I had always looked at the cafeteria like a battlefield - every table like marked territory for different pacts and factions. The athletes or the jocks as I would like to call them commandeered the west wing, loud and without a care in the world, on their flank were the theatre kids always gesturing, mimicking, and reenacting scenes from movies. There was the brain trust, hunched over mountains of textbooks with quiet intensity. Then in the farthest corner, my corner sat the ones like me- unaffiliated, uninterested, and separated from everything else. They existed there but did not belong anywhere.
Today was like every other day. I carried my tray carefully, eyes low and trying to blend in with the cacophony that surrounded me, I had mastered the art of slipping through the crowd so much so that I almost seemed invisible. As I reached my table I was greeted by the all-too-familiar sound of silence. I had grown to like the quiet. I slid into a seat, across from Mia. She didn't look up from the notebook in front of her as she scribbled absentmindedly across its pages. Mia and I were not exactly friends, we just coexisted in that space at lunchtime. She drew, I read. We didn't ask the other too many questions and no one bothered the other. An unspoken rule of some sort.
One lovely thing about being on the fringe is that you notice everything. How the popular girls did not just laugh - they threw their heads back in such a theatrical manner as though someone were always watching. Or how the guys at the athlete table slapped each other's shoulders with a force that seemed more competitive than affectionate.
As much as I hated it I envied them, for their ease, their belonging. I'd tried once to sit with the theater kids and boy might I say it was some experience. They had invited me after I had innocently complimented one of their outfits in the hallway. For three straight days, I sat through mind-numbing conversations about movie characters and lighting cues that made absolutely no sense to me. On the fourth day, no one bothered to wave me over.
"Where do you go in your head?" Mia asked, her voice snapping me back to reality.
"What?" I asked in a semi-stupor, still a little dazed from the abrupt interruption of my daydream.
"You always look like your mind is far away like you are thinking of something else," She continued, her eyes scanning my face curiously as though she were sketching me in her mind.
I shrugged "Nowhere, really"
"Liar," She said, with a smirk and went back to scribbling in her notebook.
Throughout the rest of the day, I could not get her question out of my mind. Maybe it wasn't so much that I went somewhere that I didn't know where I wanted to be. I thought about all the roles people seemed to slip into at school - athlete, artist, genius, rebel - and how none seemed to fit me. I wasn't funny enough, smart enough, and talented enough. I wasn't enough of anything to be anyone.
The next morning, Mira stopped me in the hallway. "I want to show you something," she said, thrusting her notebook at me.
The page was filled with sketches of faces, each incomplete in some way - a nose missing here, an eye unfinished there - but all of them vivid and alive.
"They're amazing," I said, tracing the lines with my eyes.
"They're you," she replied, almost shyly.
"What?"
Her face flushed. "Not you exactly. Just? the way I see people like us. We're pieces. Bits of everyone we've ever wanted to be, but not one thing. It's not bad, you know. It's just? different."
I stared at the sketches again, my chest tightening. She had put into art what I couldn't put into words.
"Why are you showing me this?" I asked softly.
Mira shrugged, tucking the notebook under her arm. "Because I think you get it. And because maybe it's not so bad, being a little of everything."
For the first time, I didn't feel the urge to shrink away.