A New Home

 

In my early childhood I moved around a lot. My education was always different. I didn’t go to a public or private school for a while. Elementary school was split between public and homeschool for me. At the age of 11, I finally moved back to upstate New York, and I lived in a small town called Rhinebeck. There was pretty much only one school for our whole district, so I was forced to go there. Entering in 6th grade, most of the 70 kids or so in my grade already grew up with each other through preschool or even as early as kindergarten. 

As you could imagine, a new kid in a small grade was sort of the talk of the town. Some people were very interested in meeting me and getting to know me and some weren’t. I was getting to know everyone and learning a lot about the place pretty quickly. There were all these different yet stereotypical cliques that you would expect from “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” or some other young coming of age movie. At the cafeteria, there were 3 rows and 3 columns of tables. All the jocks took the first 3 tables down the left side when you walked in, since there was another extra table in the front. The girls took most of the tables on the last row.

When I made my first friend at the school, I sat at his table which always seemed to have different kids every day. He wasn’t the most popular kid, but he’d already been there for a while, so he already had a couple of friends. After being there for a bit, my new kid spark started to fade away and he just kind of forgot about me. This was the start of what seemed like a never ending journey for me, which was finding a new home. I forgot that I was still very new to all of the other kids in my grade, and while that notion felt daunting, it excited me. 

I spent a lot of time making individual friends in classes, which was pretty fun. When it came to lunch and recess, it was a completely different story. I didn’t want to sit with my first friend anymore. I needed to find another table to sit at and make new friends. Of course, I went to the main nerdy group first. They were the nicest and easiest to talk to. Some of them were always drawing, or talking about video games and their classes. The funniest thing to me was that a lot of them didn’t necessarily have the best grades, and I might’ve even had better grades than some of them. After a few weeks it got kind of old, so I decided that I’d sit somewhere else this time. 

Now this was a few months into my first year of school here in Rhinebeck. I was taking the school bus which I hated, and it was the short bus. I guess it was a miracle that I ended up here. On one cold fall day, I decided I would sit somewhere else at the cafeteria. I knew a couple of kids who were part of the jock groups, and that was kind of my ticket into one of their lunch tables. I remember my parents packed me something they usually didn’t. A pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon, something they would never really eat for lunch but only for breakfast, and very rarely at that.

When I pulled it out of my bag all eyes were on me. I was a bit embarrassed because it was nothing like what their parents had packed for lunch. Most of them had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, carrots, along with apple juice. I was a bit worried about what they thought about me. I thought I looked like a weirdo, but hanging out at their table ended up being fine. We talked about the usual, sports and girls. All of a sudden, I ran out of things to say and watched as the table got quiet for a second. There was nothing for me to add to the conversation anymore. I wasn’t the most athletic kid by any means, I just liked playing soccer at recess here and there, ever since I was little. Hell, I thought I liked girls but I was just a dumb kid. I never really had crushes, I just pretended to so I could seem normal. I fit in a sense, but I didn’t feel like I belonged. There was almost no part of me that wanted to make myself part of this group anymore. They kept talking about whatever dumb jocks talk about, and I just remember feeling so bored. 

I hooked my little prepubescent arm around a dinky cafeteria chair, and turned my head. There it was, my new home. There was no more worrying about which table to choose anymore. The middle table was reserved for no one. It was a table for all the kids who didn’t belong to any group. You could sort of call us a bunch of misfits. I already knew some of the kids that sat there, and it blew my mind how I wasn’t sitting there for so long. There were almost a different bunch of kids sitting there every day. Some were regulars and others would pop in from time to time. While this was a whole new group, I didn’t feel like a new kid anymore. I loved it. These people felt like they’d been my friends for a while. I could just be myself. There was no need for me to impress anyone anymore. I didn’t have to look for a group to give myself an identity. It didn’t matter that I was once a homeschooled kid, and that I never really got to go to public school for a decent length of time.