I sit down at our table: no one's here yet. But within seconds, the vultures (a.k.a. my friends) swoop down on our table.

"What are you looking at?" Jackie says crossly. Whatever. She is in a bad mood as always, so I sort of ignore her and turn to Angela.

"Oh, my gosh! You'll never believe what happened to me on the bus today! So I was sitting there next to..."

"Holy. Goodness. Of. My. LIFE!!! Health class was amazing. I have stories to tell youuuuu!" Taylor trills as she plops down to the table, (Angela is still talking. We're used to it. It's like white noise to a certain point.)

"One Tree Hill last night made me want to punch through my TV! No joke." Meghan wails, and scoots onto the end of a bench. Melissa is right next to her, opening her brown paper bag and spilling out a turkey sandwich and bag of Doritos.

"God, I know! I wanted to kill Dan. Seriously!" Melissa points out. I turn and look, and Erika and Kiran have descended on the table. Kiran wordlessly unzips her lunch box and digs in, now participating in Angela's conversation.

"Oh! Kiran! Ok so I was just telling Alyssa and Taylor about the bus ride today. It was crazy! So anyway, I went to switch seats and..."

Andi unwraps her gourmet macaroni salad, and one of the Special Ed kids starts serenading her. I snort into my napkin, only because the look on her face was priceless.

"Andi, hey, I found another picture of David Archuleta, your future husband. Do you want it?" I ask her. She's so obsessed with American Idol and this David kid on the show, and I like to find pictures of him for her when I can.

"Of course!" Her eyes grow wide. Shrieking, she grabs the magazine cut out from my hands. "He's so dreamy."

Erika wiggled down the bench and started talking to me.

"Hey, so about Friday. Do you want me to bring my camera so we can upload the videos from DC?"


"Yeah, I think that would be a good idea." I mumbled, talking around the straw of my juice box. We were having a party on Friday, just me and Erika and Taylor. It was my mistake of mentioning it in front of the other people who weren't invited.

"What are you guys talking about?" Jackie asks darkly. I glance at Erika, and we both know that Jackie would get mad if she knew we were having a party with out her.

"N-N-Nothing." I slowly say. Jackie's eyes turn into slits.

"What the crap, Alyssa, just tell me."

"So then I got off the bus and everything was fine again but he's still following me around and..."

"Hah, and then this one girl asked the stupidest question ever. Can you believe she wants to be a Harvard lawyer? Ugh, I wanted to punch her in the face. Anyways, Mrs. M got so mad at her because she thought she was joking!"

"We should have a One Tree Hill marathon over the weekend! If I don't have soccer, I mean."

"Oh my gosh, you should have seen it Alyssa, the look on the 6th grader's faces when I was running through the orchestra room like 'MY TACOOO!'"

"Totally. Although we'll have to shoo Jessica over to Mary's house so we can have no annoyances for our viewing party! She's so annoying."

"Alyssa, do you want to come over Thursday for 'Office Night'? We can have buffalo wing pizza and watch it in the theater!"

A whistle blows, then two, then four. All of the gym teachers are grinding our conversation to a halt, and unanimously we look up, only to bite our lips and put our heads back down. We're getting a stern eye from Mrs. R, because we won't shut up. Well fine then! It's just another normal day in the lunch room. What would I do without the comic relief from my friends. Nonstop chatter, that's pretty much us. Thank God for lunch!