Member-only story
Watching the Cool Kids’ Table
Observations from a distance by an uncool kid
I can see the table clearly in my mind. It was a table in a large room in the junior high school I attended a million years ago. It was situated in the middle of the room that functioned as our study hall and, at noon, our lunch room. It had a whitish formica top with brown folding legs. Around it were six chairs where the students sat.
During study hall, there was nothing special about it. Each class period different students were assigned to sit at it randomly. Some students did their assignments from their classes. Some doodled to kill the time. Others simply stared out the window or talked quietly with the other kids at the table. There was no expectation that we actually did school work, and talking was permitted so long as we didn’t make a lot of noise.
When lunchtime came, however, this rather ordinary-looking table transformed into the center of our school universe. As the previous students from the study hall got up to leave, the rest of the school filtered in and took their seats, not unlike dairy cattle entering their barn. Almost as if by magic, it became “the cool kids’ table.” There were no signs denoting that, and while there were no assigned seats in the lunchroom, everyone knew who was allowed to sit there and who was not.
