Steve

I went to junior high with a kid named Steve Easilymocked. That is not his real name, but it is true. It was especially true for other junior high kids. And it didn't help that he was in band. So was I. It didn't help that he was kind of short and round. So was I. It didn't help that he wore glasses. So did I. And lest you worry that I am secretly describing myself in an attempt to put psychological distance between my reality and my remembrances, fear not. Steve Easilymocked was a real person. Even if that's not his real name.
Steve was the way that I kept myself in the game. Specifically a game called "Bombardment," a peculiarly sadistic form of dodgeball that used flattened soccer balls as projectiles and the preternaturally aggressive instincts of adolescent boys to terrorize the short round, glasses wearing victims on the back row. Please God, just don't let me get hit in the face. But if I could stay in the fray one round longer than Steve, then I was going to be okay. Steve was the slow gazelle. He was going to be thinned from any herd in which he found himself running. And the lions in junior high were especially unforgiving.
I told myself, "Yes, you're in band, but at least you're playing tuba. Not the wimpy old clarinet like Steve."
I told myself, "Yes, you carry a lunch box, but at least it's not some nondescript brown paper bag with your name written on it by your mom."
I told myself, "Yes, you're one of the last ones picked, but at least you're not the last one picked."
I told myself all these things as an ongoing reminder that even if I was near the bottom of the pecking order, I wasn't the bottom of the pecking order.
Which is why I feel so awful about not going to Steve's birthday party. About halfway through our seventh grade year, Steve and I had struck up an acquaintance. The kind of acquaintance fostered by sitting outside the band room waiting for it to be unlocked in the morning. Or milling about fearfully near the back of the gymnasium as the flattened soccer balls whizzed past our heads. We were going to live through this. But when I was handed that little envelope, I could feel a gulf opening up between us. If I went to Steve's birthday party, I would need to invite him to mine. Even though it was months away, I imagined all the forced conversations we would necessarily have about this and that. I would be stuck with Steve Easilymocked as my friend. Forever.
I didn't RSVP. I didn't tell my mom that I had been invited, because I knew what the right thing to do was and I didn't want her reminding me. I "lost" the invitation, and though I remembered the following Monday to ask how it was, I knew that it was probably just him and his mom and maybe a relative or two, sitting around having the kind of forced fun that feels like torture when you're in seventh grade.
By ninth grade, Steve was no longer in band. He had slipped into a group of nascent cowboys, having found his way through the somewhat traditional channels of buying a hat and boots. And raising a goat in 4H. It didn't make him any more popular, but he had a caste. When we got to high school, we had stopped even nodding at one another in the hallway. That moment was gone.
And I feel awful about it today.