Owl Eyes

“What are you gonna have, kid?” the lunch lady asked gruffly for the third time.

“Do you have anything that doesn’t have a poor dead animal in it?” the girl asked for the third time as well, getting angry now. But not a brutish kind of anger, something more delicate and polite and more annoyed than anything.

“Kid. You’re killing me. Just eat a salad or something,” the woman said, exasperated. She pushed a few sweaty curls back into her hairnet.

“No. There’s bacon in it.” The girl stuck her chin out indignantly and crossed her arms gracefully.

“Frankie! Hurry up!” A guy shouted from the back of the line.

“Don’t call be that,” she said, her refined anger growing a bit.

“That’s your name, Frankie. Now get some salad and shut up.”

“It’s Jemma!”

The lunch lady just blinked her heavily wrinkled lids at her. She sighed and scratched at her hairnet with tobacco-stained sausage fingers. “Pick the bacon out,” the woman said and held out a plastic container with the salad in it.

The girl let out a clipped sigh and whisked the container out of the lunch lady’s hands and walked to the nearest empty lunch table, shoulders erect.

And so she sat down and began to pick out each little bit of bacon with as much delicacy as if she were performing brain surgery. She sat facing a group of snub-nosed girls with pleated skirts and pom-poms tossed below their seats.

Jemma watched them with curiosity. They occasionally threw disgusted glances at her and then turned back to their companions, letting out false scornful laughter.

Jemma scrunched her nose up at them, took a dainty bite of salad and turned to another table for these girls in skirts were getting to be incredibly predictable and a bit of bore. This next group consisted of a mixture of acne-ridden students with bad haircuts and heaving, true laughter. She found these characters far more interesting for there was the faintest glimmer of individualism in the pack.

But then after a few conversations about different topics centering around videogames and Star Wars, they began to look uneasily at Jemma.

And then suddenly they grew quiet for a few moments and they all got up as one and left the cafeteria, dumping their trays into the huge black chasms they call trashcans.

Jemma blinked at the absence of her entertainment. She weighed her options and then thought it best to follow the lead of the acne-ridden ones and toss her tray and leave the cafeteria. She didn’t want to be late for class after all.

So Jemma threw away her half-eaten salad and passed a group of burly boys on her way out.

They all wolf-whistled and so at the momentary distraction, Jemma peered at them for a split second and then only a second later she was face down in the laces of a Nike, spread eagle across the cold linoleum.

Laughter erupted from the room as Jemma picked herself up carefully and brushed the crumbs and the smell of jock off her sweater.

“Nice landing, Frank,” one of the boys shouted. His shout was followed by rowdy laughter and a bit of over-enthusiastic applause. Why do they find this so entertaining? Don’t they have something better to do?

Jemma pinched up her little rosebud mouth and gazed evenly at the boy that had called her Frank. “…Jemma,” she said evenly and left the cafeteria with part of a Twinkie plastered to her right kneecap.