Sack Lunch(Ron Pruitt) The eighth graders flow listlessly into the school cafeteria hunched forward under the weight of backpacks, divided pretty much into two groups. One group lines up for the hot lunch while the others move in among the tables and pull off their backpacks and thump them down to the floor and sit down in bunches divided along race, gender and economic lines which have been rigidly established in the opening days of the school year. Among those who have brought lunches packed at home, there is a second subdivision, involving the type of container used to transport the food. Most of the children who have packed in their lunches take their accustomed places and snap open colorful lunch boxes screen printed with smiling faces from TV, cartoons, or Disney productions. Many of them pull forth a thermos decorated to match the lunch box, unscrew the cap, and pour up hot soup or chilled juice before beginning to set out the food items.

The smallest group does not proceed directly to the tables. They clutch brown bag lunches and most of them go over to buy small cartons of milk before sitting down. The sack lunch kids sit at their established two tables by the far wall, boys at one table, girls at the other. If the cafeteria were a restaurant, the tables they occupy would be the last to be filled by the diners, situated farthest from the bank of windows and requiring the longest walk from the door. Those who tote in the sack lunches cling to the lowest rung on the pre-pubescent food chain.

Clement doesn’t bother to queue for milk because he eats his lunch dry. He sits down at the usual empty table, his back to the wall and waits for some of the other sack lunch kids to join him. His lunch sets in front of him unopened while he waits, a blotchy grease stain darkening the sides. He knows exactly what lays inside having packed it himself in the small kitchen of his modest home in the gathering morning light. While he was assembling it his dad had snored contentedly in the background. Having worked the swing shift at the nearby Tyson chicken processing plant, his dad rarely ventured out of bed before noon. Lunch prep had fallen to Clement in fifth grade after his mother had run off with a house painter. Today’s lunch was typical, a fried egg sandwich on white bread slathered with oleo and an overripe banana. He has plans for the banana.

There was one advantage to sitting against the far wall. Food missiles propelled from other tables could arrive from fewer vectors and the tables by the wall were out of range from the far reaches of the cafeteria. Placing himself sitting facing the rest of the tables, as Clement had, meant that if you were vigilant you would see the empty milk carton hurtling your way in time to dodge it and you might even be able to determine who had launched it in your direction. Some sack lunchers chose instead to sit with their backs to the assembled eaters in a pathetic attempt not to be reminded that they had been relegated to the slums of tableland and they offered the most juicy targets, unaware that food flung their way was incoming until it splatted directly onto them. Those who chose to present their back to the firing range had pretty much accepted their fate as victims in the slam-bang heartless world of junior high school and relied on luck and poor aim to protect them.

Three other boys join Clement, sitting spread out around the table, leaving a buffer zone of empty chairs between them. After the other boys settle in and pull open the eaves on their milk cartons, Clement opens his brown bag, pulls out the two items, folds the bag flat and lays them out. The other boys empty their sacks, bringing out potted meat sandwiches, baloney sandwiches, potato chips, cupcakes, apples, and cookies. Clement surveys the lot and begins trying to barter.

My banana for your cookies, he offers.

Naw, it's got brown spots.

The banana is freckled and soft on one end. Clement ends up negotiating a trade for one oatmeal cookie.

He takes a big bite of the egg sandwich and finds the banana had lent its flavor to the bread which is dried out from being unwrapped in the bag all morning. But the egg and oleo combination is tasty and overwhelms the banana taste pretty much. He finishes the sandwich in a few big gulps and the cookie follows in two big bites. Lunch is finished.

He folds up the brown bag and sticks it into the back pocket of his Rustler Wal-Mart jeans to reuse the next day. He waits around while the slower eaters finish, observing whether they eat all their items which they do. It is during this time frame, when the kids who have bought their lunches and have finished whatever portion of the cafeteria offering they deem edible, and are left with food they have no intention of eating, that the daily aerial assault begins.

It starts harmlessly enough when a pat of margarine comes arcing out of the tables, gains momentum on its downward flight and lands and sticks on an empty part of the girls’ table. None of the sack lunch kids even acknowledges its arrival. It is followed shortly by a second pat which has been imbued with too much thrust and sails well over their heads and smacks into the wall behind the two tables and adheres there.

Salad makings comprise much of the ammo hurled aloft, raw vegetables being about as popular with the lunch crowd as the kids at which they are thrown. The hail of veggies begins while Clement waits for the slowest eater in the group to finish. Of course, any of the sack lunch crowd can leave individually anytime after downing their lunches, but they know that they are less vulnerable if they wait and all walk out together, so they move at the pace of the slowest boy in the group, a fat kid named Delbert who daily packs in a huge lunch of three sandwiches, chips, cupcakes and a candy bar, all washed down with three cartons of milk. As the proprietor of the biggest food holdings, he is also the one most involved in trades with the other boys, which further delays his eating and, as if this is not enough, he is one of those who insist on talking throughout the lunch hour, meaning that most of his food items are still in front of him after the other boys have wolfed their lunches, and then they urge him repeatedly to shut up and eat, especially after the food starts flying.

