I feel the pressure of a hand locked tight on my wrist, hear the crunch of a plastic wrapper as something is taken from me, pulled out and away from my grasp.
The scene speeds up around me and in front of me and inside me. Mrs. Underwood stands firm, blocking access to my own daughter, who is, if I’m seeing things right, shivering inside a gray pinafore that’s two sizes too large.
“One thing you’ll understand while you’re working for me,” Mrs. Underwood says, leading me away from Freddie and steering me toward the serving counter. Her words are slow and deliberate and horrible as she slides a tray from the stack and sets it down much too firmly on the metal surface. “And you will understand it, Dr. Fairchild. No one is special here. No one.” In her hand is the package of cookies meant for Freddie.
But she’s taken so much more away from me than that.
FORTY-TWO
THEN:
I was fourteen when I met Malcolm. I ate lunch alone in my second week of high school, a book in one hand and a cheese sandwich in the other. Every five minutes, I’d have to put one of them down and push my glasses up from the tip of my nose to the bridge where they belonged. It looked as if I were reading and eating, but what I was really doing was counting the eyes of other people watching me and wishing I could vanish, blend into the linoleum floor and plastic chairs.
Malcolm, bucktoothed and skinny, an Adam’s apple he wouldn’t grow into for another few years bulging at his throat, brought his lunch to my corner. There were whispers, loud enough to make out and sharp enough to hurt, circling in the air between the other tables.
“I don’t know about you,” Malcolm said, setting his tray down opposite me, “but I deal with them by playing a game.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I deal with them by wishing I’d disappear.”
“That’s not a very good game. I’ve got a better one.” He pointed to a table of cheerleaders, their impossibly short skirts flaring out over impossibly tanned thighs. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.” With each word, his chin moved, like he was counting them out. “If the building erupted in flames, I think we could let those three burn. What do you say?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes roamed across the room to the jocks. “Total waste of life,” he said, nodding toward one of the basketball stars. “Burn or save?”
“Burn.”
“Okay. So you know the rules. Now you pick one.”
I scanned the cafeteria, landing on a girl two years older than me who laughed at a dress I wore twice in the same week. “Her. The one with the big earrings. Little Miss Richie-Rich.”
“Good call.”
And it went on, until we’d burned every single body in the cafeteria except ourselves and one kid from the math club who Malcolm didn’t consider completely useless. In fifteen minutes, we got rid of the assholes, the idiots, the “uglies” (as Malcolm called them), and pretty much anyone else we could find an excuse to hate. We even took out the lunch ladies, just on account of them being fat.
“Feel better?” he said when we were, hypothetically, the last ones standing.
“I do. But we can’t burn everyone.”
“Got a better idea?” His eyes twinkled with mischief.
“Well,” I said, thinking I’d like to dive into those eyes and swim in them. “What if we turned it around? I mean, what if we made it so the dumb popular people had to—I don’t know—wait in line for lunch? Or pay extra for stuff?”
We grew into ourselves, eventually, got better at blending in. By my junior year, our idea of color-coded identification cards had taken hold. By next spring, every school in Maryland had adopted the scheme. With our gold cards came perks: free tickets to dances, priority cafeteria lines, a separate student lounge. Malcolm used to joke about it being exactly like the classes in air travel.