When I was a freshman, one of my best friend’s favorite lunch table topics was to compliment my other best friend’s writing skill. Almost once aweek, after I got my food, I would sit down at our usual round table by the salad bar and pick up words like “amazing essay” or “perfect writer” from their conversation. When reaching the climax, my best friend would even use hand gestures, the kind used by only obsessed fans when they see the love of their life. Meanwhile, my other friend, head slightly drooped, would be picking little round olives with her fork one at a time, the corner of her lips slightly rising into a smile, uncontrollably.

My “amazing essay” friend and I shared one very harsh English teacher. Only less than a handful of people in all of her three English classes would be receiving an A- or above every time. She never told us about our class average, but we had figured it should be something around B. The majority of the class would be very unsatisfied, my friend most certainly included, but I’m still not sure, even till this day, if I was, too. I only remember really liking that teacher, whether I loved her paper correcting technique or not.

Every time after our teacher handed back our papers, I would have to watch that pointless lunchtime show all over again. I did run away a couple of times and sat with my other friends, sometimes even alone, but I stopped as soon as I realized that my two best friends thought I was ditching them. I hated my stammer every time they caught me sitting at the rectangular table and asked me why I didn’t go join them. I figured watching the show would be a price I had to pay to love them, just like listening to my mother’s lecturing.

The conversation usually started with my “perfect writer” friend complaining about the score she received on that week’s English paper—usually a B+--a score that would make me jump up and down with joy, but a letter that my rigorous friend would not be merely satisfied with. Then, when it was time for my other friend to talk, she would start piling words like “this is so unfair” and “you should talk to your advisor”. You know what’s really unfair? I punched my fork into my soft and thick Mac and cheese, growling soundlessly. It was getting B-minuses not because I didn’t have a good thesis or detailed observation, but because my grammatical errors were worse than a middle schooler and my English teacher couldn’t understand what I was trying to say thirty percent of the time. But every time I started complaining, my friends would just throw me stuff like “But it’s your second language! You are already doing so well”—as if I was any less than them as a writer just because my parents decided to raise me in China instead of in this silly country where everyone speaks “English” and eats so much cheese they have to build gyms everywhere just so they can use up all those calories.

I often tried to change topic, too (and failed). It just seemed as if my friend’s favorite thing to do was to scrape the very bottom of her vocabulary bank. After a couple of weeks, my writer friend, confidence boosted, joined the conversation of two about how cruel my English teacher was—for giving her an A-.

Heart burning, I stood up and dumped most of my burger into the trash can, without saying goodbye. On my way out, I grabbed a frozen turkey sandwich just in case I got hungry in the afternoon and didn’t forget to compliment it on being an A+ sandwich.