Read Bridie’s recent piece in the New York Times about the summer before she started junior high.

Summerscapes
An occasional series on the rites of summer.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

First Day of Cool

By BRIDIE CLARK
Published: September 3, 2007

IT was a humid evening at the tail end of summer. My family was eating dinner around our picnic table when my mother spotted the hot air balloon, cresting down in the distance. I don’t remember who proposed we chase it to its landing spot, or who seconded, but suddenly half-gnawed corn on the cob clattered down on plates and we raced for the driveway.

At 12, I lived for moments like this — moments I could pretend I was still a kid.

I grew up in a nice suburb outside of Hartford, where summer was the season for indulging whims, camping in the backyard, swimming instead of bathing. It was the season I most appreciated having a brother — for the simpler, why-talk-when-we-could-be-jumping-off-this-rock way that boys play, the peace of ending each day bone-tired. Even my parents, strict during the school year, became kids every June.

Most of all, summer was the peak season for daydreams — my most passionate hobby then and now. There wasn’t much to do besides daydream, really, unless you were good at pickup sports or had many friends. That summer I was 12, about to start a junior high where I’d know almost nobody, I lived inside my head more than I did in the real world.

Pretty much everyone, I realize now, goes through an awkward phase and feels that their curse is unique. Yet it remains a fact that all the girls in my sixth-grade class glided through puberty overnight, while I alone remained flat-chested (noted by a classmate who spelled out my condition upside down on his scientific calculator), shy, glaringly uncool.

This is where daydreams came in handy. Inside my head, there was nothing stopping me from being the cute sister from the sitcom “Charles in Charge,” or as sassy and stylish as any girl you’d find in Seventeen magazine.

That summer, when I wasn’t chewing my nails over confusing class schedules and locker assignments, all daydreams were directed toward one shining vision: the New Me, the girl I would unveil (to dropped jaws and perhaps a few scattered gasps) when school started in the fall. That summer was my golden opportunity to transform myself.

But how? I started by breaking coolness down into three components: looks, clothing, flirting skills.

On the looks front, my hands were tied. No amount of coffee-guzzling could’ve stunted the growth spurt that had shot me up an entire foot the year before. Now my head rested like a pinball on top of a nervous, toothpick-frail body. A perm might have added a little volume up there, but my mother was staunchly against it and impossible to break.

Also not helping: the Irish-Catholic genes to which I owed my translucently pale, vein-laced skin. Getting golden (a must) would be an uphill battle, so I committed to a rigorous rotisserie approach. When lifeguards at the town pool blew their whistles extra long for adult swim, I’d flip onto my back and coat myself in baby oil. Ten pages into my Baby-sitters Club book, time to reflip onto my stomach. Repeat 1,346 times. I steeled myself against the sizzle of crisping flesh with visions of a bronzed start to school.

On the clothing front, only my grandmother could help me: Grandma, a child during the Depression, understood — even more than I did — how important it was to have the perfect First Day of School Outfit.

During my annual visit with my grandparents, she and I pulled pages from catalogs, thought long and hard about what we wanted the outfit to “say,” and then, after hours of scouring malls, performed a living-room fashion show for my grandfather. Here I got the scattered gasps, the dropped jaws I craved. (My grandparents spoiled me, but they were much more generous than that — they humored me.)

Flirting, though, was the true focus of my daydreams. One thing was for sure: I needed to start school with some prepared banter. Experience had laid bare the dangers of off-the-cuff. I committed some “boy” information to memory: the starting quarterback for the Giants, the definitions of a grand slam and a triple play.

Then it was on to dreaming up the locker-side quips I’d exchange with a curly-haired altar boy from our church, or my whispered chats in study hall with a handsome eighth-grade stranger. Imaginary popularity was the best; if I said something goofy, I’d just rewind the mental tape and start over until the dialogue ran smoothly.

In fact, I’d spent our balloon-chasing car ride quizzing myself with optimistic hypotheticals: What, for instance, would New Me do if a boy asked me out on a date? There were several ways this could go down — in the cafeteria, on a walk home, or most thrilling of all, by phone — and I knew exactly how I would respond in each case. (“Sure” would always be my first word. It was the relaxed, laid-back choice — clearly better than an over-eager “yes” or a dull “O.K.”)

In a blink, it was Labor Day, and then the first day of junior high. After a fluttery night’s sleep, I walked through the doors of Sedgwick Middle School. I wore a killer outfit. I was tan, for me. I’d practiced a casual, hallway-appropriate smile. My head was crammed with more banter than a season of “Gilmore Girls.”

Needless to say, I still felt exactly like myself — self-conscious, shy, very likely to trip on uneven flooring.

Well-dressed, though. And even though I’d spent three months gearing up for this non-moment, this transformation-that-didn’t-happen, I have no memory of disappointment.

My memory instead takes me to that sticky August night when we stalked the balloon. That night, when I’d imagined that there was just a week separating me from my life as a cool kid, I’d been happy. My sister’s knee blatantly flopped into my space in the back seat, but I felt no need to elbow her. My father noted the convenient location of a Dairy Queen for the ride back. And my mother was happy too, her bare feet resting on the dashboard. She hummed along to a Beach Boys song that I didn’t think she liked.

The balloon plopped down in a soccer field. Sitting on the warm hood of the station wagon, we watched it deflate and deform until it was just a melt of lumpy rainbow-colored fabric. Then it was time to chase down some ice cream. It was better than any daydream.

Bridie Clark is the author of “Because She Can,” a novel.