Of Silver Spoons and Acquired Tastes

[Jasper Blackwater]

Jasper Blackwater stood alone before a sea of crumb-covered tabletops and empty chairs and frowned a small, dejected frown.

It was just after 3:30 in the afternoon, and the majority of the student body had eaten lunch a long time ago. Jas might have, too, if he hadn’t been distracted by packing; the looming Thanksgiving holiday had disrupted his normal schedule, and his sense of time had gone with it. When he’d finally arrived at the cafeteria, the day’s freshly cooked lunch offering had been removed in preparation for dinner. Not wanting to waste the effort it had taken him to walk there, he’d put together a hodgepodge of a meal from the grab-and-go case.

He scanned the tables again, then looked down at the pile of food on his brown ceramic lunch tray. He didn’t like to eat alone—it gave him far too much time to think. He sighed a small, resigned sigh as he made to slide his tray onto the nearest empty table. The change in direction proved beneficial: in the far corner, where a single table was tucked into a cubby-like space between the wall and the windows, a waterfall of gold hair shone in the late afternoon sunlight.

Even though she was facing away from him, Jasper recognized that hair. It was very distinctive.

He beamed—for no one’s benefit but his own—and secured his broad, thick-fingered hands on either side of the tray again. It took him about thirty seconds to walk, with careful determination, to the far side of the cafeteria.

“Hey, Audrey,” he said. He lingered at the side of the table just long enough to place his tray onto it with a gentle clack. “You don’t mind, do you?”

He maneuvered himself to the opposite side of the table—the side nearest to the wall—and managed to slide into the seat across from her with a determined wiggle and a bit of an oomf. He was wearing jeans, and a pale blue cardigan over a white t-shirt; the fabric was held taut across his middle by a handful of wooden toggle buttons, one of which was missing. The bottommost briefly scraped against the laminate tabletop on the way down.

It was a lot of effort, but her purse had been occupying the seat directly beside of her, and he hadn’t wanted to be rude.

There was a beat of silence.

“Do you always eat this late?” he asked, turning his gaze to the window and the world below. Pilot Ridge went about its business as he watched; beyond the modest tops of the buildings downtown, the mountains were snow-patched and blue with distance.

He looked back to his tray, then: two halves of a chicken salad wrap, a bag of chips, a small leafy salad with a packet of ranch dressing, and two chocolate chip muffins wrapped in cellophane, all gathered around a 20 ounce bottle of Diet Coke. He popped the clear plastic lid off of the salad first; it was identical to the one Audrey was disinterestedly raking her fork over.

He fidgeted with the dressing packet, slowly but surely becoming more and more desperate. He felt much hungrier than he had a few moments ago.

[Audrey Vandergraaf]

It was 3:30 on the dot, and Audrey was in her usual spot, a long tabled nestled between a bleached ceramic wall and a large pair of sliding glass windows, an ideal alcove for the shy eater. Her back faced the rest of the lunchroom and her eyelids were shut as she basked in the warmth of the sheeted sunlight. The leggy blonde offered little attention to her salad, her plastic cutlery grazing a wedge of iceberg lettuce as she nodded softly to the doleful crooning of Jim Morrison.

Audrey needed to isolate herself to make the cafeteria dining experience tolerable. Her efforts to be solitary in her digestion only reminding her of the impending holiday, clearly her least favorite, Thanksgiving. She shuddered at the thought of it, refusing to linger on the idea any longer; fortunately, a sweet familiar face stumbled into her visual field. Ordinarily, Audrey abhorred any type of company during mealtimes, but at the moment her need to distract herself from imminent filial doom overrode that.

Jasper said something, but the movements of his lips were still paired with the sounds of the Doors. The girl giggled, pulling out her earbuds as her friend forced himself into the seat opposite her, his tray over-loaded with the depressing leftovers of the grab-and-go case; her dietary selection of a side salad—no dressing—and a bottle of ensure paled in comparison.

“Always.” She replied before offering an easy explanation, “it’s when the caf is most empty.”

The girl continued to look on, clearly amused as an adorable Jasper was challenged by a particularly resistant package of ranch dressing. Without a word she slipped the packet from his wrestling hands, her long fingers deftly creating a clean opening with a single tug. She placed it back onto his tray, successfully hiding her disgust of having handled a full-fat garnish until a particularly intense hunger pang struck her in the stomach.

She winced, pushing her uneaten salad away from her before weakly reaching for her protein-laden beverage, giving it an uneasy shake before screwing off its cap.

“I hate this shit.”

