Commons is the school dining hall and the heart of Andover's campus. Commons offers four oak-paneled, dining rooms, plus three smaller dining rooms for smaller get togethers. The dining halls are served by cafeterias that offer homemade bread and soup and salad bar and vegan food and pasta and black beans and rice and frozen yogurt and so on and so forth DAILY). In the Ryley Room, downstairs, there are pool tables and games and you can buy your favorite foods and snacks like pizza and calzones. When you're hitting the books in your dorm room at night, The Ryley Room even delivers.

Q: When can you eat?

A: One dining hall is open all day for sandwiches and bagels; the other three are open at breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the full smorgasbord of food.

A: The first week of school or so, the Blue Key students (seniors in charge of school spirit) hover about, herding new students to orientation and to meals, so the new students naturally tend to sit together in Commons with their Senior mentors. After those first few days, though, anything goes. Students sit with their roommates, with kids from their classes, with kids they don't know yet but want to know, with teammates, with members of their musical groups or drama productions, with their teachers, with their teachers' families, and sometimes, for the peace and quiet of it, with a copy of the Boston Globe, and sometimes, because they're scrambling just a little bit to get their work done, with a copy of Hamlet.