Laylee Grenweld once ate a man’s finger. 

She could describe it in detail. The way her incisors had cracked too cleanly through the knuckle cartilage, yet struggled profoundly against the skin and sinew, leaving her clamped down, tearing at it like a dog. The man’s curly finger hairs had tickled the roof of her mouth as his unkempt nail scratched at her throat. It tasted like salt and dirt, before those flavors were washed away by iron. She could identify the exact instant his earlier shouting became screaming, words became raw instinct, and how that moment felt like victory. He might have been able to keep the damn thing if he hadn’t tried to yank his hand away — if he’d fought that animal impulse. Her teeth and his arm went opposite, ripping him and leaving the little appendage resting in her mouth. She chewed once, twice, before realizing it would get her nowhere, and swallowed it like a pill.

Laylee wasn’t supposed to remember that. No one knew that she did. For that reason, and others, she reckoned that this was not an appropriate experience to bring up in a conversation about the quality of high school cafeteria food, though it would be considerably less banal. 

Yes, Amelia, you’re right. Chickens do not have fingers. And while it is more likely that the breaded, processed meat contains proportionally more chicken than it does… mealworms or whatever it is she’s currently implying, it is misleading to simply call the result chicken instead of homogenized chicken sausage or something. But, like, who honestly cares? And why do you think anyone cares enough to listen to it as though it’s a novel thought? If this is the quality of conversation she could expect in school, Laylee wasn’t sure what she’d supposedly been missing out on.

That’s not really fair, Laylee reminded herself. She was tired from studying for Honors Bio, and less than an hour ago she’d had a test to try and pass with appropriate mediocrity. The other girls probably were exhausted as well. Amelia was simply the only one at the table with enough energy to fill the silence. She’d jumped in with her first and worst thought. Better hers than Laylee’s.

“Oh my god, do you remember that time I ate a raw chicken leg?” came Wash’s, right on cue. She’d looked across the table to Valerie, who returned the glance with a look of tired, knowing disgust.

“What, how did that happen? Were you, like, four?” Laylee asked, perhaps overshooting her attempt to sound horrified.

“It wasn’t raw,” Valerie chimed in, not bothering to pick her head up from where she’d laid beside her near-empty lunch tray. “It just wasn’t cooked all the way through.”

“What’s the difference between that and being raw?” Wash asked.

“It’s just every time you tell this story you make it sound like the hotel just had a cold, pink chicken carcass hanging out on a buffet table and you were stupid enough to take a giant bite out of it.” Valerie picked up both her head and her fork, using the latter to prod at her green beans. “You should thank me for interrupting. I’m trying to save you from sounding like a moron.”

If Laylee had to rank her friends from lowest to highest on the friendship scale — something she knew was not good to do but mentally did anyway — it was Amelia, then Wash, then Valerie. This, unfortunately, left her without anyone she could clearly label as her “best friend.” Laylee was at a familiarity disadvantage. Valerie and Amelia had known each other since third grade, while Wash and Valerie were both violinists, and had already met during both years of middle school Solo and Ensemble. That made her the most outside member of their little friend circle, forged as it was through the fires of a series of overlapping Venn Diagrams. Of the over two thousand students at General Beauregard High, they were the only four fitting the criteria: freshman, girls, taking Honors classes, and, lastly, in orchestra. With the amount of time they’d be required to spend together, it was best to become friends to avoid becoming enemies.

Had she been able to pick, however, Laylee strongly felt that Valerie would make for a very good best friend. She was smart. Like, she was already being looked at as their graduating class’ future salutatorian — perhaps valedictorian, if actual genius Evan Mayweather executes on the rumor that he might go to college after junior year. Both academically and socially, this was a good position for Valerie to be in. Even Laylee found herself thinking, whenever Valerie was slightly rude or snippy, she’s under a lot of pressure. The source of that stress, grades, was perfectly socially acceptable for their age, which avoided questions and criticism. Valerie may have been beyond the reach of many in the school, but everyone there perfectly understood why. 

Aside from that, she was also very pretty. Her eyes were soft, slow-moving, analytical, and partially hidden behind a narrow, rectangular, and dark set of frames. Her deep brown hair regularly went through the hot and rigorous process of being flat-iron straightened and curling-iron twirled. Her simple touch of make-up blended perfectly into her dark skin, and her thin arms and legs had a slightly shiny quality. The way she kept up her appearance made her look nearly like an adult, or, even more remarkably, like a professional, of the type Laylee saw in offices and courthouses in the shows her mother watched. 

So many students must have aspired to be Valerie Forrest. Laylee, however, did not seek to be so exceptional. She was happy where she was, sitting diagonally across from Valerie in the little square of friendship that they’d carved out of the long, rectangular cafeteria table. People likely saw them sitting together and thought, there’s Valerie Forrest, the smartest girl in the school, and her friend whose name I can’t recall. It took effort not to smile at the thought. Laylee could do far, far worse for herself than being Valerie’s friend. Even if “best friends” stayed permanently off the table, it was a good place to be.

