At the Breakfast Counter

The roommate who never ate breakfast was dressed and ready to leave without eating. The one who always made the same breakfast, a protein and fruit smoothie, was making it. The one who always grabbed a few scraps to take with her had grabbed an orange and a packet of oatmeal. And the one who usually fixed a simple bowl of cereal was eating it — but only after he had examined his half-gallon of skim milk, which was approximately half-empty, and muttered to himself, “I just bought this,” as if to wonder who had drunk some.

“Not me, I’ve got my own half-gallon,” Protein Smoothie thought to himself while avoiding eye contact. He did acknowledge in his mind’s dialogue that he had, over the course of various past half-gallons, helped himself to a splash of his roommate’s milk here and there.

For the first — and maybe last — time they all happened to gather near the kitchen at the same time to breakfast on a weekday. This was a most unusual coincidence.

After living with someone for a while, you get to know the conversation topics they resort to during awkward silences, so it was no surprise when Orange & Oatmeal said to No Breakfast, “Jeans today?” No Breakfast usually wore slacks to work.

He was what you might call long-winded. In fact, the length of his anecdotes, and the irrelevance of most of the details in them, was legendary. His tendency to drone on, emphasizing exceedingly mundane aspects of his stories; his uncanny ability to begin a story with great promise, only to delay his punch line far too long and lose his audience had long been behind-his-back fodder for Simple Cereal and Protein Smoothie.

As you might imagine, this mere icebreaker set the stage for another demonstration of that ability.

“So get this. They promised that if we hit all our volunteer hours — ” the mere phrase ‘volunteer hours’ would have sufficed, but instead a thorough explanation ensued — “they would let us wear jeans the rest of the year. This was in mid-November…well, the second week of November. Ah, I guess the third. And we hit our hours. But not enough people participated. To participate, all you had to do was turn on the computer, get on the Internet, log in to the computer system, and press a button,” he said.

This was, relative to what could have emerged, a succinct telling.

Protein Smoothie was the sort who questioned the premise of most things, and his opinions, skeptical of conventional wisdom, could be counted on to enter any conversation.

“Are jeans even more comfortable than slacks?” he asked.

“No.”

“I HATE jeans,” chimed Cereal.

“Wait, why do you hate….that’s a subject for another day. What the hell kind of reward is that?” Smoothie asked No Breakfast.

“My company’s a joke.”

So it fell to Orange & Oatmeal to lighten, with a feminine energy, the mood of the conversation, which had quickly turned dark in the participants’ morning irritability.

“Every day is a leggings day for me,” she said with gently boastful smile.

At this, the conversation ended, as No Breakfast headed for the door. Orange and oatmeal in hand, she headed for the bathroom, and Smoothie, with his smoothie in hand, retreated toward his basement.

But Cereal, sitting with his elbows barely able to reach the counter at which he sat, was known for poorly timed, ill-advised, often immature commentary.

“I need some male leggings,” he said, chuckling a ‘tee-hee.’

“You have more pressing concerns,” Smoothie said quietly, and he wondered whether he had been heard.

If you enjoyed this story — and even if you didn’t — you should check out my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.