It's been a while since I've told you my thoughts on a book that you don't care that I have read. So it's that time again, and if you want to close the browser window now, I get that. It's taken me a couple of days to really formulate this one into a blog in my mind. Not because it was so profound necessarily, and I've read it before, but just because I had to figure out how it related to me.

I just finished Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I first read it 9th grade English and I remembered the story, but not many of the details and none of the discussion that we had about it in class. But as I started thinking about the book, in reading it again, I find a sense of almost irony about when I read it before. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized Lord of the Flies is the story of my junior high school experience. I don't know that I've found anything else that can depict those three years more accurately than this book about English school boys whose plane crashes on an island leaving them to fend for themselves and slowly turning them into savages. Yup, that's about it.

I've been trying to figure out which character in the book can most represent Lindsey circa 1997-2000. There's Ralph the chosen leader who emerges with the ideas for survival. And then there's Piggy who is the fat kid with glasses who actually has most of Ralph's ideas but people won't listen to him because he's the fat kid with glasses, so Ralph shares the ideas. There is also Jack, the leader of the choir boys and the head hunter; he's the first to really turn savage and will kill anyone or anything that gets in the way of his path to the top. There's also Simon, the loyal recluse who is the only one to really find truth to the island in both the natural and the supernatural. Not to mention a cast of other minor characters who fill in the plot nicely. I think if I really had to list out the qualities of these four main players, I would see that at that point in my life, I was Piggy.

I started 6th grade when I was 10. It's the only year of school in my entire educational career that I felt distant from my older classmates. Not to mention the fact that we had moved to Las Vegas just before the start of the school year from California, where I had already started 6th grade in an elementary school where we still had recess. I still had a Barbie house in my room and played with my dolls fairly often. I was 10, I mean really, I was a little kid. I really liked skorts and there is a picture from my first day of school in 6th grade where I had tube socks pulled all the way up under brown clogs. I didn't exactly fit in, to say the least.

I made a few friends that year, always trying to get ahead of the game. And frankly, what kid isn't in jr. high? But my friends were never exactly climbing to the top of the social latter. I do remember those kids who tried harder to get in with that crowd. They ended up getting there by high school, but then, by high school (at least at mine) it didn't really matter anymore.

When I would speak, no one would listen. Or they would taunt back the things that I had said. Kind of like Piggy and the taunts of the other boys like "Sucks to your ass-mar!" Also like Piggy, I would light up at the thought of acceptance. No matter how short lived.

There were always the Jacks, starting out as a normal, every day choir boy, who felt the need to be the head boy. They were some of those social climbers that I already mentioned.

There were Ralphs and Simons too. The Ralphs became the kids who really ended up somewhere by the time we graduated high school seven years later. The Jacks would try to poach them because it would seem like you could only have one or the other. The Simons were the silent types. The ones took note of everything happening and will someday right about everyone else in their best selling memoir.

Typically, Lord of the Flies is described as a political statement piece. The tale of civilization left alone, leading to its own demise. But isn't that what middle school is after all?

The only person I've ever met in my entire life who liked junior high is my husband. Everyone else I've talked to had a pretty miserable experience. Our bodies were changing, we had lockers and six different classes, all of the sudden boys/girls (depending on your preference) looked different -- and we liked it, and most of all we had absolutely no idea who we were and at the time it seemed like the best way to figure it out was to make sure everyone else knew who you didn't want them to be. Middle school is brutal, just like the island. One minute you have an ally and the next an enemy. One day you're the leader of it all and the next day everyone wants to kill you.

Piggy and Simon don't fare well in the story. And I feel like the version of me that was Piggy faced the same fate.

I was trying to imagine what would have come after the last page of the book. What would have happened next?

I know that when I started high school in 2000 I was SO excited to have a chance to start over. My middle school fed fewer students into the high school at the time than the other major counterpart. There were new faces, and faces that didn't recognize mine. I was ready. And I loved high school. I felt like, at my school in particular, that everything that everyone had worked so hard to become back in junior high didn't even matter once we got to high school. Everyone intermingled with everyone else.

I think that it would have been the same for Ralph. He would have gone back home and exhaled a huge sigh of relief. Everything off the island was different. The people who knew him on the island didn't matter any more. Maybe he started a new school too, with no pretenses and no past life. Just a successful, happy post-island career.

In the end I guess I turned into Ralph. And maybe Piggy would have to, if given the chance. Ralph, though sometimes forced to do savage things, was the one boy who retained his dignity and his propriety throughout. He came out on top in the end. I am happy with where I ended up, so I feel like I did too.

I guess that makes me Riggy... or Palph... Palphy?... Pigalph? ...