#106: Claudia, Queen of the Seventh Grade
We went from Claudia Kishi, Middle School Dropout to Claudia, Queen of the Seventh Grade — Miss Kishi adjusts quickly! Now that she’s made a few friends and is acing her classes (which honestly doesn’t make sense to me… just because she’s been through them once doesn’t mean she’s now going to immediately grasp all the material without any other help), life is pretty good and Claudia is looking to level up. Enter: the seventh-grade prom (????) and her seventh-grade friends’ insistence on nominating her for Queen.
No one in the BSC except Mallory and Jessi seem too interested in Claudia’s potential coronation, but Claudia is secretly psyched and her friends Shari, Jeannie, Johanna, and Josh go above and beyond to help her win Queen. Not content to just rest on her laurels and ride the wave of the honorary title, Claudia wants to get seventh-graders involved in planning and pulling off the dance and doing a food drive. The faculty advisor is like, “sure you don’t wanna pump the brakes, hon?” but Claudia wants to go full steam ahead and she gets her King, Mark (a wise-ass who was also held back - in third grade) on board, so the faculty advisor okays it.
It’s a lot of hard work, but Claud pulls it off, natch, and she also gets closer to wise-ass King Mark… and they kiss. Claudia is head-to-toe tingly and then goes to a BSC meeting where her friends are all either ignoring her or making fun of seventh grade stuff so she finally explodes and Kristy is sheepishly like, “yeah, sorry, I’m an asshole” and then everything’s fine.
At the “prom,” Claudia and Mark make a grand entrance. Claudia’s friend Josh, who obviously has a crush on her but who in a modern telling of the BSC would definitely be the gay best friend, is rattled when he hears she and Mark kissed but then supportively encourages her to “go for it, girl.” SO SHE DOES. She and Mark kiss again in front of everyone while dancing to the seventh grade song (a U4Me track, of course). She says that two kisses obviously means a relationship (obviously) (????). Has Claudia finally found… The Perfect Boy?
