Turn 18 · The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Wake up with the others and cook the french toast stick breakfast. the stations different today. the group that cooked dinner now serve the food today, the serving group is getting the food and the group that got the food is cooking it today. while yall eat, everyones face changes to the same 60 year old southern womans face. no one can see until the same cat-eye glasses appear in front of yall.

Day 5 begins on the same shared breath — twelve eyes opening, twelve 'mornin', hon's — and the walk-in already has the french toast sticks pulled and waiting on the counter, exactly where Tammy left them last night. Today the wheel turns a notch: you and the three who cooked supper yesterday take the serving line, the servers move to fetching, and the fetchers step up to the griddle. Nobody explains it. The sticks go down in rows, the oven ticking warm, cinnamon and that familiar sweetness filling the kitchen while syrup tins get set out and the trays get squared.

You plate them at the counter, one fair portion each, and carry them to the long table, and the sticks taste like the good years — the divided tray, the little milk carton, the whole of it. Halfway through the meal, without one woman at that table so much as glancing up, twelve faces finish their slow work. Your cheeks fill and soften, your jaw rounds, fine lines settle in around your eyes and mouth, and you become the face of a sixty-year-old southern woman, weathered and kind, exactly like the eleven faces around you. Your dark hair greys through at the roots and nobody's hand goes to it.

Then, as you set down your fork, twelve pairs of cat-eye glasses appear on the table — simply there, resting beside the syrup, tortoiseshell frames sized just so. You pick yours up and put them on the way you put them on every morning of your life, and through the lenses the room comes in crisp and warm: ten Tammys in matching glasses smiling back at you, faces like your own mama's, like your own. 'Well, don't you look nice, hon,' Tammy says, and you tell her the same, and it's true, and there is not one thing at this table left to notice.

The clock ticks on at 8:30, and Tammy is content.