At an age when peers become more important than parents, these three buddies Jared Garber, left, Grey Lehrhaupt, center, and Drew Bradley are awakening to middle school’s cliques and strict gender codes. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)

At the height of summer, a trio of tween boys walk away from the muggy heat and into the chilled air of their favorite place, the hockey rink.

This is where their friendship was formed. It’s where they unleash their aggressions, test their abilities and confront disappointment, and where they saw one of their own through tragedy. It’s where they learned that the claw game is totally rigged but still beg their parents for quarters to see if they can beat it.

Jared Garber, Grey Lehrhaupt and Drew Bradley come to this rink near their homes in Upper Bucks County, Pa., five or six times a week. There is no practice this night, but they gather anyway to eat tater tots and chicken fingers from the concession stand.

In just over a month, the boys will start a new school year at three middle schools. As they become tweens, they are reaching a point in their development when peers tend to matter more than parents and pecking orders shift. When, just as boys begin to pull away from their families, they are hit with immense social pressure to be strong and impassive — to fit the masculine mold of toughness. They are about to be tossed into a social ecosystem that prizes alpha males over quirky kids.

Sitting in the booth behind them, their parents know their influence is about to wane.

They know that although their boys are hockey players, they are not typical jocks. Jared wears braces and glasses and is so skinny the outline of his shoulder bones shows through his T-shirt. Grey has blond, wavy hair that falls past his neck and a collection of essential oils at home in his room. Drew spends his spare time studying vocabulary words to prepare for achievement exams. All three came to hockey through the passions of their parents, and it turned into a passion of their own.

Sometimes even excelling at that — a game known for its brutality — doesn’t seem to impress other guys. At Drew’s school, all the soccer and basketball players sit together at lunch. And if he plays his usual hockey position, goalie, during a similar game at gym or recess, things don’t always go well. “When I play goalie I get bullied,” he says. “If I let in one shot, they’re like, ‘Boooooo!’ ”

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Psychologists say all manner of boy codes are about to be thrown at these three: Be aggressive. Don’t show a girl you like her (too much). Pretend you don’t care about school. Never cry, especially in front of other guys.

Today, the boys throw their arms around one another, affectionately. They speak freely about why they are friends — because, Grey explains, “we’re all nice people.” They still have stuffed animals at home and don’t mind being seen with their moms.

But how much longer will the sweetness last?

Grey Lehrhaupt, left, and Jared Garber are at their local ice rink multiple times a week. Grey and his friends know the claw game at the ice rink is rigged, but they like to try their hand anyway. Socialization for boys such as Jared and his friends, seen here getting on the school bus, intensifies in middle school as they seek to figure out what kind of young men they will be.

For all genders, adolescence is marked by fissures: cutting off childlike ways, even childhood friends, and relying less on family.

Best-selling books and movies have focused on the cutthroat agony of girls at this stage (“Mean Girls,” “Reviving Ophelia,” “Eighth Grade”). But boyhood at this juncture has largely been ignored in pop culture and elsewhere.

Yet it’s this period when the prevailing culture tightens its grip on boys, asking them to adhere to strict protocols of masculinity to secure their spot in the social rankings and to stay safe from the bullying and exclusion that can result if they step outside of the mold.

Michael Thompson, a psychologist and co-author of the book “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,” says that for boys, it can feel like manhood “has to be won.”

“Are you strong enough? Are you athletic enough? And in middle school: Are your muscles big enough? Are you tall enough? Is your [penis] big enough?” he explains. “That’s middle school for boys, and that’s pretty crappy.”

The result is not just that some boys feel compelled to assert their superiority through athletic and romantic conquests. It’s that others, feeling unable to compete and rejected by a society that doesn’t seem to value their unique gifts, shut themselves off from the world. They turn to alternate realities online, sink into video game addictions and prefer virtual relationships to personal ones. Destructive behaviors of neo-Nazis, mass killers and incels — misogynistic, involuntarily celibate men — have grown out of men’s feelings of ostracization.

