Dear Daveta,

When I was in the eighth grade, I moved away from the home I had lived in San Jose since I was three. I started school in San Carlos at Tierra Linda, where everyday I ate lunch alone. I sat at the back of a classroom where the boys who sat toward the front laughed and threw spitwads to try to stick them in the holes of the acoustical ceiling every chance they got. I remember one day they made so much noise I didn’t hear the math homework assignment and had to raise my hand to ask Mr. Darley to repeat it. For some reason I will never understand: he walked all the way to the back of the class to slam a ruler hard against my desk, making such a horrific noise I involuntarily broke into tears. There was no one to commiserate with about this, and no one to even get the math assignment from.

As I wandered around the school, sometimes some of the spitwad-throwing boys would make remarks, as awkward eighth grade boys do about girls. And I felt vulnerable and unprotected.

Finally, one day I turned around and asked the girl behind me if I could eat lunch with her. She said she had another friend she usually ate with and had to check with her. When, after a few days, she had not given me an answer, I finally had the nerve to ask what their decision was. She said that she and her friend had decided two was company, three a crowd. So, I continued on alone.

It wasn’t too long after that that you, Daveta, asked me to have lunch with you. I remember I was so thrilled to have someone to walk around the field with after lunch. We made daisy chains, you taught me how to make gum wrapper chains, and I was not so lonely anymore.

Then one weekend my dad took us to the ice rink and I invited you along. There were some boys, high school boys with white T-shirts that they rolled up–the way some guys did and then sometimes stuck cigarettes into the cuffs–and “greaser” hair cuts. They knew and were very friendly with you and began to be friendly with me. They scared me and the fact that you seemed to know them so well also scared me. These were not boys I wanted to consider me a friend. From that time on, I refused to have lunch with you. I do not recall what I said about that to you, but I know I never ever thanked you so much for having kept me company for a while. I simply hung out, now, again, alone.

I learned, in high school, when I finally had met and made friends with some girls, that apparently the two major “cliques” of eighth grade girls had actually been vying for me as a potential member and, when they saw me having lunch with you, they considered me “unworthy” and no longer considered me as a possible member of either “clique.” They never, in the entire time I ate alone, had anyone within their cliques talk to me to find out anything about me. They judged me by whatever it was they had decided about you.

And me? I deserted you without explanation when you were the only one who ever stepped forward and asked me to eat with you when I was so alone. I just wanted to let you know that my behavior, my lack of explanation and subsequent desertion of you, is something that still comes to mind. I want to apologize and to thank you for taking that time with me. The circumstances of hanging out with you saved me from becoming part of a clique and left me, instead, to work out a variety of friendships across the span of high school, but what I did to you and how I treated you was not something I am proud of. I do not think you went on to the high school, so do not even know what happened to you after eighth grade. But I still thank you for stepping up to fill a void in my life at a time I really needed it.

Susan A., age 67