Silver Bound Girl

Chapter 4

              Walking into the cafeteria, Willow was again reminded why it was one of the most popular places in school to sit, and why it was one of the most relaxing place for her and her family to be. Almost the entirety of the far wall was taken up with windows and two windowed doors. They led out onto the square courtyard that lay in the centre of the school. Edged with trees on two sides, filled with scattered benches and wooden picnic tables, it was a grassy expanse open to everyone.

            With the weather still summer warm, every table and bench was already filled with students talking and eating. Willow shrugged, eyes scanning the tables that filled up the cafeteria’s pale wood floors. With white walls and that many windows, the whole place always seemed far bigger than it really was.

            But her eyes did eventually light on Rune. He was sitting on the nearer end of a table, one that was empty until it neared the opposite end of him. That decided her. Shifting her backpack a little higher on her shoulders, she headed straight towards him, ignoring the table her cousins had claimed and the one the shyer girls had banded together at.

            She dropped into the chair across from him, letting her bag slip off onto the ground beside her. “Hey,” she said, before leaning over to get her lunch out of her backpack.

            When she looked up again, Rune’s eyebrows were up, his hands wrapped around a sandwich. “You know, if you sit with me, people are going to start talking about you.”

            Willow shrugged, pulling two wraps out of her lunch bag. “Let them. I don’t care.”

            “Really? You could have fooled me with that nice and friendly act you put on normally.”

            “That’s because of my family. And why are you surprised? I thought after Biology we’d established a kind of proto-friendship.”

            Rune’s lips twitched into a smile. “Proto-friendship. I like it. And what does your family have to do with how you act?”

            She sighed, hands pausing in the middle of undoing the plastic film. “Because we’re not a family. We’re a bloody clan. There’s a saying in town you’ll hear sometimes. You can’t spit here without hitting a Byron. My family’s been here since before this place was a town, and since it’s rare for any of us to leave for more than a couple of years, almost all of us live here. So, just imagine if one of us ended up with a bad rep around town. Can you imagine what that would be like for the rest of the family? Heck, even if it was just here at school, it could end up making my cousins miserable. That’s why I do my best to be friendly to everyone. While I don’t care what people say about me, I’m not about to let my family suffer for it.”

            “How many of you are there?”

            For a moment, all Willow did was stare. Then she frowned. “I don’t actually know. There are a lot of us. Just give a me a sec,” she said, beginning to tick things off on her fingers, lips moving as she went. “Maybe a hundred? Somewhere around there I guess.”

            Rune shook his head. “I can’t even imagine. No wonder you’re worried about what others think.”

            Shrugging, Willow noticed the hush that had just begun to descend on the cafeteria. Looking around, she noticed the absence of the teachers normally watching them from the doors. “Shit,” she said, turning back to Rune. “Grab your lunch and get under the table.”

            His forehead wrinkled. “What?”

            “Seriously, under the table. Quickly. You don’t want to be in the open,” she said, sweeping her wraps back into her bag and slipping underneath the length of metal and wood.

            Rune joined her, his face full of questions. “What’s going on?”

            The sound of liquid splattering across their table had him jerking to stare. He noticed the other students also taking refuge under the tables, several of them popping up for a few seconds just to drop down, laughing. It took a sandwich crust landing beside him before Rune realized what was going on. “A food fight?”

            Willow sighed. “Yeah. They happened every time the teachers leave. You have to keep your ears open for the silence or you’ll be caught in the open. I predict a bunch of the grade nines are going to have to leave early to change after this. Just watch,” she said, jerking her head towards the salad container that could just be seen between the gaps of the tables. The plastic was open, spilling lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and salad dressing across its path.

            The next to enter their view was an open yogurt cup, the half-liquid mass narrowly missing Rune. It skidded to a halt under the next table over, a tiny puddle of pink-coloured goo spreading. Willow shook her head, glad it had kept going. She’d been sure it was going to land on his back and she wasn’t fast enough to yank him out of the way.

            The air and floor were thick with food, both flying and crashed, when the cafeteria doors opened. “Hey!” an adult voice cried. “Stop that this instance!”

            “Finally,” Willow said, rolling her eyes. “You’d think, given it happens every time they leave, that the teachers would have figured out that there has to be one of them here at all times during lunch. But no, this happens at least once or twice a year.”

            Seeing other students coming out from under the tables, Rune followed suit, frowning at Willow. “Won’t this just make more work for the custodians?”

            “Yeah. Which is why those of us with a conscience don’t participate. Though everyone here has to help with the initial clean-up. Be glad that even the students here learned not to throw pop cans after last year,” she replied, shaking her head.

            Rune looked around at the cafeteria that was covered in the remnants of nearly three hundred lunches. Half-eaten hamburgers, banana peels, pudding, and ketchup-covered French fries created a veritable rainbow of wasted food. He could even see that some of the students hadn’t been as lucky as he and Willows had been, emerging with smears of white, splatters of orange, and bits of brown clinging to their hair, skin, and clothing. His gaze went to Willow. “This school…is everyone in it insane?”

            She smiled mockingly. “Welcome to WASS!”