Diversity?

         “Diiiiing” The end bell rings. I gather my stuff quickly, walking briskly out the door. I rush down the stairs as quickly as I could, but there were just too many people in the staircase. Going down the single flight of stairs from my English class to the locker rooms took me longer than one would expect for a single flight of stairs.
My friends were already inside and changing when I got to our usual spot in the locker rooms. “How did you get here so fast?” I ask my friend Sarah, who was already done changing. It seemed strange that she always got to the locker rooms the quickest, since she came from the 8th floor, while the rest of my friends, who also get to the locker rooms before I, had lunch. “I walked,” she replied as she headed out the door. Sighing, I started to change. When I was done, I headed down to the 3rd floor gym, where I knew my friends would already be. We talk while we stand there, waiting for our gym teacher to open the door for us.
“Lay lum aw day gum yut jo meh ah?” What do you think we’ll be doing today?
“Aw gum yut yeow yiew pow bo ah” I’ll be jogging again today. My friend, Jesse replies. He’s in a different gym class from me, but we still hang out before gym together.
“Oh my God! Stop talking in Chinese!” my friend, Helen yells in exasperation.
We laugh and talk in Chinese some more, just to annoy her.
“Are you speaking in Cantonese?” my friend, Olivia asks us.
“Mhmmm” I reply.
“Oh, no wonder I couldn’t understand! I only speak Mando”
“It should be called Manda,” Helen tells us, “It’s Mandarin, not Mandorin.”
“Lay day yup hui lah” You’re going in now, I tell Jesse and he rushes off to his gym room where his class is going inside. He is followed by Helen, who is in the same gym class.
Pretty soon, my gym teacher comes and we go inside the gym. “Where is everyone?” he asks as he takes attendance; half the class was at SING rehearsals. When he was done, he told us that since it was the last day of our gym unit, he would let us play basketball or volleyball by ourselves. We broke off into our groups and decided what we wanted to do.
“I’m the only non-Oriental girl in this class,” my friend, Elsa remarks as she looks around the room.
“Oh my God, you’re right!” the rest of us say when we realized that she was right.
“This class has too many Asians,” I tell her, “just like our bio class.”
“Yeah I know, right? Morning bio had so many more non-Asians,” Elsa says, shaking her head. “Anyways, what are we going to do?”
While the rest of the group decides what we were going to do, I think about what Elsa said. It was true that our class was very Asian; I could count the ones who weren’t on my hands. But was it just our class? No, I decided, it wasn’t. Our school itself is full of Asian people and this fact is reflected in classes; some just represent it better than others. Looking around the room, I see groups of people playing basketball. The Asians were on a court by themselves, as were the whites, leaving another court for the kids who weren’t either. Furthermore, the class was divided into the kids who took biology and the kids who took physics, since gym and science classes were blocks and consisted of mostly the same people. My group seemed to be the most diverse; we had Elsa and Sarah, who was Asian, but took Physics. Another thing I noticed was that none of the other groups had any girls in them, whereas my whole group was female. Was there a reason behind all this? Looking at my group once more, I realized that the reason we were a group was because most of us went to the same junior high school together. Those that didn’t go to Mark Twain with us were friends we had made in the first term.
“The boys aren’t taking me seriously,” Elsa complained, forcing me back to reality. She had tried to play basketball with the guys, but they didn’t even block her shots. “Let’s just play volleyball.”