I was a twig-sized seventh-grader at Rowe Junior High School — the puniest of ranks in the strangest and most emotionally unstable three years of a human being’s “wonder years.”

I sat at a table with my loud and obnoxious friends in an echo chamber of a lunchroom full of loud and obnoxious strange and emotionally unstable pre- and newly minted teens.

As I lifted a hunk of Mom’s chocolate cake to my mouth — because, why waste time using a fork — one of the big kids, a blond-headed ninth-grader in a jean jacket, and his buddies passed our table.

The big kid casually smooshed the chocolate cake into my face, filling my nostrils and smearing my glasses with white cream frosting.

The big kid and his buddies howled with laughter that barely registered on the Richter scale of the typical lunchroom commotion.

I was incensed. I did what any dweeby little seventh-grader would do — I tattled.

What I meant to do was to ask the lunchroom monitor — art teacher Mr. Hummer, who wore hearing aids that I suspected he blissfully turned off during his duty — for permission to go to the boys’ room to wash frosting off my face.

Mr. Hummer demanded to know who did it. Forgetting the code of not ratting out a fellow student, I spluttered a detailed description of the big kid.

When I got back from the boys’ room, the big kid and his freshly issued detention slip awaited.

“Meet me out front after school.” He spoke softly, but I heard every chilling word, even above the lunchroom ruckus.

“I can’t. I have to catch my bus.”

“We. Are going. To fight. Meet me out front after school.”

So after school … I never dove onto my bus so swiftly.

I lived way out in the country. I couldn’t just walk home. Besides, if I fought the big kid, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere.

In second grade, I once punched a bully while three kids held him down on the ground. He didn’t feel a thing. I cried for years from the pain of hitting someone.

I didn’t know how to fight.

The school year came to a close and the big kid moved on to Conneaut High School. I still had two more years to serve at the junior high.

We never crossed paths again — I was ever vigilant (read “frightened”) about that.

I saw him once at the Ashtabula County Fair. One glimpse of his angry glare was enough to send me melting into the crowd. The advantage of melting is that once you’re a gooey puddle of cowardice, it’s easy to ooze through cracks and crevices to disappear.

I’ve been thinking about that big kid a lot lately. I’ve been assured by mutual friends that he’s really a great guy — warm, generous and hilarious.

I never saw that. I wasn’t looking.

What I can see now is that back in those junior high years, all of us were scared little kids. Weird things we couldn’t understand tortured our minds and bodies. Voices cracked, then deepened. Any little thing could set off shock waves of anger or hilarity — sometimes simultaneously. We mocked anyone who still cuddled a teddy bear — and hoped that no one caught us playing with our G.I. Joes and Barbies behind closed doors.

We desperately wanted to be as cool as we thought everyone else was. It made us do stupid things.

Like smashing cake into a little kid’s kisser.

And tattling over nothing like a whiny 3-year-old.

The big kid and I were 12 and 14 back then. Now we’re 65 and 67. I doubt that he wants to take a swing at me anymore. But if he does, I owe him the opportunity.

What I’d rather do is sit across a lunch table from him and share old times. Maybe Mom would bake a cake, and we could share it.

And if he wanted to smoosh it in my face again, that would be as hilarious now as I realize it was then. We’d both fall to the floor giggling like a couple of little boys on the playground.

And then someone would have to help us back to our feet. Because we’ve grown up. Grown older.

But maybe we’ve also grown the sense to know that we’re in this together.

Eat cake with Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.