Of course I was mad about this, as were just about everyone else in the 8th grade. Immediately I, and others sitting at my table, began to think up ways we could rebel tomorrow, Friday, March 4th, 2016. We needed to do everything we could to stop this madness as soon as possible.
When lunchtime on Friday came along, I arrived in the school lobby, right outside of the cafeteria, to see everyone in the usual blob waiting to enter the lunchroom, except this time they were split down the middle to make room for our principle who was yelling "If you packed lunch, get in line on the left, if you are buying school lunch, line up on the right!"
Once he was finished yelling and carefully checking that each line was organized correctly, we were led into the cafeteria and told that all packers have to sit on one side of the room and the buyers had to sit on the other. This was their pathetic strategy of keeping us from popping any bags.
As you may have assumed, this obviously didn't keep the sounds of things popping and teenagers screaming from subsiding at all whatsoever. In fact, it only fortified our anger and brought us to being even more obnoxious than any other day before today. As we had planned, we executed quite a number of our unique plans to let our principle know that there is no way he will manage to stop us from being teenagers. Some of us either brought our own bags in and popped them, or we emptied our slushie cups, turned them upside down, and smacked the bottom, which, though a little weaker, created a sort of popping sound that was still noticed. There were not as many packers who actually popped their plastic bags, but there were still enough that we earned our normal lunch back the Monday we came back to school.
But no, we did not earn back our rights without losing any men. During this very vile but most legendary half hour of all of Maple Avenue's history, the principal had as many teachers as he could get patrolling the cafeteria to arrest every student they could find popping bags, and trust me, they were keeping out the eye of an eagle. To pop a bag or cup and not get caught was almost as difficult as avoiding the Eye of Sauron's gaze when sneaking into Mordor with the Ring on a chain around your neck. They were even so strict about it that if they heard a pop, but did not even see who caused it, they would go to the table that the pop sounded to come from, and they sent someone to the office, not even further investigating whether or not their accusation towards that student was fully accurate. Fortunately, the teachers were unable to hold up for the entire lunch period because there was too much to fight against. By about 15 minutes into the revolt, their power wore down. They began to fail to catch more and more of us left and right. Although there had to be at least 10 plus teachers in charge of taking us away, the popping grew wilder than they ever expected it to. It came to the point that anyone was able to pop something without worrying about being caught by the end of the period. This was when our principle had finally accepted his defeat and gave us our lives back. The end of a bag war which seemed to drag on for maybe 7 hours instead of the actual half. The 2016 Bag Revolt.