Almost a quarter of boys ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school 0 10 20 percent Bullied 24.5% Made fun of, called names or insulted 16.2 13.2 Spread rumors Pushed, shoved, tripped or spit on 8.9 Threatened with harm 5 Excluded from activities on purpose 4.8 Tried to make do things they did not want to do 3.6 Property destroyed on purpose 3.3 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2011. Almost a quarter of boys ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school 0 5 10 15 20 percent 24.5% Bullied Made fun of, called names or insulted 16.2 13.2 Spread rumors Pushed, shoved, tripped or spit on 8.9 Threatened with harm 5 Excluded from activities on purpose 4.8 Tried to make do things they did not want to do 3.6 3.3 Property destroyed on purpose Source: National Center for Education Statistics, School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2011. Almost a quarter of boys ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school 0 5 10 15 20 percent Bullied 24.5% 16.2 Made fun of, called names or insulted 13.2 Spread rumors 8.9 Pushed, shoved, tripped or spit on 5 Threatened with harm 4.8 Excluded from activities on purpose 3.6 Tried to make do things they did not want to do Property destroyed on purpose 3.3 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2011.

Judy Y. Chu, a human biology professor at Stanford University, says that as very young children, boys are socialized to mask their sweetness and emotional attachments. The less emotionally vulnerable they are, the higher they land in the boy hierarchy — where independence and toughness reign.

That socialization intensifies in middle school when boys like Jared, Grey and Drew seek to figure out what kind of young men they will be, and what the world will think of them.

“The patriarchy kind of sucks for everyone,” Chu says. Boys are “destined to strive to a measure of masculinity [to which] they will always fall short.”

Sometimes playing hockey, a sport known for brutality, isn’t enough for Jared, left, and Grey, right, to impress their male peers.

Grey, 11, opens a “secret drawer” in his wooden bedroom desk. “It’s all baby stuff,” he confides, holding up a plush toy and an old burp cloth. “I always touch it because it’s so soft.”

A shoe organizer holds his video game controllers, and a miniature hockey net sits beside his closet. Next to Grey’s essential oils is a glowing Himalayan salt rock. “I need it to sleep better,” he explains. Since preschool, family friends have nicknamed Grey “Spicoli” after the jovial pot smoker from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

Grey has that same surfer-dude breeziness. And he doesn’t want to trade it for teenage angst. “I’m gonna try not to be, like, super emo and stuff. I’m gonna try.”

Tomorrow is the first day of sixth grade. Grey skipped middle school orientation — “I just didn’t want to talk about school yet” — so he doesn’t yet know his schedule, the location of his locker or the combination to his lock. “I hope they’re gonna tell me,” he shrugs. “Oh, well.”

Nicole Ellis interviews Joe Ghartey about how being a biracial kid in the U.S. and in Ghana helped him learn to accept his transgender son, Penelope. (Nicole Ellis /The Washington Post)

His older brother, Aeryk, 14, just finished middle school. But, right now, Aeryk is in the bedroom next door and can be heard through the wall, shouting at video games.

The brothers used to be close but not so much over the past couple of years. Like so many young teenage boys, Aeryk turned inward, engaging less with his family and more with his screens.

At this moment, Grey still adores his parents — “they’re cool” — and doesn’t understand why Aeryk feels so differently. “He kind of just wants to move out,” Grey says softly.

Grey’s parents, Kerri and Adam Lehrhaupt, have been stunned by Aeryk’s withdrawal at home, even as their eldest continues to be a standout athlete and straight-A student.

They know Grey will have his own evolution. “He’s a social chameleon. If you put him in a great environment, then he’s a great kid,” says Kerri, a health-care consultant. “If you put him in a not-so-great environment, he reflects that back in his behavior.”

Grey is occasionally teased for looking like a girl because of his long hair but still sees himself as part of the “popular” crowd. His mother is hoping the forces of middle school — the pressure to be a guy’s guy or to take risks in the pursuit of popularity — won’t fray his sense of self.

Which, at this point, is strong. Grey says the person he looks up to most in the world is himself. “Because,” he says, “it’s cool that I have all these amazing things that I’m good at. Like mini-golf.”

Heading into their children’s middle school years, parents such as Jared’s mother, Jen Garber, know their influence is about to wane.

Jared, 12, bounds off his new school bus after his inaugural day of middle school. It’s the first time in years he hasn’t ridden with his younger brother and sister.

“Oh, it was a good day, you can tell,” his father, Jeff Garber, says from their front porch, clearly relieved to see Jared chat with a neighbor buddy and walk toward the house with a smile.

On the couch next to his boxer puppy, Ivan, Jared gives his parents a little bit of the lowdown. The bus ride was fine. He has friends in his classes. He likes the freedom to talk in the halls but misses recess.

