When you are twelve years old and pudgy, you know it.  When you are those things and not well off it amplifies the others.  At twelve I was about five feet six inches tall and shall we say, plump?  I was not what you would call popular.  As a matter of fact I was more what you might have known as that weird kid.  

Weird I was too, I read encyclopedias, I was often heard to ask questions that struck others as well, funny at best and bizzare at their worst.  Looking back now I see that I was much more normal than I would have believed in those days.

That was the way I left the seventh grade, a weird, fat, average looking kid.  What happened between seventh and eighth grade was probably the most unusual thing that happened to me from a physical place.  I didn't even notice when it started but, by the time I reached my thirteenth birthday I had grown three inches and was no longer pudgy by any definition.  My feet had grown too from a size seven to a size ten.  I didn't have a pair that fit me, that went for my jeans too.  This was shocking to my folks.  They couldn't keep up with it so I wore shorts and flip flops  

The Summer rolled on and when it was the middle of August, I had reached six feet tall and was able to wear a size twelve shoe.  When the time came to register for the coming school year people didn't know who I was, girls who had ignored me before looked up and asked me how eall I was and blushed when they did it.  To bad they had been so effective at crushing my self esteem.  I just couldn't take them seriously.

 It was like the world changed though.  No more crap from people that were still six inches shorter than me.  No more fat kid crap in gym class either.  Add to that a fair amount of attention from the opposite sex and it was just sensory overload.  

Eveery kid get this growth spurt some sooner and some later, some more and some less.  I don't know exactly how to explain it.  There was just so much difference in that short Summer vacation between Twelve and thirteen.