Does Your Kid Want to Be Cool?

Posted on May 24, 2018 Topic : Fiction

Like most middle schoolers, Flex's mind is on a million different things—school, sports, friends, girls (of course), and yes, he's thinking about God too. But mostly, Flex is obsessed with being cool. In this excerpt from the graphic novel The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock, Flex contemplates the meaningful things in middle-school life—football and fitting in.

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Am I cool?

Well, I’m 12 years old and writing a memoir, so that right there probably disqualifies me from being cool.

I’ve always liked reading and writing. What can I say?

In the pantheon of Nerdy Kids Who Write Books, everybody is doing apocalyptic fiction or trying to write their own versions of The Hobbit. But I’m not a nerd—in either the cool or uncool sense of the word. Cool nerds listen to bands you’ve never heard of and obsess about video games. Uncool nerds are like cool nerds except that they skip the bands and just obsess about the video games.

That about sums up the nerd situation.

But what I really love is football (and to a lesser degree, basketball and baseball and track and professional wrestling—which I don’t admit to in mixed company). I live for football.

Right before football practice

Our locker room at Empty Factory Middle School is actually in the boiler room. We put on our shoulder pads underneath asbestos pipes that will probably one day kill us.

In fact, I think I feel a cough coming on (coughs). This doesn’t seem to bother anyone except me, and I don’t say anything about it out loud.

Two people who are cooler than me are our star running back, Scottie (nickname: Maverick, or Mav) and our quarterback, Fordo.

Scottie has great shoes, wears a gold chain and totally pulls it off, and is dating Krissy from band.

When you’re a seventh grader dating an eighth grader, you’re automatically cool. You’re, like, grandfathered into being cool forever. Our kids will tell our grandkids about you. That’s how cool you are.

But football really stresses me out, even though it’s the thing I love more than any other thing in the world. I know I should say I love God more than football… and I do. I mean, I do. Except that football is the thing I think about and dream about. When I get home from practice, I lay out my jersey on the floor and put on my headphones and just dream about football.

Coach has a perpetually red face, but not because he’s nervous. It’s because he’s Intense. In Coach Wood’s world, there are two kinds of people—people who are intense and have pride, and people who lack intensity and pride. (Spoiler alert: You don’t want to be the second kind of person.)

I’m the first kind, or at least I’m trying to be. I’m not the most athletic guy, but I work really, really hard. There are some guys like this in the NFL, and not surprisingly, they are my favorite players. I’m a starter at tight end and outside linebacker.

Why am I this nervous before an average Thursday practice? I have no idea. The cool kids (like Mav and Fordo) aren’t like this. They wait until the last minute to get their uniforms on, and Mav is currently showing Fordo something on his iPhone. They’re both laughing.

Cool kids get to bring their iPhones to school. My parents won’t let me.