The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 8 of 32

everyone keeps working on the food as everyone now has the same 60 year old woman southern voice with a drawl. you all sit down at the table and instead of not talking, everyone is talking about their horribles lives and how this is helping them so much. after eating, everyone cleans up the kitchen and head to a new room which has a tv in there, you all watch the news on there.

The drawl spreads through the kitchen like the knowing did — one voice at a time, mid-sentence, until every woman working the line speaks in the same warm, unhurried older woman's accent. Talia says 'griddle's hot' in it. Dana says 'portions even, y'all' in it. Nobody screams. That is the worst part — you watch them hear it happen to them and keep flipping bacon, and you keep working too, because your hands won't stop and, if you're honest, because the rhythm is comforting.

At the table the talk is not what you expected. Nobody plans escape. They trade their lives like recipes. Wren tells how her boyfriend emptied her account and her mother won't take her calls. Dana talks about the job she lost and the sister she stopped speaking to. One by one they lay it down — debts, dead parents, men who broke them, years that went nowhere — and one by one each says some version of the same thing: this is helping. Being here is helping. 'Ain't nothin' out there for me anyhow,' Priya says quietly, in the voice that isn't hers, and your stomach drops, because two days ago she was the one who fled the room.

You clean the kitchen spotless again, and the pride arrives on schedule, warm and settled, and you let it come because resisting it is starting to feel like shouting into water.

Then Talia finds the room — down past the dormitory, a small lounge with twelve folding chairs facing a mounted television, old but humming with power the building shouldn't have. The local news comes on. A woman with weather-worn hair reads a segment about a catering company's tour group, twelve young women, missing since Saturday in the Hollow Ridge valley. Search suspended, she says, pending further developments. The photograph they show is all twelve of you, laughing on the bus, taken the morning you left.

Dana stands up and touches the screen. 'They're lookin',' she says, and her voice is full of relief.

Nobody mentions the word 'suspended.' The screen cuts to a cartoon, an old one, a talking lunch tray singing about vitamins. It is 8:30 somewhere. You sit down in your folding chair with the others, and the tray sings, and twelve women in the same voice laugh at the same joke.