Did You Hear They Fired the Lunch Lady?

This one hurts.

At least with the lunch lady gig under my belt, it’ll be easy to find another job. Something in fast food, probably. All they expect you to do there is stand behind the counter and take orders. When you’re a lunch lady, you gotta do that�"plus walk around and supervise to make sure the taters you made don’t end up in somebody’s f*****g eye. Some of those middle schoolers are f*****g demons too, and you really think about what a burden you’re lifting from some poor sons of b*****s for a couple hours.

                There was this one girl, Kasey. Good kid. Talked too much sometimes and held up the line, and always hung out with this sleazy-a*s boy who made me check my pockets for my wallet after each time we talked. But Kasey was nice, always had her hair strung up in a ponytail, and always ordered the chicken-n’-cheese taquitos I could just stick in the microwave.

                It’s her friends who made me wish I was allowed to wear earplugs on the job; six absolute stick figures of girls who wouldn’t cover up their bellybuttons in the damn Arctic, always screeching and hollering about who has AIDs and what’s a blowjob and who did what under the bleachers at 2:00 AM. It took less than a month for Kasey’s shorts to shrink to their size. It’s a sad thing you see a hundred times in middle schools.

That group was always right there in front of the counter and I’d be stuck wanting to pluck my ears out until it was time to supervise. Then I’d be granted the sweet mercy of being able to walk around and find the quietest corner of the cafeteria. That was unless somebody yelled for a teacher�"which wasn’t often. Kasey did one time, though.

                “Mrs. Bakshi!”

                On my way over there, half the group of girls was sitting up trying to look all proper, and the other half was trying to hush up their friend before she could tattle. One was pretending to laugh, like it was just a joke, whatever it was.

                “Claire called me a hundred!” she whined, shredding up her voice box trying to scream over everyone else.

                “Did not!” said Claire. Could’ve told you she’d say that.

                “Yeah, why’d you do that?” said another girl�"Michelle, I think.

                “I didn’t! All I said was Isaac thinks you’re a hundred, and who cares what he thinks?! He’s got snot on his sleeves all the time; I’ve seen it.”

                “You didn’t have to say it out loud!”

                I raised my voice to shut them up. Then I made a mistake and asked what the hell was so bad about being called… whatever that was. They just giggled. F*****g kids. They think they’ve got more brain cells than Einstein and Tesla combined.

                “Everybody knows,” Claire explained�"to use the term very loosely. “I’m a fourteen, Danica’s a sixteen, Michelle’s a fifteen�"”

                “Fifteen-point-eight!” said Michelle. “Basically a sixteen.”

                “Rahel is a sixteen, and Kasey…” �"Claire drew that out for a long time�" “is a hundred.”

                “Claire!”

                “I’m trying to help you! Everyone knows that boys aren’t gonna talk to you unless you’re below eighteen-point-five. I’m just trying to help.”

                I’d had enough at that point, so I just about lost my voice trying to shut them up and tell them I didn’t need to know what it meant to know they were being rude to Kasey and to cut it out.

                “Okay, fine,” said Claire, finally. “Sorry I was trying to help… hundred.”

                The scowl on Kasey’s face stretched from one side of her forehead to the other as she slammed her hands down on the table, got up, and stormed away, slap-slap footsteps as loud as a fifty-pound girl could make.

                So I told Claire that it’s never okay to call people names.

                “I’m not!” she said. “It’s not a name! It’s just math. All you do is take your weight and you divide it by your height squared. You should be happy we’re doing math.”

                See, I’m not dumb. I was told how to deal with kids during training, and I picked up a few things here and there along the way. That’s how I remembered that this girl just rattled off the formula for BMI. An index score below 18.5 meant you were underweight.

                I asked where Kasey had gone.

                She wouldn’t tell me.

                I told her she’d tell eventually, and she didn’t tell me, she’d be telling Principal Novak.

                She finally got the fight knocked out of her. “Kasey’s probably in the bathroom. That’s where we all go.”

                That’s when I headed to the girls’ bathroom right beside the cafeteria. The line for that was always a mile long because the other two bathrooms had been broken all year and Principal Novak would rather buy new staffroom carpeting than fix them. However, this time I came in just as a girl was coming out, swaying as she walked, so pale in the face that she almost bumped into me.

                There was a bend in the hallway so that the boys couldn’t peek inside. It was a twisting, white-tiled place with one lightbulb for the whole thing. I had just stepped inside when I heard retching and a dump in the toilet. Someone was puking their f*****g guts up in there. Then I heard it again, but… a little farther away. I turned the corner.
                The girls’ bathroom had 3 stalls in it. Every single one was open, and every single one had a girl on her knees, throwing everything their stomachs held up into it. A fourth girl was sat up against the wall, heaving, hand on her chest, eyes shut. The first girl to hoist herself up on her feet after wiping the drool off her mouth was Kasey, and all she did when she saw me was stare me in the eye, lips burnt white, fingers shaking, eyes as wide as the moon.

                Of course, I told Principal Novak.

                One week later, I’m looking for a new job. They needed new lunch ladies. All of us had to go because our food was so bad that it was making the girls throw up. He told everybody they’d stop once they got some better food to choke down. Somehow, I don’t believe he checked to make sure.