This day a carrot disc is the first to strike home, bouncing off the top of the head of one of the boys who chose to present his back to the barrage. Next a wedge of tomato strikes Clement squarely in the chest and caroms onto the tabletop. He looks down, notes a small pink damp spot on his white tee and shrugs.

Dessert items, though more infrequently tossed, are attractive to food throwers for their inherent stickiness. Thus it is that the boy sitting next to Clement takes a cube of green Jello in the forehead and has it break into pieces from the impact and slime down his face in what has to be a satisfying feat of marksmanship for the assailant. A delighted chorus of laughter peals from the nearby tables which have the best view of the direct hit. The boy picks up a crumpled napkin and swabs at his face. Shortly thereafter, a piece of meringue, a difficult projectile because of its lightness and wind resistance, flies from a nearby table of lunchbox kids and tangles in one of the girl’s stringy hair. She goes on eating, unaware it is even there.

A group of teachers sit at the opposite end of the cafeteria eating and talking together, an adult protectorate, so unaware in their isolated oasis of what is happening at the other end of the room that they might as well be at the other end of the continent. This despite the fact that some of the teachers have themselves attended this very school and the others have attended ones so similar in social structure as to be indistinguishable and on top of this a majority of the teachers have at one time or another been the objects of the same type of humiliation being handed out practically right under their noses. Of course, one teacher is stationed near the door, assigned to cafeteria duty on a rotating basis, but it is relatively simple to thwart this precaution. Just simply make sure that the half second or so you needed to get the foodstuff airborne happens when the teacher’s eyes are averted.

Teachers rarely ever venture anywhere near the tables where the sack lunch bunch huddles. There is really no reason for the teachers to make the trek to the far wall, just as it would be pointless to drive their cars through blighted neighborhoods if they live in the attractive suburbs on the other side of town, which they do. Once, Clement remembers, a teacher had wandered into the area, why he couldn’t imagine, and as she strolled by his table she noted the food scattered around on the floor from the daily bombardment. Fixing the table with an accusatory glare she said, never breaking stride, "My but you boys are messy." It wouldn’t have taken much of an intellectual leap on her part to realize that the food items lying around had not come out of sack lunches packed at home, but were instead mostly components of the very lunch she had just finished consuming.

It is the waiting for the other boys to finish that Clement finds most difficult to endure. It is then that his mind begins to drift which only makes him less alert to what might be headed his way. One thing that returns to haunt him repeatedly is the question of social status. If he buys the hot lunch, wears good label jeans and expensive athletic shoes, has his hair cut trendily every two weeks, and cultivates the boys who do the same, will he then be sitting somewhere out there in the midst of middle-class security, flinging food at the same people he sits around the table with now? Or is social caste indelible as ink and the trappings of status only what accompanies superiority? It is a chicken and egg question but of one thing he is sure, the lines of demarcation, however drawn up, are as uncrossable for him as if, say, he tried to transform himself into a chicken.

What, he wonders too, will the future hold for him if people already see him, more than anything else, as a target? Would he be the soldier who is shot first because some snobby lieutenant forces him to the point of the platoon as they patrol dangerous foreign lands? Will the car salesman try to pawn off the worst lemon on the lot on him? Is he a permanent member of a class of victims for life? Though projecting far ahead, the thought makes him uncomfortable.

Given that he is relegated to his assigned position in the hierarchy, Clement has to content himself with fantasies to quell his frustration, and it is to these that he gravitates as the long minutes pass while Delbert deliberately chews his oversized portions.

This day he indulges in one of his favorite escapes involving the fire hose inset into the wall behind a square glass panel in the hall just outside the cafeteria. In his revels, Clement bursts into the cafeteria, the canvas hose uncoiling behind him and filling up with water as he leaps to a tabletop, and the water pounds forth in a powerful stream which he sweeps across the tables, clearing them of food, dishes, lunch boxes, slamming the whole mess into the faces of the smug hot lunch buyers and lunch box louts and then he shoots the cold water directly onto them, knocking them to the floor, and then continues to hose them down, sliding them all across the floor until the akimbo bodies are packed up against the far wall, teachers included, and then he keeps hosing them down as they struggle to rise and knocks them back down again and again and keeps the cold water flowing and when he is so tired he can no longer hold the pulsing torrent of water he turns the hose over to one of the other sack lunch kids who have been standing by appreciatively eyeing the whole glorious feat.

But in his heart he knows he is too downtrodden, too fearful, too accepting of the judgments placed on him, to ever even attempt anything remotely like his daydream. The scraping of chairs being pushed back draws him back to reality. The sack lunch girls, as usual, have finished first and walk gingerly past the boys’ table toward the door, all of them looking either straight ahead or down at the floor.

Fortunately for them and the other sack lunch sadsacks, the cafeteria has begun to clear rapidly, most of the students being faster eaters than Delbert, and they drift out in small complacent groups of three or four, talking casually and headed outside where the sack lunch losers will shortly have no choice but to join them and try their hardest to be invisible.

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