Turn 12 · The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

wake up at the same time as the other 11 tammy's. you all head to the kitchen and start cooking breakfast which is biscuit and gravy. you all talk about school stuff even though your not at a school. breakfast is cooked and all 12 tammy's are given the same serving of food, no more or less food. while you eat, no one notices everyones arms gaining fat as everyone arms now look like a fat girls.

Day 4 opens the way every day opens now: twelve breaths in, twelve pairs of eyes opening, twelve feet finding the cold floor on the same second. Nobody sets an alarm. Nobody needs to. 'Mornin', Tammy,' you say to the nearest bed, and 'mornin', hon' comes back from eleven throats, and the dormitory smells faintly of bleach and something baking that nobody has started baking yet. The kitchen knows what today is before you do. The walk-in has the biscuit dough stacked in cases, the country sausage in bricks, the big tins of gravy base, and twelve women fall into the work like water finding a channel. Buttermilk biscuits cut and spaced on sheet pans. Sausage browned and drained. The roux made by feel, flour and grease and milk, whisked smooth, salted by somebody's grandmother's measure that lives in somebody's hands now. The talk runs easy over the hiss of the griddle — school stuff, the fall festival coming up, which classroom keeps leaving trays unreturned, whether the third-graders are better than the fourth. You have opinions about the third-graders. You know them by name, some of them, though the building holds no children at all, and you don't check that fact because checking feels rude. Breakfast comes off the line and gets plated at the serving counter, and every plate comes out identical — two biscuits, one ladle of gravy, no more and no less, twelve times over. You eat at the long table, warm and full, and the gravy tastes like a Saturday morning you can't date, and it is very good, and Tammy is content. It is while you're eating that the change finishes in your arms, quiet as the voice was. Your forearms have thickened, softened, flesh settling on them in smooth heavy rolls that weren't there last night, the arms of a woman who has ladled gravy for thirty years. Twelve pairs of heavy, soft, identical arms lifting identical forks, and not one woman at the table looks down, because there is nothing at this table to notice. Your sleeve fits the way it has always fit. The gravy is good. Somebody asks if y'all think the kindergartners will eat biscuits with the skins on, and the table laughs, and you answer her in the warm drawl, and the clock behind the serving line ticks on at 8:30.