Recess for one
There’s some social pressure shy students feel when asked to share their baon. But a little courage and understanding goes a long way to appeasing high school angst.
Stepping into a new classroom on the first day of school is one of the loneliest experiences a student can have. Most of the time, people don’t notice the click-clack of your leather shoes as you enter through the door. You then drift towards the most vacant quadrant of the classroom and settle in. But if people do notice — if a dozen unfamiliar faces turn towards you just as you’re making your entrance — then you keep your head down. You take the nearest empty seat and you somehow pretend to look busy on the first day of school. I kept my head down either way. I’ve always found it difficult to make friends. In high school, I was who Stephen Chbosky would call a wallflower. I sat to the side during soirees and stood on the fringes of every social circle in class. I only really spoke when spoken to. In college, I dreaded walking from one class to the next. I hated bumping into acquaintances in the hallways because I knew I wouldn’t be confident enough to say “hi” to them. To this day, it takes an immense amount of willpower on my part to start a conversation with someone else.
High school was a lot quieter, though. Recess was a thing. You didn’t have to jog across campus in 10 minutes just to make it to another class. A high school classroom was your territory. But even within that territory, lines were drawn and cliques were formed. The jocks had their side, the popular student leaders had the platform, and everyone else found their own corners. I tried to stay in the middle of the Venn diagram.
One day, I could see the red of two individually wrapped cookies inside the Tupperware container for my baon. I cracked open the lid and unwrapped one.
“Uy, sarap naman!” In the time it took for me to raise the cookie to my mouth, one of the class jocks had moved from their side of the room to right beside my seat. “Penge?” His hands were clasped in front of him.
I wasn’t sure what to say, or if I should respond verbally at all. I let him take a piece, and he thanked me as he walked back to his friends. After eight years of attending an all-boys grade school, you get conditioned not to stand in the way of people bigger than you.
This continued for some time. Each day I would find two more cookies in the Tupperware, and each day the group of people standing beside my seat seemed to grow. The first cookie would have one piece taken out of it, then two, and then only half a cookie would remain in the packaging. People would greet me in the morning by saying, “Cookies!” and they would approach me with their palms out. Once in a while the urge to protest bubbled up within me, but I repeatedly convinced myself to stay silent. If I was to remain with these people for the following three years, I wanted to remain on their good side.
But at a certain point, I realized that this was more than I wanted to get used to. One recess, my youngest classmate — he was only 11 in freshman year — returned from the washroom to find that our other classmates were ransacking his lunchbox. They made no attempt to be subtle about their act of plunder; they ate his food in plain sight as he objected behind them. His outcry fell on deaf ears. I realized that, at his age, I was in grade school and I was on the receiving end of similar laughter.
If I was to remain with these people for three more years, there had to be some order. When the recess bell rang the next day, I tried to avoid suspicion by opening the Tupperware while it was still inside my backpack. I plucked out the cookie and began to peel off its wrapping.
In my peripheral vision, I could see one of my jock classmates swivel his head towards me. He got up out of his seat and approached. This was it.
Before he could say anything, I faced him and said, “Sorry, I’m really hungry today. Could I have this? Sorry.” The grade schooler in me held his breath, fists up to block against the beating.
“Oh, okay! No problem,” he said. And he walked back.
I continued to hold my breath. I expected to see him whisper to his friends, then they would look over their shoulders and glare at me. Another apology was poised on my lips.
But nothing happened. I exhaled. Recess continued. I raised the cookie to my lips and took a bite.
Things changed quite suddenly. In the days that followed, as my classmates continued to ask me for food, I began to understand that my saying “no” was in no way tantamount to my rejection of them. More importantly, I was learning that my classmates were fully capable of respecting my boundaries and deserved much more from me than my fear. I just had to give them a chance. If I was to be with them for so long, I couldn’t afford to be paralyzed.
During our high school senior retreat, I got a “palanca” in the form of a scrap of paper from one of my jock classmates. It said, in nearly indiscernible scribbles, “Glad we got close thanks to your cookies!” I guess things worked out in some ways.
As for my 11-year-old classmate, the class apologized to him and unanimously agreed during the retreat — he was 14 then — that he was the best thing that had happened to us.
Stepping into a new classroom on the first day can be terrifying and lonely. But you can bet that people are going to be completely different at the end of it all. It’s easy to forget that you don’t have to come out of it alone.