Popular Kids Meet the Equalizer

"How is your daughter doing in school this year?" I hadn't had a chance to talk to the girls from Valuations since I'd come back to the office. My return to teaching had become only a hiatus from my desk job. I was back after six months. I'd been placed in the middle of the office floor this time, far away from Valuations, where I used to sit.

Tricia sat diagonally from me then, and I'd heard many a story about her daughter being bullied at school, and many a phone conversation between Tricia and the school principal. Now we sat across the table from each other at a department luncheon in a Mexican resturant.

"She's doing well!" Tricia remarked of her daughter, "I think she's finally worked up the guts to stand up to those mean girls."

"Good!" I said. "Middle school girls are the worst. I'm tellin ya. That's where I just came from, and I think its probably the first time in kids' lives where cliques start to form and you start recognizing popular kids and not-popular kids. They don't really seem to be aware of that in elementary school."
"Yes!" Tricia said. "And you know what they're picking on her about this year? Her clothes! If she doesn't have on Hollister or American Eagle she doesn't even want to show up at school."
"Yeah, uniforms have really changed things like that in Metro schools."
We nodded, as did the other ladies next to us at the table.

I always hate department luncheons with no seating charts. Everyone mingles, but you never know who you're going to sit by. If you get stuck with someone who's your superior, you get nervous. If you get stuck with people you don't know, you get left out. If you get stuck with someone you hate, you get annoyed. Its a total crap shoot.

Megan Cates was sitting next to me, adjacent to Tricia. Megan was fairly new. She was mid-twenties, blonde, a tad chunky, and rumored to have tattooed eye make-up, meaning that her eyeliner was permanent and would never come off. That weirded me out.

"I don't even think we had popular kids when I was in school," she said. "Everybody was pretty nice to each other. There were groups that hung out together, but I don't think any one group was quote unquote cooler." She chuckled, and took a sip of water.
"Did you go to a small school?" Tricia asked.
"Well, it was a small town, yes."
We digested that for a minute, crunching our free chips and salsa.
"You mean you seriously never got picked on?"
"No. I can't remember a single insult." Megan smiled. "I guess kids aren't like that anymore. I wonder what causes that."
"TV," Paula chimed in from the other side of Tricia.
"Probably," I added.
We crunched our chips again in silence, listening to the commotion at the other end of the table.
"Well if I've learned anything from teaching its that your experience in school is totally unique to you. Nobody has the same experiences. I don't remember kids being crazy hooligans and running teachers out of their classrooms, but I went through Honors and Advanced Placement classes where that didn't happen that often. Teaching Standard classes and low performers really made me realize that things haven't changed, but my perspective has."
Megan nodded to me, but I didn't stop there.
"So... maybe there were some other kids who DID feel picked-on at your school."
She paused.
"Well come to think of it, yeah. Actually. I guess there was this one girl who was kind of a bully."
That wasn't what I had asked, but I was interested.
"All of my daughter's bullies are girls!" Tricia added. "People don't really call girls bullies. I guess they think they're too feminine, but they can be just as mean and awful as boys."
"Well, this is actually a pretty funny story," Megan started. "When I was in high school I was active in a lot of clubs and stuff. I was on the yearbook staff, and I dated Jeff, who is now my husband--"
"--Oh! That's so cute!" Paula was still listening too.
"Yeah, so I dated my husband for like two years of highschool before we went to college." She took another sip of water and her grin got all big and loaded like this was a super juicy story. "Well. There was this girl at school who I guess wanted to date Jeff? Anyway, she just got so mad at me for dating him. And she was kind of a weird girl, too. Like she's still weird. I think she's a lesbian now or something, like she seriously does DRAG shows and stuff as a MAN, which is funny, because she was mad at me all Senior year of high school for dating Jeff, who is a man." She laughed, and made this face like 'WEIRD-O!' and continued. "Well, she was on the yearbook staff with me, and before the pages went out to be printed, she got into the lists and deleted my picture and my name out of the yearbook altogether."
"Oh no!" Tricia and Paula across the table gaped.
"Your Senior picture!"
"What did you do?"
"Nothing," Megan said. "I mean, they gave me my money back, but there wasn't really anything we could do. The books had already been printed. And they knew who did it, you know. So they kept her from walking the line at graduation; she got an F in yearbook class. But let me tell you. My friends gave that girl hell about doing that to me. I mean, she probably wished she'd never even met me."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh," Megan mused, "They called her some terrible names, drove to where she worked, slashed her tires. You know, stuff like that."
"Oh my god! That's horrible!" I was taken aback.
"Well she reaps what she sows, huh?" Tricia seemed unsurprised.
"That poor girl." I said.
"Well, I wasn't in on any of it, of course. She tried to press charges against me or something for damaging her property but I wasn't even there, you know. And that whole rest of the year was just hell for her I'm sure. But she probably deserved it." Megan smiled. "Other than that, though, nobody was mean or clique-y in my high school. Everybody pretty much got along."

The waiter came a few minutes later with our food, and cross-table comparisons to lower priced Mexican resturants began. But I couldn't stop thinking about the girl. I couldn't stop thinking that the only reason Megan hadn't experienced any bullying and thought that her school didn't have cliques was because she was in the biggest clique of all.

Everybody probably got along from her perspective because they weren't about to cross her or her friends, and she was probably too self-centered to even notice that people didn't like her. I mean, if the girl really did become a lesbian later she was probably going through some intense times in high school. Megan and her friends probably weren't the only ones who thought she was weird. And who knows! Maybe something actually HAD happened between her and Megan's husband Jeff, to make her really angry. Some of the best people I know had the worst times in high school. In fact, it's all the popular kids who end up never leaving town and making anything of themselves. The weirdos are always more successful.

Isn't it strange when you're years and years beyond high school, but you can still feel the old us-and-them principles creeping in? I suddenly knew for a fact that had I been in high school with Megan I would NOT have been able to be her friend. She wouldn't have glanced twice at me. More than likely I would have made friends with the girl that got terrorized. And yet here we were having lunch together just because we worked in the same building.

Man, adolescence sucks.
When I was teaching middle school kids my favorite kid was a class clown who made jokes to roll the insults off his back. He came from a broken home and was the youngest of four, the only boy, and his mother had recently become pregnant with some random guy's kid even though she didn't take care of the four she already had. I wanted so badly to explain to him how adulthood was an equalizer. That he really could be whatever he wanted to be. That no label would ever stick with him his whole life. That he was brilliant and hilarious and good no matter what people said or how many times he was sent to the principal's office.

But you can't explain those things to someone who hasn't experienced them. His future felt like a white void where he didn't even exist yet. It didn't matter what I said, he was not going to be able to fill in those blanks. His only reality was now. And for all he knew it would be all he'd ever know.

And thats how I imagine that girl that Megan was talking about. I imagine her balling up her fists because the only reality is now and she's trapped; she can't move.
It makes me wish I could teach again, just to talk to her.

I put down my fork and looked at Megan laughing at something Tricia said.
She was a temp just like me.
Adulthood really is the equalizer.