On the way back from the food specialist appointment , I had the most enlightening conversation with Dash. Not about food. More about a peek into his world as a second-grader.

He said, out of nowhere, “It seems I’ve been elected as the president of our club.”

“What club is that?” I asked, thinking it was something with the other kids who live on our road.

“In school. Not exactly a club… ”

Let me synopsize, because Dash’s thought processes tend to be roundabout and I had to worm it out of him and we were navigating the traffic and I can’t remember exactly how it went anyway. But the gist is that he and the other “not cool” kids in his class are a club, of some unofficial sort. I asked if the cool kids were also a club, and he said he thinks so, but he’s not sure.

He thinks he’s not entirely one of the uncool kids, but maybe somewhere in the middle. It seems to be settled in terms of who sits where in the cafeteria, and the cool kids never sit with Dash (or vice versa, I suppose). But once, one of them talked to him. He thinks. And he “mumbled” something back. (I don’t know why he didn’t say it. Maybe it’s not cool to say things when you could mumble them. Or maybe he didn’t know what to say, so he hedged his bets.)

I don’t remember being aware of cool vs. not cool when I was eight. Then again, we didn’t have a cafeteria in my primary school. Maybe it would have played out earlier if we had. I remember knowing who was cool (and that I wasn’t) by the time I was 10 or 11, when the cool girls were listening to Duran Duran and wearing stonewashed drainpipe jeans with zips on the bottom. But that seems like it was an oncoming-adolescence thing. Tweens hadn’t been invented in the 80s. I didn’t have to be a tween, so I didn’t have to decide if I was cool when I was eight.

He has to navigate his own way, and I’m confident he’ll find it. I can’t do it for him and I wouldn’t know where to start. We talked about how it’s okay to be not cool, but he was way ahead of me on that front; and about how even the cool kids mightn’t feel like they’re the cool kids all the time, and about how it’s good to talk to everyone whoever they are.

But I’m glad he’s got his little band of buddies, of the not-cool-kids. Proto- Freaks and Geeks , even. They’re really the coolest ones, everyone knows that.