Break These Rules by Luke Reynolds

Author:Luke Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

ALWAYS SIT IN YOUR ASSIGNED SEAT …

LYN MILLER-LACHMANN

In my elementary school, the teachers assigned seats not only in the classroom but also in the cafeteria. Doing so made it easier for them to keep track of us, to figure out, say, who went missing or who sent food flying in someone else’s direction.

When I started middle school, I was overjoyed at first that we would be able to choose our own seats rather than having to sit where the teacher told us. I saw it as a privilege of growing up, getting to making our own decisions for at least one period in the school day. My joy disappeared by the end of the first week, however, when I discovered that my fellow students were far more determined to sort us out and make sure we didn’t sit where we weren’t supposed to sit. Their “assigned seats” generally excluded me, due to my unusual and obsessive interests and lack of social skills that I would later find out are signs of the autism spectrum condition known as Asperger’s syndrome. (I always knew I was “different” but was not officially diagnosed until adulthood.)

Sometime in seventh grade, I got tired of sitting by myself. I wanted to be popular, so I decided to sit at the popular girls’ table. In my supreme cluelessness, I believed that sitting at the same table would make me one of them. I paid for my food, brought my lunch tray to the table claimed by the popular girls, and set it down. Without saying a word, one of the girls pushed my tray from the table onto the floor.

This breaking of the unwritten rule, “Always sit in your assigned seat,” inspired—and begins—my middle grade novel Rogue, about a 13-year-old girl with Asperger’s who will do anything to have a friend. Unlike my protagonist, I did not pick my tray off the floor and slam it into the girl’s face (thereby getting kicked out of school for the rest of the year). Instead, I returned to my solitary spot at the other end of the cafeteria for the remainder of my middle school years, and in high school I found other places to eat lunch where I didn’t have to see anyone else and they didn’t see me. One of the girls from the popular table graduated with me, and we ended up going to the same university, but our paths never crossed in the four years we were there. Until I spotted her name in the alumni magazine, I completely forgot that she and I were in the same class in college as well as in middle and high school. She had become just as invisible to me as I was to her in high school.

In the 1990s the psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum published a bestselling book titled Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? In it, she wrote, “most of the early information we receive about ‘others’—people racially, religiously, or socioeconomically different from ourselves—does not come as the result of firsthand experience.

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