Turn 14 · The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Start cooking lunch with the other Tammys. its nachos today. you all cook together while now moving the same with the same southern drawl voice. after lunch is done, the same serving is served as you all sit at the table. while eating, you all lose appetite for all other foods. the only foods that yall love is the forzen school meals which you are all fine with.

Lunch is nachos, and the walk-in has everything waiting — big bags of golden tort chips, tins of processed cheese sauce, a case of seasoned ground beef in bricks. Twelve women move through the kitchen like one body wearing twelve aprons. You reach and tammy passes; tammy turns and tammy is already there with the tray. Nobody speaks to coordinate it. When somebody does speak it's in the shared drawl, easy as breathing: 'Mind the cheese now, hon, it'll scorch on you.' 'Won't scorch, I got it.' The beef browns, the cheese loosens in the big pot, and the serving line gets laid out pretty, chips fanned on the trays, the little paper boats from the storage room set ready like it's a real lunch line with real children coming. The portions come out identical, same as always — same count of chips, same ladle of cheese, same spoon of beef, twelve plates in a row that could be one plate photographed twelve times. You sit at the long table with the others and the nachos taste exactly like the ones from the little cafeteria you remember, the good years, the plastic tray with the divided sections. Halfway through, somebody mentions supper. 'What we fixin' tonight, y'all?' and tammy says she'd been thinking chicken patties, and then tammy says quiet, 'I don't rightly want anything but the freezer meals no more. Anything else just don't... sound like food.' The table nods along, your own head among them, and when you reach inside yourself for some other meal — a curry, a burger, anything from before — your appetite slides right off the thought. Those aren't meals. Those are just pictures. The frozen school food is food, the only food, and the feeling that settles over the table is not loss. It's relief, like coming home to a kitchen that only ever cooks one way, the right way. You finish your boat of nachos, every chip, and lick the cheese off your broad soft thumb, and Talia starts clearing while the rest of you gather the trays, and Tammy is content, and the clock ticks on at 8:30.