The Cheesecake Factory is aglow with warm ambience, low laughter and clinking glasses, all the stuff of a good commercial. But amid the goodwill and dishes of overflowing carbohydrates, a lone bubble of silence envelops a table of four high school seniors, awkwardly sitting across from each other. It’s the second semester of senior year.

Unused to having the time to sit down at a restaurant and order food, the four seniors each toy with their phones, two thinking about checking their grades, the third fighting the urge to start studying the AP Biology PowerPoint she’s already downloaded onto her phone, and the fourth just about to break and start writing his AP Lit essay. The only noise at the table is the sound of neurotic foot tapping, as someone worries about the physics WebAssign that’s due in twelve hours. The conversation is strained, isolated, and at times painful: the short-lived topics include last week’s calculus test, the upcoming timed write, and the chemistry test curve.

Oh boy. Someone else is trying to make a stab at conversation. She repeats a joke she recently heard on SNL (she’s just recently started watching again; besides, there’s no way she’s retained enough humor over the past 3.5 years to produce her own jokes), but the others just stare dully at her. Everything feels more ludicrous and laughable when one’s bloodstream is 50% caffeine.

The second semester of senior year has finally arrived, and current seniors have been eagerly awaiting its arrival for the past three and a half years—its distant gleam often provided the light at the end of the tunnel during crazed 3 A.M. study sessions (of which there were many). Yet, now, without the ominous, omnipresent weight of tests, grades, SATs, and applications, seniors don’t quite know what to do. Weekends were spent desperately catching up on sleep (I once slept a memorable 18 hours from Friday night into Saturday afternoon); breaks were spent preemptively RTN-ing chapters of AP Euro; and summer breaks were spent taking courses, conducting research, and, of course, wrangling the dreaded beast that is summer homework.

In retrospect, it was fairly easy living a life rigidly dictated by a plethora of rigorous classes and incessant extracurriculars: students robotically followed schedules that were timed impeccably to allow time for every last sport, community service obligation, club, instrument, and AP class. They didn’t have to worry about planning out their leisure time because they had none. Collin Montag ’17 remarks that, in contrast, with senioritis, “it’s no longer a question of what I can do to get the best grade in the class, but instead, how to minimize the work I have to do each day in order to just barely scrape by.”

After years of toil and trouble, seniors feel obligated to adhere to a new routine of apathy and relaxation, an attitude of screw-it-we’re-leaving-for-college-soon. Now, determined to flout the homework and studying to which they are so accustomed, seniors scramble to find hobbies, interests, and friends to fill the hours that have suddenly freed up. Awkwardly, they open text threads that contain mostly pictures of homework and worked out solutions and homework assignments and type, “Wanna hang out later?” in lieu of the usual “Wanna study at the library later?” or “Can you work on the project after school?” It seems foreign. Weird.

Blinking blearily at the harsh daylight like bears come out of hibernation, seniors struggle to reacquaint themselves with reality.

“Brangelina broke up? Obama’s no longer our president?” Catherine McDonnell 17’ inquires confusedly. All of a sudden, seniors have the time to watch the nightly news, dig up their Netflix passwords, and commit to long-term Snapchat streaks.

Seniors look forward to college for four years that are notoriously more relaxed, more free, and less stressful than the previous four. But will they know how to enjoy them?