Chapter 11: Canteen Storage Room

It was Thursday. When the bell rang to signal the beginning of lunch, I walked out from my algebra class and, instead of walking to my locker to deposit my books, I went straight to the canteen so I could be early in line to get some food. When I arrived at the canteen in the school hall I was shocked because the queue was about twenty meters long! It snaked around the hall for a while and then went outside the hall. I couldn't believe it.

As I walked to the back of the line I heard someone call out my name. I turned and found Lily standing in the middle of the line. I wondered how she got to the canteen so quickly after class. My class must have finished later than other classes or perhaps everyone who lined up here must have had classes that were located close to the canteen.

"I saved you a spot," said Lily.

As I walked towards the little girl, everyone else in the line looked at me. I felt nervous. When I got into the line in front of Lily, the guy in front of me, a guy with a really greasy face, looked at me harshly.

"Piss off!" he said. "Don't push in."

"This position was saved," I said, noticing how oily this kid's face was. Light from the ceiling reflected off this kid's face as if his head were a shiny bowling ball.

"You can't save spaces," said the greasy-faced kid.

"Yes, you can."

"No, you can't."

"Why do you care?" I asked him. "I'm behind you."

The greasy faced kid thought about what I said for a while. He looked at Lily. "You know this guy?"

I looked at Lily, who didn't seem to like being in the spotlight.

"She's my sister," I said.

The greasy faced kid nodded, turned around, and continued to engage in conversations with his own friends. When I looked at Lily she had a strangely big smile on her face. Her teeth were exposed all the way to her canines.

"I'm not your sister," she said.

"You sort of look like me," I said.

She stared up at my face. "Not really. Your hair's black. Mine's brown."

I looked more carefully at Lily's hair. It was dark brown, almost black. "What color hair does your sister Ella have?"

"Brown. Like mine."

"Are you sure? The last time I saw her she had blonde hair."

"She dyed it."

Lily and I finally ended up at the front of the line. She got a sausage roll and a bottle of orange juice while I got a meat pie as well as a bottle of orange juice. In the school hall there were quite a few students hanging around because the place connected to the canteen, the lockers, the basketball courts, and even the soccer field. The place was like a busy railway station. Lily and I walked out to the soccer field and found a spot to sit and eat.

I saw Mark standing at the other end of the school hall. He was walking slowly with two girls flanking him. It seemed like these two girls were eager to touch and feel Mark, who seemed to enjoy being touched and felt. I looked closer at these two girls and noticed that none of them was Ella. Had Ella and Mark broken up that quickly?

Lily and I sat at one corner of the soccer field. The little girl finished her sausage roll before I even took a bite of my pie, probably because she wasn't busy staring at Mark like I was. Lily held her orange juice bottle with both hands near the base and when she drank she spilled a little juice from her mouth because the flow of orange juice from the bottle to her mouth was slightly greater than the flow of orange juice down her throat. When she realized she had too much juice in her mouth it looked like she choked and gagged for a while before she quickly swallowed all the juice down her throat. She then started coughing, spewing into the warm sunny air cool mists of orange juice and saliva that headed in my direction. When Lily recovered from the coughing she looked at me. Her eyes were moist from all the coughing. The rims of her nostrils too were moist, as was her mouth. She had her mouth open. Because of the orange juice, both her tongue and her lips developed a slight orange coloration.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Does your orange juice taste funny?"

I opened my bottle and took a sip. It tasted a little sweeter than usual, but nothing major. In fact, I thought it tasted better than usual.

"It tastes yuck," said Lily with a look of disgust.

"Maybe they added more preservatives," I said, wondering whether that would make the juice sweeter or not. "Or maybe they put sugar or artificial sweetener in it."

"Why did they do that?"

"Maybe they tried to save money by putting more water into the orange juice, and to compensate for the weak watery taste they added sweetener to it."

Lily looked confused.

"You wait here," I told Lily. "I'll go to the canteen and ask them what they've done with the orange juice." I stood up and headed back inside the school hall.

When I arrived back at the canteen I noticed the line was gone and the place was shut. I walked around and managed to find a side door, which I entered. The place I entered was not the canteen. It was a room I had never been in before. It looked like a storage room. The walls were pure concrete and the fluorescent light on the ceiling had a harsh industrial look. The room contained many, many boxes all piled up forming towers. The room was quite large—about as large as an average basketball court. The boxes, I noticed, had labels on them. They were raw ingredients used to make the food and drinks that were sold to students, ingredients such as sugar, flour, and yeast. They were obviously purchased in bulk.

The towers of boxes were about five meters tall and looked like walls. If someone were to push these boxes then a domino effect would topple all the other towers of boxes in the room. It was like the supermarket in which items like cans or cereal were stack upon one another.

After a minute of walking I suddenly realized I wasn't the only person in the room. I peeked around a wall of boxes and saw someone. I couldn't see the person's face because he was wearing a black mask over his face. The mask reminded me of a Batman mask without the pointy ears. This person also wore a white robe with a hood. He was standing next to a steel drum labeled SOLUTION 97.1. The drum was open at the top. On the ground near this steel drum was a large black plastic bag filled with white powder. This hooded person stood behind a desk. On the desk was an open box. The hooded person held in his left hand a plastic container of some sort—a container most likely from the box. The container had the words PLAIN FLOUR printed on it. In the hooded person's right hand was a giant syringe about six inches long. The needle was about two inches long and was pierced through the plastic container.

"Hey, you!" cried someone from behind me.

I turned around and found another person in white robes. This person, however, wasn't hooded, nor did he wear a mask. I could see his face but didn't recognize him. He was some stranger with a chubby face. He pointed at me and told me to freeze. The masked person with the syringe seemed startled and disturbed, so much so that he dropped on the floor the syringe and plastic container.

The chubby faced boy screamed at the guy who had the syringe. "Aristo, yer forgot to lock the door, yer Malaka!"

I spoke. "What's going on here?"

The chubby faced person didn't respond with any words. Instead, he stepped up to me and tried to swing a punch at my stomach. Fortunately for me his movements were slow and I managed to dodge his flying fist. I didn't bother fighting against these people because there were two of them and I was uncertain about whether they had any weapons concealed under their robes. I turned around and ran, making sure I knocked over as many boxes as possible to make it hard for them to follow me. Containers filled with flour, sauce, and various other foodstuffs were littered all over the concrete floor. I could hear the two boys tripping over and screaming as they ran behind me.