Begin zoomed way in to the tip of a pencil, not too sharp, or the lead will poke through the rough brown paper and damage the surface of the book it’s protecting. The pencil is inscribing another small, lower-case letter b, in the cramped space between the packing wide clear packing tape reinforcement to the cut up grocery bag covering the math book. The little b, and it’s neighbors were each earned by doing extra math lessons on the school computer, and each one added one-tenth of a point to my final (or quarterly?) grade. It must have been 7th grade, because I didn’t have a “math class” until then, and it was definitely still at Roessleville. 

Rick Miller and I had time before school almost every day, and were competing to see which of us was most likely to get stuffed into a locker for being a math suck up. That’s not true, partially because we didn’t have lockers big enough. What teasing I experienced was more focussed on glasses, big ears, and actual deviations from the pack mentality, as is to be expected for children. I was teased occasionally, not consistently. I had no nemesis or bully to fear. I never really saw anti-nerd abuse. The toxicities my school specialised in were casual homophobia and racism against the few non-white students, shaming poor kids, and rampant teasing of girls. That last one turned into harassment by junior high, and of which I was an embarrassingly active participant. I’m sure there were other abuses heaped upon children, but those are the chart-toppers. I was successful and comfortable and safe. 

Those little b’s were an important part of the world. My safe little space of reward for effort, and approval by adult authority. I would put another little b on my book-cover, in a nice row of five or ten, and assured myself another incremental gimme from the system. I earned them by doing “extra work”, sure,  but I was already at school early, and if they were going to reward me, for doing MATH, on a COMPUTER, I was on-board. The only thing better would have been academic credit for eating those coconut-covered red Twinkies.

Narratively, there feels like there should be ominous music, or a foreshadowing of an impending overturning of my world. There wasn’t. Not in any honest recording of events. As the year went on the small brown windows between the tape filled up with b’s, and the biggest source of stress in my orderly world was finding room for more rows of letters, and could I get a grade above one-hundred. I grew up in a world that rewarded studious white guys whose values were in line with authority. It obviously still does, although so many people who look like me are screaming that it did not and does not.