Dining time in boarding school
was an exercise in nervousness.
For those who went to dbee
boarding schools, and those who were too dbee to even go to boarding school, the dining area looked something like
this. There were columns of tables, “table” being two long, sturdy,
unattractive worktops smacked together to make a longer table. On the long side
of each individual table (yes, that’s a lot of tables) sat a bench. Sixteen of
us would sit at each dining table (to think that I’ve only just started), on
those backless benches (oh, the
horror).
Oh, it was NOTHING like this.
Necessity is the mother of
invention, though, so some of us improvised by leaning on the backs of those
who sat behind us. It wasn’t entirely comforting but it was better than…okay,
truth be told, it wasn’t better than anything.
And we’d be there, sitting,
drinking tea, or porridge, or eating yam, staring—or not—at the person opposite
us, or at the table, or around the dining hall, or at our idle hand, wondering
when the torture would end, while prefects and teachers patrolled the isles in
self-important gaits, hissing if someone so much as coughed, because God forbid
anyone makes a sound that is not related to metal cutlery hitting a grimy metal
plate.
I spelled ‘isle’ without an ‘a.’ I always
feel awkward when I do that.
Then again, I think it’s the first time I’ve
done that…
Morning dining was especially
painful to be at. We were hardly awake—the rising bell, that awful,
hate-worthy, cringe-worthy, tranquillity-shattering clangour that yanked us
from the temporary escape that was sleep, came too early every day, marking the
beginning of another day of slave labour. So, tired as we were from rising too
quick and scrubbing our fingernails away (thankfully my fingernails remained
intact. I daresay the scrubbing made them prettier. Then again, I don’t
remember scrubbing that much…) we were too fatigued to say much in the
mornings, so the dining hall was often a quiet expanse reminiscent of rows of
sarcophagi.
‘Sarcophagi’ is such a cool word. I didn’t
even have to use it. I just put it there. Because.
Worse was when they shuffled
tables. They did that often, anytime we started getting used to seeing this
stranger more frequently and feeling slightly more at home with them. Because, in my boarding school, they lived
by the rule to make the student as unhappy as possible. It’s like they said
to themselves (“they” being all the big people in my senior high I didn’t like,
i.e. a lot of people), “I see her smiling while eating! I see him talking to
the other boy like they’re friends. How dare these people have fun when they’re
under our watch? The effrontery!”
Knowing them, they definitely used the word ‘effrontery.’
But I knew one table that was always alive, one group of people that
looked like they lived for the dining
hall moments, and it wasn’t because of the food. They are…
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE!
Or something like them. Without
the powers. And the spandex. And the mean faces on the comic books. And the
endless pursuit of villains. And the spandex.
I should write on them.
Soon.
Parcé-que…I was one of them.
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