The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 5 of 32

continue looking around the place and find something wired. 12 blue work dress with a collar, 12 white aprons, 12 stockings, 12 yellow gloves, 12 cat-eye glasses, 12 black flats and 12 Invisible nylon hairnets. creps you out. soon everyone stomach rumbles in hunger at dinner time. the 9 that cooked lunch go to cook dinner. but you and 2 otherswho didnt help eariler join. still wearing your outfit

You tell yourself you're looking for exits, and for a while you are. But your feet carry you past the loading dock, past the offices, to a door you hadn't noticed before — a narrow room off the corridor behind the serving line, dark, smelling of new fabric. You find the light switch and the room answers with a hum of fluorescent tube.

Racks line both walls, and on them, in twelve identical sets, the uniforms hang. Blue work dresses with Peter Pan collars, stiff and unworn. White aprons, creased into perfect thirds. Twelve pairs of sheer stockings, twelve yellow rubber gloves, twelve pairs of black flats in a row, toes aligned. Twelve cat-eye glasses with gold frames sit above them on a shelf, and beside those, folded so lightly they're almost not there, twelve fine nylon hairnets. Twelve of each. Twelve of everything. Sized, when you touch the hem of one dress, for women of your height and Dana's and Priya's — for the twelve of you, individually, as if someone had measured you while you slept.

You stand in the doorway a long moment with your hand still on the hem. The room doesn't smell of dust or storage. It smells like it was opened this morning.

Down the corridor a bell-shaped timer goes off, and the sound pulls your stomach tight with hunger — dinnertime, right on schedule, the same certainty the hunger has shown all day. In the kitchen nine of the women are already moving, pulling cases of chicken patties and tater tots from the walk-in, and Dana says it without turning around: 'Grab an apron if you're helping, there's plenty.'

You don't take one. You and two of the others — the ones who stood out of the lunch service — step to the counter and join the line, and your hands find their places in the assembly as though the counter itself had been waiting for you. Sauce scoop. Bun. Patty. Bun. You don't decide the order. The order arrives in your hands like a song you knew before you heard it.