Not that recess was a panacea. In fifth grade, he saw boys get ridiculed during sports. The “popular kids,” he says, would sometimes yell at unathletic guys, just because “they’re not very good at it.”

Sometimes Jared would try to help. “I’d say, ‘Don’t listen to them. You’re fine the way you are,’ ” he recalls.

Jared’s dad has loved hockey since childhood and now coaches the high school junior varsity team. He put Jared in skates as a preschooler. These days, he says, Jared can outskate him. “I can’t coach him anymore.”

Jeff sounds both a little sad about it, but also proud. “I’m living vicariously through him,” he says with a laugh.

But the feeling that Jared doesn’t need him anymore gnaws at Jeff. It recently prompted him to open a giant jigsaw puzzle he could work on with his son. They would be face to face, Jeff figured, chatting about whatever was on Jared’s mind. They could feel close, even as Jared begins to pull away, stepping into a life of his own.

The idea succeeded at first; they both got excited by it. But then Jeff noticed that Jared was working on the puzzle when he wasn’t around. “Now he just does it without me.”

Inside their world We asked for a few pictures of the boys’ lives. Drew Grey Jared

A week into the school year, Drew sits on a couch in a darkened living room with his mom, Carol Bradley. On a nearby kitchen counter is his father’s old Philadelphia Phillies hat, resting on a box that contains his father’s ashes. Every day they light a candle that smells like the man they miss.

Drew, Jared and Grey were all on the ice in November 2017, when Drew’s dad, Craig, who was coaching, fell suddenly ill and was rushed to the hospital. A week later, he died of a hemorrhagic stroke at age 40.

Craig was patient and quiet. He was the family’s link to the hockey world, having played goalie for Princeton University. He also was Drew’s idol.

Drew Bradley plays the same hockey position his late father once did: goalie.

Drew is a quiet, intellectual 12-year-old who’s been bullied on and off since the second grade. It’s at hockey where he feels most accepted. Like his dad, Drew became a goalie. With teammates, he’s still reserved but more relaxed.

And at the rink he can exorcise some frustrations. One of Carol’s biggest worries is that her son won’t ask for help when he needs it. That he might feel like he needs to be strong, rather than sad. Though Drew sees a counselor, he doesn’t otherwise talk much about his feelings. But they come out on the ice.

“It’s a way to get rid of emotions,” he says, “because you’re just channeling it into being better in the sport and not being angry.”

Occasionally Carol sends Drew off with Craig’s childhood best friend, Mike Warner. They recently went shopping for new hockey gear, and Mike told Drew stories about his dad. Carol, who was born in Nicaragua and doesn’t have much family in town, understands her son might feel like he needs to be the man of the house now. She’s hoping that in “Uncle Mikey,” Drew will find a male role model to lean on and the compassion of someone who understands the loss he’s suffered.

But Drew isn’t looking for attention because of the tragedy. The day Craig died, Carol sent Drew to play in his hockey game, as he normally would have. She waited until the game was over to tell him his father had passed.

“I know,” he responded. “I think he was here because I’ve never played that well.”

Jared and Grey didn’t quite know what to say to Drew after his father’s death. Jared’s parents were at the hospital with Carol when the neurologist said he wouldn’t make it. When they came home, Jared asked his mom how to treat Drew now. “Just treat him like he’s your friend,” she told him through tears. “Like you always did.”

“I didn’t really want to make a big deal out of it,” Drew says.

And, looking back, he thinks his friends did exactly the right thing. “They gave me support,” he says. “Just, like, being my friends.”

“It’s a way to get rid of emotions,” Drew says of playing hockey, “because you’re just channeling it into being better in the sport and not being angry.”

Now, after a month of middle school, on a rare night without ice time, the three buddies are once again squished together in a booth for dinner, this time at a local restaurant. Drew is wearing a button-down shirt and shiny new shoes. He visited an all-boys prep school today, one of a few to which he’ll apply for high school.

“It’s cool because education-wise it’s better than my school,” he says. Also: They have ice cream there. And no girls.

Girls may someday become objects of affection but not at the moment. For Drew, they are mostly frustrating. Boys and girls both talking in class? It’s the boys who get in trouble. When he tries to get to his locker, he sometimes can’t because there’s a gaggle of girls huddled in the way, laughing, talking and making his life miserable. A girl who bullied him on the school bus in fourth grade threatened: “You can’t do anything about it because I’m a girl.” Already this year, a female classmate dug her fingernails into him, he says, drawing blood. But he didn’t tell their teacher. “Because it just doesn’t help,” he shrugs.

