hallways. Additionally, after it opened, the building won an architectural award for being an environmentally friendly “green” building — a sharp contrast to what it had been in our time.

While I am in touch with many of my high school, elementary, and junior high teachers, I am in touch with only one particularly exceptional teacher I had at Kagenshlaft — my seventh grade English teacher. The other faces of that place live under the dust of my old yearbooks.

The summer after seventh grade, I would often ride my bike to the school to check on its demolition progress. One day, I came upon a bulldozer knocking into the center of the school where the cafeteria and ISS room stood. With a thunderous bang, the walls collapsed.

I sipped back a can of Coke and rode on.