School Daze

Who Ran My Underwear Up the Flagpole? by Jerry Spinelli, 1992.

It’s still just a few weeks into the first new school year at Plumstead Middle School, and Eddie still feels a little out of place. He still feels like he’s a grade school kid at heart and doesn’t fit in with the big kids at middle school. The most grown-up impulse that he has is to frequently stare and smile at Sunny Wyler, and she doesn’t even like him to do that.

Then, something horribly embarrassing happens. Mr. Hollis, the social studies teacher is so late that the entire class gives up on him arriving and decides to go to the locker rooms to change early for gym. Mr. Hollis storms into the boys’ locker room a minute later and barks orders at the boys to return to his class immediately. Eddie, scared to death of his angry teacher, follows this order to the letter – forgetting that he isn’t wearing any pants and is just sitting there in his underwear. Eddie is the only person who doesn’t get any punishment from Mr. Hollis, who is sympathetic to his plight, but that’s not enough to make up for everyone seeing Eddie in his underwear.

Eddie’s underwear has cartoon characters on it, which is just another thing that makes him feel like a baby in middle school. He enlists the help of his best friend, Pickles, to help him burn his old cartoon character underwear, planning to buy some new ones with money he was saving to buy comic books. Then, Pickles suggests to him that he do something else to see how grown-up he is: try out for the school’s football team.

Unbeknownst to the boys, Salem and Sunny are both trying out for the school’s cheerleading squad. Salem isn’t at all the cheerleading type, but that’s the very reason why she wants to join the cheerleading squad. She wants to be an author, and she’s trying to understand different types of people so she can create more realistic characters. Therefore, she sometimes does things that would otherwise be out of character for her just for the experience or to get inside the head of different types of people. However, Salem realizes that she isn’t a very good cheerleader, so she invites Sunny over to consult her on what to do.

In spite of her grumpy, prickly personality, Sunny is actually a very good cheerleader, but she can’t help Salem to improve enough to make the squad. The girls do see Eddie at the football try-outs, though. Eddie’s uniform is really too big for him, his helmet gets turned around, and he ends up with a nosebleed. The coach complains about everything that’s going on with the team and how little time he has to train them and says that what he needs is a manager, so Salem volunteers for the position. Salem is very good at organizing things. With Pickles as part of the school’s small marching band, the entire group of friends is now involved in the school’s football games.

The four kids still have lunch with the school principal once a week, having developed a friendship with him during their rocky first days of school. They tell the principal about their football involvement, and Sunny brings up the subject of Eddie’s Superman underwear that everyone in the class saw him wearing. Eddie denies having any Superman underwear (which is now true), and Pickles backs him up, saying that one pair was just an old pair that he had to wear that day because the others were in the wash. The principal tries to hint to Sunny that she should stop teasing Eddie, but she takes it too far, and Eddie ends up smashing a Devil Dog snack cake (link repaired Nov. 2023) into Sunny’s face. The principal is actually impressed that timid Eddie had to the nerve to do it, and oddly, Sunny doesn’t even seem upset afterward.

Thus begins Eddie’s first steps at learning to be more grown-up. However, it’s not going to be easy for him. His current reputation is going to be hard to live down. The other guys on the football team are all bigger than he is, and he’s been bullied by the big kids since school started. At one practice meet, his pants fall down because his uniform is too loose, and a big kid hoists him in the air to show everyone that he’s not wearing Superman underwear.

But, what Pickles had told Eddie when they were burning Eddie’s old underwear was correct: Eddie might be a kid, but so are all the other sixth graders at their school. Eddie isn’t the only boy on the football team who is new and small. He’s not the only one who is sometimes timid and awkward, either. As team manager, Salem soon begins helping the new football players tie the drawstrings of their pants more tightly because other players are worried about losing their pants like Eddie did. She also begins soothing their various injuries, fears, and ruffled feelings. Around their coach, the boys have to act tough and not cry, even when they’re scared or hurt, but since their team manager is an understanding girl, the boys can sometimes let down their guard and be more human with her. Salem gets a lot of insight into the emotions of football players, and in return, she helps the young players to understand and manage their emotions, too. Eddie resists most of Salem’s help because he’s trying to prove that he’s tough and grown-up, but without her support, many of the other boys would have quit the team.

As the season progresses, Eddie gets the chance to a football hero, the very first player to score a touchdown at their brand-new school, and Sunny realizes that she’d rather be a mascot than a cheerleader because she’s too grouchy to be a cheerleader and nobody tells a Fighting Hamster to keep smiling. However, even Eddie’s football victory doesn’t end the teasing, and somebody runs a pair of Superman underpants up the flagpole to mock him. In a desperate attempt to cheer him up, Salem promises to arrange the thing she knows that Eddie wants the most – a chance to kiss Sunny. Will it work?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The kids do some growing-up in this book, but not unreasonably so for eleven-year-olds. The party where Salem tries to arrange for Sunny and Eddie to kiss is suitably awkward. As the kids talk about the idea of kissing, they tease each other. I didn’t like the part where Salem called Sunny a baby for not wanting to kiss Eddie. It’s not that I don’t think that’s realistic for some eleven-year-olds, but I believe more in the modern idea of giving consent and respecting someone’s “no” when it comes to anything romantic. That didn’t occur to me when I first read this book as a kid, but that’s what real maturity does for you. The word “sex” does appear in the story when Salem challenges Sunny’s maturity, saying that she probably still giggles when someone says that word, to which Sunny quickly replies, “Don’t you?”

“‘No,’ said Salem, ‘as a matter of fact, I don’t. What’s there to giggle about? It’s nature. It’s as natural as trees and cows. Do you giggle when somebody says trees or cows?’
‘If the tree tries to kiss the cow,’ said Sunny, ‘sure, absolutely.'”

As part of their maturity talk, Salem points out that women do mature faster than men, and that’s why some young women marry older men. Well, that’s one explanation for that, although, as an adult, I can think of at least two more.

To her credit, Sunny thinks of a way to deliver a kiss to Eddie without exactly kissing him. She does it in a joking way as part of a game of Truth or Dare.

As a side plot, the kids were also trying to decide whether or not they want to go to the Halloween Dance at school. On Halloween, they all meet in their costumes, and Eddie is over his Superman underwear embarrassment enough to wear a Superman costume. At first, the kids think that maybe they’ll go to the dance, but on the way, they can’t resist stopping to trick-or-treat and end up changing their minds. They’re not really ready to be completely grown-up yet, any more than they’re interested in romance in any serious sense. What’s more, they’re all fine with that.

This is the book where Pickles makes himself a new skateboard out of an old surfboard that’s big enough to carry not only him but all of his friends, too. He calls it the Picklebus.