All three boys agree that teachers seem automatically inclined to favor girls over boys. “I think,” Jared says, “they just have a better reputation.”

For now, the prospect of dating is met with raised eyebrows and shaking heads. “No, no, no,” Jared insists.

This summer, on an app called Houseparty that allows big groups to join the same call, Grey overheard several girls admit to being enamored with him. It was not welcome information.

“I don’t want them to have crushes on me,” he says. So he came up with a plan: “Every time I see them, I try to stay away.”

Over video games on their phones, multiple chocolate milks and french fries, they talk about how things are different now that they’re in middle school. The girls are taller, different somehow.

“This one girl pulled out a pencil in class. I didn’t know it was a makeup pencil,” Grey tells his friends. “She put it toward her eye, and I was like ‘No! Wait! What are you doing?’ And then she did her eyebrow or something.”

In their own words Here’s what other boys are saying “It’s not stress, but there’s a lot of worry about ‘We gotta do this thing right.’ All these different projects. Different teachers. It builds up over time. So you gotta be careful and manage it as well as you can.” Alex Murray, 13, Manassas, Va. “I feel like parents don’t realize the social aspect of video games. A bunch of my friends socialize a lot by video games. Like Fortnite. Sometimes they tell me to get off when I’m playing with my friends and stuff and I feel like I don’t get to do as much with my friends as I would like to.” Alex Hoffman, 12, Needham, Mass. “I like to joke around a lot. We like to move around and stuff, and teachers, everytime we laugh, they stop the whole class. Even though we’re not the only ones laughing. Most of the teachers are kind of sexist. Girls can do anything they want and never get in trouble. But as soon as boys disrupt the class the once, it’s serious. ... They should give us more freedom.” Jason Ward, 12, Austin “Most of us have things going good with our lives. We have food, water, everything that’s needed. And we have phones, and we look at the news apps and see the things that are happening and it scares us sometimes. Me and my friends sometimes talk about the school shootings happening. ... I myself am worried that might happen at any school around our campus.” Dillan Wernecke, 12, Gainesville, Fla.

The boys do have friends who’ve begun “dating.” “Well, apparently,” Jared sighs. “They say they’re dating, but they’re not going anywhere.”

At the end of a recent school dance Grey brought a “lady friend” a slushie. “Everyone thought I liked her. . . . I didn’t know what giving a slushie was,” he says. “If you give a girl a slushie, that means you like her.”

But maybe, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, Grey did know it meant something. And maybe he was trying it out, just to see what would happen.

Of his new life in middle school, Jared says he has friends in his classes, he likes the freedom to talk in the halls, but he also misses recess. Drew is a quiet, intellectual kid who’s been bullied on and off since the second grade. It’s at hockey where he feels most accepted. Grey wishes every grown-up knew this about being a 12-year-old: “Sometimes you just gotta be with your friends.”

There is so much to navigate in this new world. Already, social groups have begun to form. At Drew’s school, the jocks sit at one lunch table. “And then our group is just the other kids,” he explains.

Grey’s classmates have divided up into the “mean kids” and “the popular kids.” There is also a goth group and bunch of boys who vape in the bathrooms. “You can, like, smell it,” he says, eyes wide with shock.

The three hockey players are figuring out where they fit. They are clinging to their old friendships, while also exploring new ones. They are, increasingly, rolling their eyes at their parents and getting immersed in video games. They are grappling with the expectation that they be tough and strong. But the stuffed animals are still around. And so is the unabashed affection for one another.

If there’s one thing Grey wishes every grown-up knew about what it’s like to be a 12-year-old boy, it’s this: “Sometimes you just gotta be with your friends.”

Like now, when the chocolate lava cake arrives. And the three, sitting so close their shoulders touch, have a spoon fight, laughing to see who can get the best parts.

Grey has a surfer-dude breeziness. And he doesn’t want to trade it for teenage angst. “I’m gonna try not to be, like, super emo and stuff. I’m gonna try,” he said.

Credits: Photos by Calla Kessler. Instax photos by Jen Garber, Drew Bradley, Kerri Lehrhaupt, Grey Lehrhaupt and Jared Garber. Photo editing by . Graphics by . Video by . Design by .