When I was in middle school, there was a kid who sat by himself at a table next to my group’s table during lunch. I use the phrasing “my group” quite liberally, as I was a bit of a loner myself. Fortunately, my best friend happened to be an actual part of this group, so I was able to blend in, sort of. I mostly just ate my lunch, kept quiet and laughed on cue. Yeah, it was a little lame.

Anyhow, there was a kid at our table named Paul. He was a skater, so that, like, automatically bumped him up to the top of my middle school’s Hierarchy of Cool. Right there with trucker hats and weird shoelaces.

Side note: I remember trying to cheat the system, but failing to master even the most basic skating tricks. Credit where credit is due, I suppose. Being cursed with hand-eye coordination instead of the… foot-eye (?) type meant that I would not be so easily plucked from the depths of “gamer”dom.

So there’s Skater Paul right across from me at lunch, and there’s the kid sitting by himself a table over. Well, Paul occasionally thought it would be funny to look ever-so-discreetly in the latter’s direction and sing, under his breath, Bobby Vinton’s “Mr. Lonely.” It sounds a bit like a song written by Hodor from Game of Thrones if Hodor’s name were instead Mr. Lonely and not Hodor. It goes, “Mr. Looooonely. Mr. Looooonely. Mr. Loooonely.” A safer bet is that Paul did not actually know the rest of the lyrics, but this I leave to the reader’s judgment.

Regardless, it was apparently hilarious. I’m not particularly sure what was so groundbreakingly funny about all of this, but I followed suit and forced a light (and uncomfortable) chuckle so as to avoid being voted off the island to become the next day’s target.

I’m not sure if the kid ever noticed what was going on or not, but this is probably one of my biggest grade school regrets. I could quote some generic but profound-sounding quote about being a bystander (or, in my case, reluctant partaker) in the face of cruelty, but I think that this would be largely unnecessary for many reading this blog.

Something always sticks out to me when I think about that day, and that’s this: I didn’t have anything in the world against that kid at the other table. I didn’t know him, granted, but then neither did Paul. Well, other than the fact that the kid had no apparent friends, and I guess that was enough.

It’s kind of weird. It makes me wonder if, more times than not, cowardice is the culprit and not raw hatred and ill will. Maybe most of the kids at our table were laughing for the same reason I was—because they wanted to be liked, popular, whatever.

Maybe we should make more of an effort to teach our kids (through our words and actions) that there are worse things in the world than being unpopular or being largely friendless. Maybe being a person who makes fun of unpopular, largely friendless people is a far worse fate.