The Café Table Dearth
For some unknown reason, Sacred Heart admits more freshmen than they have tables in the café. The simple solution to this would be to buy three more of those circular, faux-wood tables, or at least some type of food-holding furniture, to squeeze in front of the SHA store, saving countless freshmen from the throes of the table dearth. But instead, at exactly 11:05, the freshmen who don’t fly down to the café, hearts pounding, clean laptop cases swinging from their shoulders, are subject to eat their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches off their laps, on the periphery of a packed table.
In every class, there are some girls who are always victims of this table discrepancy. The girls who don’t have the confidence and assertiveness to claim a table as their own. There’s always somebody. And in the class of 2015, those girls were my friends and me.
During the dark days of freshman year, my lap was the only table I knew. My new friends and I formed an imaginary table in a parasitic relationship with the physical table, where the lucky ones feasted off solid furniture. There was nowhere to go, no empty table for us to make our lunchtime home. We were doomed to lap-table-dom until our final exams freshman year.
You could probably blame our tablelessness on our complete lack of confidence. Isabella, Mal, Rachel, Maria and I were never assertive enough to elbow our way onto the main table. However, the unsurvivability of our weakness was ignored sophomore year when we, yes, finally got one. Granted, it was on the freshmen side of the café because we weren’t brave nor wise enough to claim a table on our rightful side, but that didn’t matter, because it was our table. We feasted in the back by the SHA store as noble sophomores overlooking fearful freshmen… well, the power we wielded was all in our heads, as we soon learned.
Junior year. 12:25 PM. The lowest moment of every single lunch I’ve ever eaten in the café. Never mind, I mean every single lunch of my entire life.
We had failed in the beginning of the school year to reclaim our sophomore year perch, but we had won a table on the junior side, in the front by the phone and Sister Lany Jo’s sign-up sheets. As juniors, upperclassmen, we thought we were safe. We mistakenly believed our class rank insulated us from the table discrepancy we feared as freshmen. Oh, how wrong we were. How, how wrong; it hurt how wrong we were.
There I was, strutting through the café’s main corridor with the composure and confidence of someone who had a lunch table, my high ponytail swinging back and forth like a brand new Bratz doll, my legs feeling strong and long despite their unshaven-ness,my eyebrows sharp and shaped,my laptop bag looking clean for once, and —
UNKNOWN PEOPLE SITTING AT MY LUNCHTABLE.
FRESHMEN SITTING AT MY LUNCH TABLE.
My ponytail sagged and my heart raced. I saw Rachel approaching the table from the opposite direction, her face aghast. She looked at me in horror. Her eyes communicated everything I was thinking: “IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN.”
Soon our whole lunchtime gang was circling our former home, weighed down by textbooks and lunch boxes and laptop bags, like hawks circling their prey. Except we were hawks that had been declawed. We were the vegetarian hawks that don’t exist – that might have existed but are now extinct.
When some of us, failingly, tried to squeeze onto the periphery of our freshmen dominated table, I said to my defeated friends, “Let’s grab some chairs and go to the back.” Even though nobody, including myself, liked this plan, we hunted the café for leftover yellow chairs and dragged them to the no man’s land between the café and the school store, with the eyes of the café upon us. I felt like a prisoner of war marching through ancient Rome, as comfortable, safe, sated Romans watching me without a solution for my plight.
We formed an island out of chairs with no table in the back of the café, in front of the school store. SHA sisters may be the sisters God forgot to give us, but I wouldn’t mind that if He’d remember to give us enough tables.
Isabella and I tried to lighten the mood with jokes about our situation. If I remembered the pitiful jokes, I would write them here, but I don’t because they were so bad. That should give you some taste of the “lunchtime” conversation.
We didn’t make any eye contact with anyone, including each other. Eventually, some people from other (COMPLETELY FULL) tables came over, and encouraged us to assert our rights to one. We didn’t do this. We couldn’t. Because even though at that moment we hated those freshmen with the fire of a thousand suns, we didn’t have the heart to kick them from the table. Because we were those freshmen. The freshmen hoping for a table, the hunt made especially more difficult during the unfamiliar second lunch… that was us.
We all left early due to incredibly important upperclassmen activities, such as made-up assignments due last period, fictional meetings with teachers, and emails we pretended to send that were blatant lies, sent mostly to ourselves or to The Void.
I thought this story would have a hopeful, inspiring conclusion, that that lunch brought us closer, but no. It was just weird, and I’m realizing now that I’m writing this just to urge the school to buy more tables. Please. Don’t perpetuate such traumatic suffering.
I asked Rachel if she learned anything from the situation, and she said, “I think we learned a lot.” “Just yesterday I callously shoved a freshman out of the way in order to get one of Shirley’s cookies. So, that’s an improvement.”
