Up The Down Escalator

Chapter 2

Seventh grade was...........  Eventful.
I went to RYNJ, or the Rose York of North Jersey. Basically, some guy with the last name Rose and some other guy with the last name York got together and made this elementary and middle school. Don't even ask me why they don't use the word "school" in the name anywhere.
But the weirdest thing about this school, where I spent ten....um....interesting years of my life, is that it is separate girl-boy classes.  This is another thing that no one knows the reason for. This leads to many strange comments from other schools, including, but not limited to calling us stuff like RYNGay. This would bother some schools, but for us, we just try to milk it as much as much as we can, pretending we like each other and what not. I don't think anyone there was actually gay or lesbian but it was definitely fun to pretend just to annoy everyone else.
The year started out fine. I liked my teachers, liked my classmates, got good grades, had a life.
"Don't die!" I shout to Jonah as I pass him in the hall.
"You don't die," he says back to me.
"You don't say it right," I tell him. He never did say it right.
"Well, what makes you think that it's not you who's saying it wrong?" He asks.
"Touché"
Inter gender talking, laughing, or even acknowledgement of existence was, for some reason, strictly against the rules at the Rose York of North Jersey. Any girl seen conversing with a boy would be humiliatingly sent back to class and would be marked as a "bad kid".
This didn't stop most girls. They would simply wait until after school or take their chances with the "bad kid" mark. The reason I never got in trouble was because all of the teachers had already mentally marked me with "good kid" so they didn't pay much attention.
Jonah Wayde and I had a weird relationship. I had the same with his twin sister Sheena. The two were a little less than a year older than me, in the eighth grade at the time. The "don't die" was only one aspect and it's a weird story.
It was late Fall of my sixth grade year. It was that type of Fall day where you forget that there is any such thing as Winter.  The Waydes' house was just around the corner from mine, so we got off at the same bus stop. Our bus stop was right by this street called Queen Anna Road. We had to cross that street in order to get home. The street was never very busy. The real problem with Queen Anna Road was that the drivers on it really don't know the meaning of the words "yield to pedestrians".
So anyways, we walked to the edge of the street, and Jonah, who was very cleverly not looking where he was going, walked right into it. Long story short, Sheena and I ended up having to literally pull him out of the street, milliseconds before a car drove right over the spot he had been in. Because of this incident, whenever I saw Sheena or Jonah, I reminded them not to die. You know, in case they were to forget.