[Jasper Blackwater]

Jasper didn’t understand why Audrey had giggled at him, although he smiled anyway; it was only when he noticed the earbuds clamped between her delicate fingertips that he realized he had interrupted anything.

He opened his mouth to apologize, but in the end, he settled for looking sheepish. He’d downloaded an iPhone app about mindfulness, and was attempting to cut back on his excessive apologies.

So far, so good.

“Oh,” he said. He studied her for a moment, then smiled. “I was wondering why I never see you at lunch. It does get pretty crowded, though—I was here way earlier yesterday, and even then the French fries were almost gone.”

He struggled with the ranch dressing for several moments before she graciously relieved him of his own ineptitude. He watched her peel the packet open with ease and place it on his tray.

“Thanks,” he said, offering her a sheepish grin in return.

He lifted the dressing over his salad and began to pour. She winced at the same time that he furrowed his eyebrows in discomfort. His gaze was still firmly trained on his own food. There was a large puddle of ranch dressing in the middle of his salad; his hand had stopped moving when he’d felt the gnawing in his belly.

Moments passed, and the only sound was the scrape of plastic on the tabletop as Audrey pushed her salad away. Jas placed his empty dressing packet on the side of his tray with care. His eyes were fixed on an empty spot on the table; his mind was thousands of miles away, several years ago. Hunger. It was the sort of thing you could forget, if you were lucky. And if you weren’t...

Her words broke his memory, and he looked up. He was not smiling, and there was a vague desperation in his wide brown eyes, like he wanted to cry but was too exhausted to spare the effort.

“Salad?” he asked, innocently. His eyes flitted briefly to the drink in her thin-fingered hand. “Or Ensure?”

A pause.

“If you don’t like it, you can have something of mine,” he said, looking back down at his tray. “Or I can—I dunno, buy you something else.”

[Audrey Vandergraaf]

Audrey attempted to listen intently as her friend detailed an earlier absence of French fries, but she had difficulty maintaining focus when the topic centered on deep-fried spuds. She nodded her head gently, long flaxen hair following the subtle movement, bobbing against the ridges of her exposed clavicle.

“Yeah, I’m actually the leader of a radical terrorist group that contests cafeteria overcrowding.” She paused, idle fingers lingering on the loose cap of her nutrient-rich shake, “As an act of solidarity, we forego the consumption of all hot meals.”

This might be the first time Audrey has ever smiled in a dining hall. Her grin quickly faded though, more so due to the introduction of a nauseating glob of ranch dressing rather than the familiar stinging of her own hunger pangs.

She turned away from her lunch date before tilting her head back, opening the circle of her throat to swallow Ensure as painlessly as possible. It would take a few more of these gulps to finish the damn thing, but at least she was now a third of the way done. If Jasper was anyone else, she would’ve simply left the table to finish her liquid meal in private, but she trusted him enough to actually digest calories in his presence.

“Both.” She grimaced, although when she spoke of hating this shit, she meant it more in an overarching sense, hating the necessity of food intake. At this point in her treatment, Audrey still refused to find pleasure in meals, but she was at least willing to view food as a necessary fuel source that maintained her renal function and kept her heart pumping.

“It’s not like that…” she rejected the offer, the chalky dairy and whey aftertaste lingering on her tongue as she attempted to configure her words. Audrey wasn’t one for self-disclosure, and although she hadn’t actually spoken of her eating disorder to a fellow student, it was pretty common knowledge around Hammel. Parts of it were private, the hospitalizations and feeding tubes, the 4000-calorie binges and the emergency surgery of her ruptured esophagus… But the diagnosis itself wasn’t too daunting a reveal.

“I have anorexia nervosa,” she left out the binge-purge subtype, “so food is just not something I’m currently capable of enjoying.” She fingered her bottle of ensure, “I have to drink at least four of these day, so it can get pretty nauseating.” She paused, feeling insecure for a moment, “Sorry if I’m over-sharing, I actually just haven’t had lunch with anyone since I’ve been here.”

Audrey had been at Hammel for well over a year.

[Jasper Blackwater]

Jasper’s gaze shifted quickly from worry to amusement at the mention of radical cafeteria terrorism. He offered a rich, good-natured laugh in reply.

“Yeah?” he said. “I dunno, it sounds like a lot of effort. I usually just get extra helpings of the good stuff so that the freshmen behind me can’t take it all.”

He grinned, although his expression faltered a moment afterward.

“I don’t really,” he said. Then, he looked dejectedly at his preservative-laden meal. “I can’t make any promises about tomorrow, though.”

