The Lunch Table...

    Most mothers consider lunch to be just a normal part of the day. You eat. You talk. Then you go back to work. In a teenager's case, it's a bit different. To most people, lunch is everything, and where you sit can mean the difference between being prom queen and being dumped in the trashcan.

But there's no mobility between the classes...sorry...tables (just finished World History reading). Sitting at a different lunch table is like crossing boundaries into enemy territory. Literally. You don't want to mess with those plaid clad girls. They can get pretty fierce defending their turf.

First, as you start walking over to the table, red tray in hand, or worse: a bagged lunch, you get a general stare in your direction, as if to say, "You must be going past us." Then, you inch a bit closer, take a huge deep breath, and set the tray down at the empty seat on the end of the table.
That's when it gets bad. The dropped jaws and bulging eyes are definitely a bad sign. You shrug and grin and say with your voice as not shaky as you can manage, "Hey, it's a free country! I'm Mary.What's your name?" Even though you know full well what their names are. But they're still glaring as you open up your crinkling brown bag in their silence. You weren't expecting a reply on the first day.
The rest of lunch you continue to be the center of conversation, although, you're never actually included in it. They sneer and gape and whisper beneath their manicured hands. And you, for goodness sakes, just keep munching on your PB and J, pretending to be oblivious, though the fragments you hear are really cutting your self-confidence down to an all time low.
At the end of lunch (you can't believe you made it through the whole 45 minutes), you get up, say "Bye guys" as if you've been best friends all along, throw your bag away, and walk off to the next class alone, all the while knowing that tomorrow you will be sitting with them again. Because you have to.

Alright, maybe it's not THAT bad, but you get the point. But why does it have to be that way? Why are you always defined by who you sit with, yet you can't sit anywhere but where you are already sitting? Why do you have to stay confined in one little seat at one little table when there's the whole cafeteria to explore? Why do other people make the rules about where you sit? Why not you? And then, why does poor Mary even want to sit with those people? What can she gain from changing her place on the social spectrum? Friends like those girls? They seemed real nice...not.

Anyway, as always, this has turned into a rant, but there will be more on lunch tables and on popularity later.