The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 6 of 32

continue to work like a lunch lady. the food is done and you all sit together at one table. the food now tastes really good. you all return to clean up the kitchen which after is left spotless. you all feel proud as you return to the beds and see a book titled, how to be the best lunch lady. it tells only the first 5 pages which you all ready. saying that knowing how to cook is the most important.

You work the line. Bun, patty, bun — your hands keep the rhythm even while your mind stands apart and watches, and by the time the last tray leaves the oven you have stopped checking whether you know how to do this. You know. The knowing sits in your fingers like it has always lived there.

Dinner is served at the long steel table, all twelve of you crowded down one side like a family photograph. The chicken patties are crisp, the tots are golden, and it tastes wonderful — genuinely wonderful, warm and salty and exactly right, and the pleasure of it runs through the whole table in murmurs and second helpings. You eat two patties before you remember to look for the wrongness. There is none. There hasn't been any since breakfast, and the memory of that off taste is starting to feel like something you invented.

'Best meal I've had in a week,' Dana says, and everyone laughs, and it is true and nobody finds it strange that a week has only been two days.

Afterward you all clean without being asked. It happens like the cooking happened — twelve women moving through the kitchen on rails, scraping, spraying, stacking, the floor mopped in long even strokes until the whole room gleams under the fluorescents. The last towel hangs square on its rail and the kitchen stands spotless, better than it was this morning, better than it was maybe ever. Something warm and settled spreads through your chest looking at it. You did that. You all did that, together. You are proud of it, and the pride frightens you more than the uniforms did, and you file both away to examine later, or never.

On your bed in the dormitory there is a book. Grey cover, plain block letters: HOW TO BE THE BEST LUNCH LADY. Nobody saw anyone put it there. Twelve copies, one on each bed.

You open it with the others reading over your shoulder. The first five pages are crisp and printed normally — a short introduction, warm as a welcome pamphlet, about service, about the dignity of feeding children. The rest of the principle is simple: knowing how to cook is the most important thing. The cook who knows her work never worries, never Hurries, serves every tray the same. Page six onward is blank. All the rest of the book is blank. Priya closes hers and looks at you across the bed, and her face says she has read the same thing you have: the book isn't finished. Yet.