Turn 25 of 26

You four leave as you wait for everyone else to join. The others soon join as they all got internships as well at the same prestigious companies just like you 4 just got. You all head to the dining hall and grab the fried, unhealthy food. It’s different from yesterday’s food. Everyone seats in 5 groups of 6. You sit with Ruth, Peggy, Penelope. Two more from class named Margaret and Lucy join.

You four leave the back room first, and the rest of the class filters out of the reception hall behind you in twos and fours — and every group, you hear as you pass, got placed. Megan's four. Priya's four. The low-pigtailed girl's four. All of them, all at the same handful of prestigious companies, the same kind of mathematics, all starting Monday, all as units. Nobody finds it strange that thirty girls from one honors section all landed the best placements in the building on the same evening. The warmth doesn't leave room for the question, and the still thing under it stays still, which somehow feels worse than the hammering ever did.

The dining hall at night is fluorescent and half-empty, and the thirty of you descend on the fried line together. The tray they hand you is different from yesterday's — chicken tenders glistening with grease, a mountainside of fries, cheese sauce in a little plastic cup, a basket of onion rings — heavier, somehow, than yesterday's heavy, and your hands load it onto your tray without a single thought of a salad crossing your mind. Double dessert too, obviously: a slab of chocolate cake and a dish of pudding, because Ruth is already carrying hers.

The tables arrange themselves into five groups of six. You don't decide the groups; you simply end up in yours, sliding onto the bench between Ruth and Peggy, with Penelope across from you — and then two more girls from the class arrive with their trays, a round-faced girl tagged MARGARET and a quiet one tagged LUCY, and the six of you click shut like a clasp.

"W-we all got the thame companieth," Margaret whistles through her wire, delighted, and the table dissolves into giggle-snorts over the chicken tenders.

"Monday," Penelope says reverently, dipping a fry in cheese sauce.

"And clath tomorrow firtht," Ruth says, patting your arm, watching you take your first small two-fingered bite of cake through the wire. "Big week for uth." The six of you eat in the warm clatter of identical lisps, and the fried food settles into your soft middle like it belongs there, and somewhere across the dining hall a girl with a phone is still scanning tables for someone who is no longer in this room at all.