To the Dearly Departing

He swished the ribbed plastic glass, and the reconstituted orange juice (more bitter than Tang and without that cool futuristic aura) lapped up the sides and hung there evenly like paint. They really did leave those O.J. tanks full all night.

"My whole entryway used to sit here freshman year. Way here in the back with all the kids sitting alone, reading C.S. textbooks. Sit and talk about dorm-cest and each other's mothers."

"I used to sit back here alone, reading a C.S. textbook."

"With a yellow coat and a shirt that said 'I survived Calculus BC,' right?"

"Yeah."

"We made fun of your mother too."

Above them five tied-together bedsheets dangled from the balcony railing. Behind, a big wooden table had been pounded into an obtuse angle with sneaker marks at the vertex. John Quincy Adams watched without judgment from his invisible, alarmed cage.

"What the hell did you do freshman year? I only knew you as the Boy with Poodle Hair."

He laughed. "The Facebook was our only bathroom reading material. I knew you were Shannon Erynne Washington of Our Lady of Mild Senility High in Toledo, photographed against a mountain background holding a trumpet."

Caught her in mid-sip. She laughed quickly and coughed violently, sending out a small orange geyser. He jumped back, fearing chemical burns. They changed tables.

"IOP, UC, some community service," he said. "I tried out for the Kroks, but they made me leave after the flaming baton in my audition act caught their vermouth cabinet on fire."

"What?"

"Not important. What about you? C.S. only?"

"Well, C.S. isn't just academics, you know. It's a family."

"Is that the reason you call Dean Lewis "Uncle Harry"?"

"No."

"Riiight."

She checked her watch. 3:30 a.m. Less than three days until Commencement, when they would join the company of educated and indebted men and women. Adult men and women, with harder features and eyes more warm than the teenagers with poodle hair who had eaten here almost four years ago. She hoped.

He looked around the empty tables and thought of the lone lunch eaters again.

"Why do Harvard students have to learn to like each other?" He said.

"My sister at State says that students there are best friends with each other in the first week. A month into school, they're already overturning police cars together."

"Because every other college is brought together by hatred--even playful hatred--of another college. For instance, why are Cornell students so tight?"

"Huddling together for warmth?"

"No, because hating Harvard unites them. At Harvard, we learn in our first sections freshman year to hate each other on an individual level."

"Hey, wait--I play IM's. I hate Quincy House 'cause they always beat us."

"Intra-campus hate doesn't count unless it's reciprocated. People in Quincy House dislike Quincy residents as much as you do. I heard a V.E.S. tutor there applied to blow the House up as part of his dissertation."

"I'd noticed they'd stopped fixing the bathrooms in Quincy."

"Why scrub decks on a doomed ship?"

"Riiight," he said. This was depressing, and he didn't need depressing right now. Most of his friends were already spouting the same kind of bitterness towards Harvard over beers at Senior Bar. Sure, they made some good points about the Harvard administration's cluelessness regarding student life. Sure, it was weird that Harvard had produced presidents, miracle drugs and a Theory of Justice, but the best idea it could come up with for social life was a barn on the MAC Quad. A barn. How about shuffleboard in the middle of Mass. Ave? And sure, he saw his entryway tutor about as often as the backs of his ears.

Still, he was optimistic, always had been. Optimism had made him stick with that Gymnastics for Senior Citizens program he'd founded in high school. Now it pulled him to a different conclusion about Harvard. It couldn't have been that bad.

"It couldn't have been that bad," he said.

"What, Harvard? I'm sure it wasn't. Did you ever have sex in Widener."

"No," he said. "But once I had a very realistic dream while sleeping in my study carrel."

"Hmm. Disgusting." She changed the subject. "You said your goodbyes to everyone yet?"

"No way. I hate goodbyes."

"That's stupid," she said. "Goodbyes aren't something you can choose to avoid just because you don't like them. You're going to hate baldness, too, but that doesn't mean it's not going to happen."

"There's a joke about bittersweetness and menopause in there someplace, but I don't know how to make it," he said. "Come on, let's go."

They walked to the alarmed door at the back of the giant hall, leaving the sheets and the broken table to puzzle tomorrow's workers. Pausing at the threshold, he turned to aim his orange-stained glass at the statue's head. Before plastic struck marble, they were out the door. Members of the 35th Reunion Class still awake at that hour looked out their Canaday windows to see two dark figures turn the corner onto Prescott Street. Behind them, under the stained-glass windows of Annenberg Hall, John Quincy Adams shrieked out an alarm to a vast and empty room.

David A. Fahrenthold '00, a history concentrator in Dunster House, was associate managing editor of The Crimson in 1999.