Cafeteria

The Buckman Elementary School cafeteria is still to this day the grandest room I've ever seen in any public school building. The brick archways around the three main entrances and above the stage, the authentic century old velvet curtains hung across the stage, the geometric tiled floors. All those features and more of the room combine to form a certain elegant sturdiness. Most often, students enter the hall through the lunch line. The way the kitchen is arranged is such that the children line up on the other side of the entrance to get their food. The hungry kids proceed to slowly make their way across a 30 or so foot section of buffet until they reach the register and pay for their surprisingly high quality food.

The salad bar lies outside of the buffet area and students are required always by a watchful parent volunteer to collect a suitable amount of fruit and vegetables before moving on to a table of their choice. Once the students are done with their lunch they must wait to be excused from the table by another parent volunteer who checks to see that they have eaten enough nutritious food. Upon being excused the kids are free to walk down the long hallway through the gymnasium and out onto the blacktop playground.

It was at one of these long-hall like bench-tables that The climax of the story takes place. One of the many kids who bullied me went so far as to spit in my food. I just had had enough. I only ever wanted to be friends with these people and I simply couldn't understand how they could be so consistently vitriolic to me. And so, having been involved in judo and kickboxing since the beginning of the last summer I proceeded to utilize the skills taught to me by senseis Servignat and Frager had taught me and beat up the bully with a flurry of kicks and a choke that had to be pried apart by the frantic parents who of course hadn't witnessed the instigating bullying and spitting.