There was an uncharacteristic lull in their conversation. Jasper could still feel the hunger; it was the significance of the sensation—more so than the sensation itself—that troubled him. His gaze lowered again. He watched Audrey’s shifting shadow on the tabletop, and tried to process her one-word answer to his question.

Both.

“Oh,” he said, for want of anything more relevant to say. Her next words only confused him further; he tried, and failed, to fathom any situation in which one could be so hungry but not want anything to eat. She hadn’t been rude, but the rejection had stung him nonetheless.

He raised his eyes to hers tentatively and then looked immediately downward again. In the end, it was her matter-of-fact tone that enabled him to relax, even though her words settled heavily in the center of his chest.

Anorexia nervosa. He’d heard of it, but realized that he did not truly know what it meant. He studied her long, thin fingers, still clutched around the half-empty bottle of Ensure. He looked at her salad, and then at his own. He was suddenly very aware of the mass of his body in three-dimensional space.

Once again, her words broke him of his uncharacteristic pensiveness. He realized that he had been quiet for a long time; his eyes widened, and he shook his head emphatically.

“No, it’s fine,” he said.

Another pause.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice had grown quiet. “That you can’t enjoy your food, I mean.”

He offered her a tentative half-smile.

“I’m glad you don’t mind me sitting here, though.”

[Audrey Vandergraaf]

Despite the discomfort that the dining hall inherently wrought, Jasper seemed to make every encounter suddenly tolerable. He seamlessly matched the beat of her conversation, his words moving to the pace of a silent metronome, always providing comfort even in their mutual stillness.

When she spoke, he listened; and her frankness didn’t scare him away.

She continued to pick at the hard ribbed plastic of the bottle cap, wide eyes fixed on its playful blue ridges. Audrey wasn’t put off by the boy’s silence; in fact she appreciated his contemplativeness over the usual awkward and aggressive fumbling that her confessions were met with.

I was anorexic once; I fasted for a week before formal!
You’re so skinny, why don’t you just eat a sandwich?
Oh, I wish I could stop eating, but I love food way too much.

These recollections frustrated her, but she was soon relieved by the marked absence of any ignorant tropes. Her eyes even lit up as Jasper offered an apology, not out of pity, but purely through empathy. In that moment she didn’t feel like a spoiled brat or an ungrateful little rich girl, but just an ordinary person finding mutuality and understanding with another ordinary person.

“I mean, I’m sort of used to it…” she began, bony fingers fidgeting as they reopened the bottle, “Right now I’m just supposed to eat, like eat regularly, and understand it as a survival necessity.”

She turned away again, blond hair sheathing her face, her lips encircling the bottle’s opening as she finished the thick beverage, the muscles in her neck moving visibly beneath her skin as she swallowed hard.

“You make good company,” she noted, picking up a napkin and wiping it around her lips, insecure about the possibility of any lingering caloric residue, “and I’m fully aware that I am the most awkward person ever to share a meal with.”

Audrey then made direct eye contact, her gaze soft and relaxed, “So really, thank you for being so understanding… I refuse to believe you’re anything but an empath.”

[Jasper Blackwater]

The air between them shifted to accommodate the honesty of their conversation, and left no room for small talk in its wake. Jasper watched Audrey watch her own fingers as they fussed with the cap of the Ensure bottle. For several moments, the only sound was the hollow scraping of fingernails against plastic.

She spoke, then, and Jasper listened carefully to her words. Used to it. His only reply was a subtle, attentive nod.

She turned away from him to finish her drink. He lowered his gaze politely to his untouched salad; after a moment of hesitation, he picked up his plastic fork and pressed its tines experimentally into the center of the large blob of dressing. There was an audible crunch from underneath.

After she’d finished drinking, he smiled at her again.

“Well, I’m glad you’re surviving,” he said. “For whatever that’s worth.”

He stared down at his food again, as though he might happen across the meaning of life and the universe between the translucent veins of his iceberg lettuce. He lifted the fork to his mouth with uncharacteristic meekness. He was still chewing when she asserted that she was the most awkward person ever to share a meal with.

His eyebrows furrowed in protest, and he shook his head, although it took him a moment to voice his disagreement.

“You’re not,” he said, immediately after swallowing. Their eyes met again; his expression changed ever so slightly as she thanked him. He shook his head again, less emphatically, although his clean-shaven face was tinged with a few splotches of pink.

“I just... you know,” he said. “We’re friends. I wouldn’t be a very good friend if you couldn’t tell me important things.”

He paused to load another bite of salad onto his fork.

