Never Shut Up

I start to think these girls will never shut up.

Selecting this chair, in spite of the fact that it’s the only comfortable one in the whole store, seemed like a bad idea to begin with. Two girls, probably 15 or 16, sit in the chairs, two of the available four, in sort of a L-shape, if you think of the chairs as forming a diamond with a table fitting awkwardly in the center. I choose one of the two available chairs, across from one of the girls, a blonde thing that looks young enough to be my younger brother’s child. Sitting across from someone was unavoidable.

There were factors missing when I made my decision. I didn’t know, for example, that the two girls were friends, although that should have been obvious by looking but wasn’t because it’s been too long since I was actually around anyone under 20. When I sat, they were silently reading or telepathically communicating, or something quiet at least. As I sat, conversation magically started. Most of the conversation centered around an absent third party member, Mark, who apparently will be here in ten minutes. One girl throws a book and a folder onto the remaining vacant chair, saving it for Mark when and if he arrives. It strikes me as rude, but like I’m going to say anything, so I don’t. I’m reading an essay, which isn’t requiring a whole lot of concentration, but the intermittent chatter is making even mild focus difficult. The thing about intermittent chatter is that it’s worse than non-stop talking. When the voices never pause, they can become white noise, just a fan turned on high. It’s the same reason people can sleep when a train is passing by their window—it’s just a loud roar. In a way, it’s almost comforting. Intermittent talk, on the other hand, is a different beast. It’s more like having a train sitting beside your window with the engine off, occasionally blasting its horn. Just when you get used to the sound—that is, the lack of sound—there it is again. I experience this firsthand, although the train simile doesn’t come to me until a little later.

Ten minutes later, or more, and Mark isn’t here. I’m personally starting to doubt he’s coming at all, and in a weird way, this is disappointing. I’ve feel I’ve formed a connection with Mark in spite of never seeing him and sort of dreading the moment he shows up, and conversation inevitably resumes.

In between the initial sitting and Mark’s arrival, another kid shows whose name I didn’t catch and didn’t feel right asking about. This kid was basically what I feared Mark would be, talking and acting like some kind of big shot, although I have to admit some of that might just be the grumpy old man inside talking. He’s talked mostly about how crazy it was to be graduating, and how he couldn’t believe it was them that stayed behind, putting a special emphasis on “them” as though everyone had expected “them”, which you would naturally think meant these four kids here, to be gone years ago. Not having all the information put me at a disadvantage already, but the conversation got stranger when this kid, let’s call him Hal, mentions that it’s nice to finally meet them, and the girls sort of indicate that they’re glad too, which makes think maybe Hal was some sort of transfer student and they were taking pity on him. The whole thing was kind of complex and I comforted myself by convincing myself I never could have made sense of it anyway, and then kind of hated myself for caring about it all.

So I’m sitting there, trying to write something, and Mark finally shows up, and he’s both exactly what I expected and somehow better—I think I’m over-empathizing with these kids and I don’t know how to stop. Mark is kind of a flirt, and it’s kind of obnoxious—the first thing he says is that the one girl’s background, a picture of her, is distracting—but somehow I forgive him because he seems like a goofy kid. Something about the whole situation makes me a little nostalgic but also sort of happy to be out of this whole dramatic age, because I can see myself in these kids and I’m sure I was at least as bad or maybe worse, and it was really important that Mark or whoever it was that time showed up.

They’re going to be here for a while. All of them have tests coming up tomorrow and it turns out they’re all pretty much certain of failing, even the smart kid who’s studying science, and it’s kind of nice in a way, to listen to them talk like graduating from high school is the biggest thing in their lives, even though it surely isn’t.

Books and movies always make high school itself look like the trial, like being in K-12 is overwhelming for most people and once they get out, things get better, like the torments and the struggle come from the halls and the pop quizzes. But honestly, the world outside is basically the same as high school—and this is such an old observation, but please bear—in the sense that high school itself is not the difficult thing. It’s just that everything is changing and complicated but even if they weren’t in high school, things would still be happening, maybe worse things, maybe the same things, and this makes me feel a weird sort of pity I can’t explain.