The waiter brings our check. We have no money, so we count pennies, literally. Dredging our pockets and the recesses of our bookbags for spare change. We're going to have to leave a very small tip.

But we linger long past the hour we had set aside for our coffee break. It is late now, and Pamplona is slowly emptying. First the couples leave, then the students. The European types remain. It seems as though they are always there.

A quotation from her paper sticks in my head. Things aren't so bad for you and me as they might have been, George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, because of those who faithfully lived hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Things aren't so bad for you and me, things aren't so bad.

The waiters start closing up for the night, putting chairs on top of empty tables. We are the only people left.

Outside the street is deserted. I'm not upset anymore, the computer doesn't frighten me.

I finish my paper at four o'clock that morning.   --Susan B. Glasser

As little girls we had tea parties.

Now we go for coffee.

It used to be Earl Grey and china dolls in mid-afternoon. Now it's capuccino and conversation, midnight at Cafe Algiers.

It started with our first 10-page papers. Soon coffee became a regular ritual. We didn't need the coffee to stay awake, we needed the conversation. And after a while, we didn't even need the excuse.

We all met separately; we went out for coffee in twos and threes. Finally the four of us ended up around the same table. Again and again.

By now we know the price of espresso at Cafe Pamplona, poppy seed cake at the Coffee Connection. We know to go to Tommy's Lunch after a party, and to Cafe Algiers in times of crisis. And we know when to order hot chocolate or tea with honey instead.

Last year it was novel. None of us had made a habit of going out for coffee before we arrived in Cambridge.

But we had thought about it. When the admissions committee asked what we wanted to do at Harvard, one of us said, "study history, learn Japanese, and go for coffee."

We had visions of smoke-filled rooms, deep voices, deep conversation and black coffee. It seemed so Harvard.

But that's not why we do it anymore.

There are many other Harvard things to do--reading Kant, retrieving our papers from the snickering computer, comping the Crimson. But going for coffee brings us together. We still use it as paper procrastination. We still use it as an escape from hectic schedules.

Most of all, going for coffee is an opportunity to talk, to re-assess, to analyse.

We may not have time in our schedules to do lunch, but we always have time to go for coffee.