The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 2 of 32

Wake up and check if anyone has come for you, they havent as you see everyone got up at the same time. you all leave the room and head to try and find something to eat when you by mistake open the firgde to see frozen french toast sticks, the ones that were served all of middle school. you tell them and everyone agrees to cook them. no one knows how to cook them and try to figure out how to.

You wake to grey light through a window you don't remember, and your first motion is for the bedside — where your phone would be. Your hand finds bare mattress. The thought that follows isn't surprise; it's that the absence already feels arranged.

In the corridor the others are emerging at the same moment, all twelve doors, all twelve faces, like a bell rang that none of you heard. Dana checks the loading door first, then the office by the entrance, then the road from the shoulder of the lot: no bus, no truck, no tire tracks but the ones the bus left yesterday, already softened by wind. Nobody has come.

"We need to eat," Dana says, and no one disagrees, because everyone is already thinking it. Your stomach has been awake since you opened your eyes, loud and insistent in a way that feels less like hunger than like an instruction.

The kitchen looks exactly as it did when you fell asleep, except for the hairnets and aprons, which have been moved. They sit now on the counter beside the fridge, squared into two neat rows. You walk past them. You pull the walk-in door open, and cold air rolls out smelling of cardboard and syrup, and there they are: case boxes of frozen french toast sticks, the exact brand from middle school, the ones with the crisp golden shell and the soft center, the ones that came with the little syrup cups. You know the logo. You know the taste before you've touched a single one.

"Oh my god," someone says behind you, and it isn't disgust. It's delight.

"Those are the ones. Those are the exact ones from — " She names your middle school. Several voices correct her: no, THEIR middle school. Six different schools. The same sticks.

The boxes come out onto the steel counter and twelve women stand around them, and the problem becomes plain: not one of you has cooked a french toast stick in your life. They were always handed to you on a compartment tray. Dana suggests the oven. Someone asks what temperature. Someone else holds a stick up and asks if you can just eat them frozen, and Priya, quiet until now, says only, "There's no toaster," as if that settles something. All of it arrives at you, the one who went to culinary school, standing closest to the ovens.