College Cafeteria

In my little snobby private college, there was a cafeteria.  In the smoking section, there were about 9 circular tables.  Each one could sit about 7 people.  If you sat back there, you were forced into socializing, three times a day, each meal.  It was a hell of a lot to ask someone who had been a loner for 20 years.  I would get my tray of food, then the real hell began.  You had to walk into the middle of the cafeteria, in front of everyone, who were already sitting at tables, in their groups, to be accepted enough to sit at a table with other people.  If you hesitated, it was humiliation.  Sometimes you would pick a table that had only one seat left, and someone at the table would say, hey, I’m saving this seat for so-and-so.  Rejection.  If you were rejected, you had to get back up, and do it all over again.  Everyone was watching.  Can he find a table?
         There were empty tables.  That was like being confined in the village stockade.  You’d pray someone would sit down with you.  If they didn’t, you just ate alone in a room full of people, most of whom knew you.  You were rejecting them, but they couldn’t care less.  After all, they HAD a table.  Every time I walked out there, my heart started beating, I felt ashamed, and I cursed the fact that I was here.
         When I first started going to this snobby, private college, I seemed to make friends fast.  I had my roommate, and others that I knew.  Going to the right table was easy.  The second year, more difficult, because I started to hate my fraternity.  The third year, I lived alone, ate alone, had no friends, and it was obvious.  I prayed every day that this torture would end! 
         Sometimes a guy would sit down at a table of people out of desperation.  I felt for him.  He didn’t really know anybody, and they didn’t know him.  He would eat in silence, afraid of being called out during the conversation, afraid of further humiliation.  He was strictly not allowed to speak.  He beat the humiliation of gaining acceptance at a table, only to find a greater humiliation yet.  If you did that, which I did very rarely, it would be even harder to sit there a second time.  Unless of course, your conversation was a hit.  In that case, you could nearly be expected.  You carved out a niche.
         The smokers sat over here, the non-smokers sat on the other side.  If you’d been a smoker, and there were no seats left, WOE to you to go into a totally unfamiliar section.  That did happen to me.
         The smokers were naturally the artsy people: the writers, the musicians, the artists.  The smoke coming out of their nostrils reflected the darkness of their soul, which nobody else could understand.  The worst one of this crew actually wore a beret.
         Many times during this ultra-intense event called conversation, I had felt like, or looked like an idiot.  Would have been better to eat alone.  Rich kids are not sensitive, and live like bulls in china shops.  Somehow they always had better grades than me.
         If the laughter level at an adjacent table was high, your table had better get up to snuff.  The worst thing you could say was, “They’re having a good time over there.”  It simply says, I can’t have a good time, I suck.
         If you had a girlfriend, you’d never be alone.  There were just too many people in two different pools of people to sit with.  Besides, you had the girlfriend.  I tried hard to get one in college.  I did, at different times.  If you broke up, and her friends sat with your friends, you’d better beat your ex to that table.  If she beat you to the table, you might never have the guts to sit there again. 
         The faculty had a whole different animal.  They only had one table, just enough seats for everyone, no extras.  They had to sit with their kind, like it or not.  If one faculty member was at one end, and one or more was at the other, and the ones in the middle left, neither would come talk to the other, and would frankly, try to pretend the other wasn’t there.  They don’t want to take a risk, such as moving down to their end.
         Kelly was doing her work study in the cafeteria, checking student IDs at the door.  She was fantastically lucky.  Her group of girlfriends always sat at the table next to her, while she was working.  She could count on one or more of them being there when she finished working a meal.  Sometimes, she wouldn’t sit by the door, but at her friends’ table.  She’d take the chair closest to her station.  She barely needed to move to check an ID.  She didn’t stop her conversation to check the IDs.  Besides, it was an easy job anyway.  I flirted with her a couple of times.  She liked it.  Never did I have the guts to go farther with it.  To this day, I don’t know why.  She was pretty, but slightly cross-eyed.  A firm, voluptuous body.  Not overweight.  Her friends looked at me.  They were cute.  None of them seemed to have boyfriends, unless they were “back home boyfriends”.  The whole thing scared me to death.  I’d blush when I walked past her.
         One time, there was a semi-decent party up on my floor.  Kelly and her crew came up to the men’s dorm for the party, for some reason.  They had nobody to hang out with.  I was a fool.  They were all hanging out in the men’s restroom.  I went in to piss and wash my hands.  I was alone.  They stared at me.  I could have easily invited four pretty women into my room.  I just couldn’t.  Cafeteria Kelly seemed to specifically be waiting for the invitation.  This 19-year old, once out for all he could get and more, was a shell of a man.
         After that night, they seemed to ignore me in the cafeteria.  I deserved no less.