Table for One

Table for One
Chapter	92 of 127 (list of chapters)
Published	March 18, 2016 (2016-03-18)
Page count	20
Major characters	Mike, Daisy, Paulo, Abbey, David, Madison
Minor characters	Sue, Jessica, Rachel, Augustus, Amaya, Matt, Jordan, Three Weird Girls
Locations	Roseville High School
Collected in	Volume Six
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Junior year begins with Mike running on no sleep and a guilty conscience. Paulo has stopped talking to Daisy, Augustus is somehow back in the halls, and the first day of school ends with a birthday wish nobody hears.

Synopsis

The first day of junior year starts badly for Mike. He barely slept, and he keeps drifting off into a static-filled daze while Daisy and Abbey chatter about honor roll. Rounding a hallway corner, he crashes into somebody and blurts “Oh god, Lucy--”. It’s Madison, who is sick of people calling her that, and who mimes slitting her throat while vowing to hunt this “Lucy” down. A shaken Mike admits to his friends that last night’s nightmare started exactly the same way.

At lunch, Paulo greets Mike warmly and refuses to acknowledge Daisy at all, coughing rather than answer her hello. When the SATs come up, he announces he’s skipping them. His pay is already split between a car fund and his dad, and anyway, “School just isn’t for me. Might as well get started on a career in burgers, haha!” He talks right over Daisy’s objection, and though he flushes when he catches her wounded stare, the freeze stays on.

The lunch conversation keeps circling the same absent girl. Madison asks the table whether Sue’s old play was “that weird incest thing”, and when David sighs out his usual pet name for Lucy, she finally connects the name she keeps getting called to the play she was mocking. When one of David’s jokes places Lucy in heaven, Paulo bolts upright screaming that “SHE’S NOT DEAD”.

Pressed by the whole table about his dazes, Mike finally admits that his nightmare went just like his morning, except that in it he ran into Lucy. It’s Paulo wondering whether Sandy has heard about any of this that really lands. Mike goes hollow for a long moment, then turns back with a bright, forced smile: “Sandy’s been great.” Paulo doesn’t look convinced.

Worrying over Paulo in the corridor after lunch, Daisy walks straight into Augustus, back at Roseville High School and looking worn out. Abbey plants himself between them before she can get a question out, and Augustus taunts him about ending up “in jail like a certain other psycho”. Daisy pulls Abbey back, insisting he’s not worth it. The smirk falls right off Augustus’s face, and he trudges away.

After the last bell, Mike slips away from the crowds with a copy of Pride and Prejudice and climbs the hill to the big tree beneath the mountains. He sits against the trunk and watches the leaves come down until he’s a small silhouette. His only words are a thought: “Happy birthday.”

Character dynamics

Madison has strong opinions about a girl she has never met.

• Paulo and Daisy: Until a few days ago these two were close, which is exactly what makes the silent treatment sting. Paulo is still smarting from Daisy’s phone-call verdict at the end of the beach trip, “It’s different because Abbey is NOT LIKE YOU!” Here he answers her greetings with silence and looks ashamed whenever he catches her hurt expression. At the bell he leaves with Rachel, and Daisy is left staring after them. Neither of them says out loud what the fight was about.
• Mike and Lucy: She never appears, and the chapter bends around her absence anyway. Mike spends the morning terrified of a chance meeting and the whole of lunch getting needled about her. By the end the dread has settled into something more like plain grief, and he finishes the first day of school alone at the tree.
• Mike and Sandy: Officially everything is fine, and Mike works hard to keep it looking that way, brandishing his phone as proof that he has a girlfriend. In truth he spent the previous night redialing her answering machine, and Paulo’s needling cracks the front for a moment before Mike papers it back over with “Sandy’s been great.”
• Madison and Lucy: Madison is nursing a grudge against a complete stranger. She already hated the name people keep mistaking her for, and now that David’s nickname has tied it to the play she was mocking, she knows exactly whose neck she wants to wring.

Mike closes out the first day of junior year alone.

• Rachel and Paulo: They’re not a couple, as Rachel herself once put it, but she spends this chapter acting an awful lot like half of one. She parks her friends at the next table over for the year, claims Paulo as “my boo” in front of everyone, and walks him out of the cafeteria at the bell.
• Daisy and Augustus: Daisy’s first reaction to finding him back at school is worry rather than fear. Her “he’s not worth it..”, aimed only at holding Abbey back, lands on Augustus anyway. His smirk collapses, and he leaves looking drained.

Trivia & observations

• One of this chapter’s updates originally went up as an April Fools’ joke page before being swapped out for the real thing. The commentary under the replacement plays innocent: “Oh yeah. OK. That old comic was some kind of glitch.”
• The lunch lady gets a name, Francine, in her first (and so far only) named appearance in the comic. The page’s commentary says the cafeteria line-cutting is drawn straight from the author’s own high school days, adding “I know how the nerdy girl feels.”
• David performs “Welcome to my humble abode” from atop a table twice, once at lunch and once in the AP English classroom, where it turns out he’s somehow jumped there from English I. He explains himself with “Like the phoenix, I rise!”
• The hilltop tree is a returning spot. It’s the same tree where a young Mike and Sandy used to eat lunch, and Mike has sat beneath it alone like this once before, in the snow.
• The chapter never says whose birthday its final line marks. For what it’s worth, the one birthday the series places right at the start of the school year is Yashy’s, celebrated against the same back-to-school grumbling in Yashy’s Birthday.
• Veronica has said the comic only reads as pro-college “because the focus is on, frankly, a bunch of nerds”. She never completed a degree herself, and relates to Paulo, who “genuinely doesn’t want to pursue college.”
• Oliver’s commentary captions the opening page “The beginning of the end”.

Related chapters

• Dial Tone: The nightmare Mike can’t shake is shown in full there, the night before this chapter opens. He dreams of bumping into a smiling Lucy at school, then spends the small hours redialing Sandy’s answering machine.
• Golden Hour: The beach trip where everything went sour. Daisy’s phone-call condemnation of Paulo in that chapter is the grudge behind his silent treatment here. It’s also where David first compared Madison to his “Lucy-baby”, which is why the name has been driving her up the wall ever since.
• Love Again: Lucy finally comes back to Roseville High. She crosses paths with the newly resurfaced Augustus, and Madison at last lays eyes on the girl she swore here to throttle.