“My dad,” he added thoughtfully, “is definitely the most awkward person I’ve ever shared a meal with. I met him for the first time on my twelfth birthday, and he took me out to lunch at this tiny Mexican restaurant. We said maybe, like, five words to each other the entire time.”

He smiled a small, bittersweet sort of smile. Then, he shoveled some more lettuce into his mouth.

“So, anyway, you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said thickly, covering his mouth with one hand to hide his half-chewed food. Even with the majority of his face covered, the sparkle in his eyes was telling. “You’re good company, too.”

[Audrey Vandergraaf]

Audrey screwed the cap back onto the now empty bottle as she listened dutifully, Jasper’s tender words punctuated with the audible crunch of cheap plastic spearing a fresh mound of lettuce.

“Yeah, I guess I am too… Glad I’m surviving, that is.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug, the sharp edges of her shoulders pushing out against the woven confines of her sweater. Her gaze moved quickly, scanning the breadth of Jasper’s strong forearms and then returning her own rolled-up sleeves, a meek smile playing on her lips; they were both donning pale blue knitwear, so in this moment, Jasper Blackwater and Audrey Vandergraaf actually matched.

Audrey busied herself with pointing her toes beneath the table as her dining partner continued to munch on his salad, her calves flexed hard and the arches of her feet stinging slightly. She took his dismissal of her assertion as flattery; the ballerina knew for a fact that she was a terrible person to share a meal with. However, after his declaration regarding the nature of their friendship, well, she experienced an unfamiliar sensation in her stomach, like a fluttering of sorts… It was strange, but nice.

“Well, you can tell me important things too…” Her voice drifted off into the antiseptic lunchroom air; this was uncharted territory, a square of Earth that had not yet been mapped. Luckily, Jasper was proving a skillful travel companion.

After her confession, he offered his own, an expression of solidarity in their shared history of subpar parenting. Audrey didn’t know Jasper was raised without his biological father, and she nodded along as he spoke, tracing both the dejected and wistful turns of his lips.

“Well, that sucks, but I hope that at least the food was good.” She began sincerely, the topics of family and eating swirling madly in he mind, “Usually when I go out with mother, the food is all wheatgrass-centric and she passes the time thinking of creative ways to call me a cow. Seriously, the woman lost her calling as a wordsmith.”

Audrey giggled through the fog of sadness they occupied mutually, glad to share this moment with someone who didn’t need to stuff them down, to instead air out the ugliness and allow a laugh or two at its expense.

“You’re better company, in fact, you should become a dining hall therapist; Set up shop by the cereal dispensers.”

[Jasper Blackwater]

Audrey informed Jasper that she was glad that she was surviving, too, she guessed, and his eyes crinkled with happiness in response, as if to say that guessing was good enough. He turned back to his salad and made to spear a grape tomato. It took him a few tries.

A warm silence fell between them until she spoke again, and Jasper raised his eyes from his food to look at her. She was doing that thing again—the thing she did with her feet. He couldn’t feel it, or anything, but he could tell anyway.

“I know I can,” he said, not because it was polite, but because it was true.

It didn’t take him long to work through the rest of the salad; soon, all that remained was a watery puddle of dressing in the bottom of the plastic container. After pausing to recount the awkward memory of his father, he took a long swig of Diet Coke. The carbonation bit the back of his throat and made his eyes well up a little.

“The food was okay,” he said. He blinked a few times to clear his vision. “I had a quesadilla, and he bought me churros. I mean, I’m pretty sure he was just nervous, but....”

The sentence faded into nothing, and was followed by a brief, half-hearted laugh.

“I didn’t see him again until I was fifteen, and I haven’t heard from him since then. I think he lives in California now.”

He fell silent, then, and busied himself with the obscene amount of plastic that had been layered over his chicken salad wrap. He listened to Audrey talk about her mother; his eyebrows were furrowed, and he picked at the stubborn packaging with a little more force than necessary. Experience had taught him that mothers were off limits as a general rule, and he could not justify voicing his discontent. He settled for picking the low-hanging fruit.

“I totally respect healthy eating, and all,” he said, “but I draw the line at wheatgrass. That is not real food.”

He finally managed to free his wrap from its plastic prison and picked up the nearest half. It sagged pitifully, and he had to use his other hand to secure it en route to his mouth. She giggled, then, which got him started, too; it took him a moment to recover enough to swallow.

“Will I get paid in cereal, too?” he asked. “Because I’d be okay with that.”

He took another large bite of chicken salad and soggy tortilla. White dressing settled in the corners of his mouth. There was another brief pause, and then:

“Are you going home? For Thanksgiving.”