This isn’t the way people think about people, Laylee. She thought to herself. Do better.

“Well, whatever, that chicken messed up my guts bad enough that I think it’s pretty fair to say it was raw,” Wash said, taking a bite out of one of the chicken fingers on her tray.

Wash was the kind of girl that made it difficult to do better. Not to say that Laylee didn’t like Wash, just that she didn’t understand her. Laylee sometimes wanted to shrink Wash down to the size of a bacteria, so she could use one of the Bio classroom’s microscopes to study her in a way that was secret instead of a way that was creepy. Or, perhaps thinking of fantastic scenarios to avoid looking creepy was itself creepy, but certainly not as creepy as turning to Wash and asking how to observe her without being creepy. Wash probably wouldn’t mind that question, though. It would be a weird thing to ask, and there’s nothing Wash seemed to enjoy more than weird things.

Wash was chubby, loud, perpetually a nearly-sunburnt red in the face. Her hair was a twisted mass of brown-blonde split ends. One of her front teeth had needed repair after some incident had chipped it, and it now exhibited two distinct shades of yellowed white. Laylee could swear that in fourteen years of life, Wash had experienced more, if less severe, incidents than the rest of the table combined. When experience failed to provide a good story, she would draw from her seemingly unlimited access to music, movies, and other media. She’d once promised to show Laylee how to “torrent” TV shows, a promise she’d yet to make good on, but one that Laylee looked forward to.

“Could you please not talk about your guts while I’m trying to eat?” asked Valerie.

“Val, you are not trying to eat. You’re trying to look like you ate so I stop calling you skinny bitch,” said Amelia.

Amelia was also at the table with them. Laylee had mixed thoughts about this.

“Laylee’s only eating rolls!” Valerie said, gesturing with her whole hand at Laylee’s tray.

“It’s the only thing here worth eating,” Laylee replied. Currently, she had four dinner rolls on her tray, with one partially shredded. Laylee ate them by tearing off chunks as if it were a communion loaf, dragging them across a pat of butter, and placing them in her mouth. She wasn’t exactly climbing higher than the first floor of the food pyramid, but at least she was having an easier time with her lunch than her peers. The bread stayed perpetually soft and sweet. Recently, she’d gone down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole, in search of an explanation for why the rolls were chewy (good), while things like the chicken fried steak fingers were chewy (vomitous). She didn’t find anything scientific, but did discover the Hokkien terms Q and QQ to describe food as springy and bouncy or extra springy and bouncy, respectively. Q was such a cute word that it had already fully replaced chewy (good) in her mind and her speech.

These thoughts and actions were strangenesses, Laylee knew, but she’d run the calculations on them. They felt quirky and adorable, matching the nickname Laylee itself. The girl named Laylee would be the kind of girl to call food Q. A girl named Laylee would have never eaten anything strange. Everyone knew she ate nothing but bread.

“Yeah, which is way more than you’re eating,” Amelia accused.

Valerie rolled her eyes before acquiescing, finally puncturing a small number of green beans with her fork and placing them in her mouth.

“There, was that so hard?” asked Amelia, her own fork digging into a pile of mashed potatoes.

Valerie politely covered her mouth, despite still speaking with food in it. “It was grueling.” 

“You know, I had gruel once,” Wash piped in.

“No you didn’t,” Valerie immediately replied.

“Wait, is gruel an actual food?” Amelia asked.

This time it was Amelia’s turn to receive Valerie’s icy stare. “Yeah? What did you think it was?”

“I dunno. I thought that it was just, like, some gross slop they gave poor orphan children in cartoons.”

“I mean, that is basically what it is,” Wash said, nodding along.

“Yeah,” Laylee said, having finally found her place to contribute. “It’s more or less just a really thin porridge.”

“See, what the fuck is porridge?” Amelia pointed at the other girls with her fork. “Do I look like Baby Bear to y’all? Do you think I go home and Papa and Mama Bear have made me a bowl of porridge that is just right? Or do you think I get to eat actual people food?”

“Probably people food,” Laylee replied.

“Thank you, Laylee,” Amelia said, with a little theatrical nod towards her. “Bread Girl’s got my back.”

“So, how exactly did you end up eating gruel?” Valerie mumbled at Wash, as though the question pained her to ask it.

“Oh, I just got really curious about what it tasted like, so I asked my dad to make it for me. Both of us were pretty surprised that it’s kinda just super milky oatmeal. It wasn’t very good, but I had to eat the whole pot over the next couple of days ‘cause I’d bothered my dad about it so much.”

“That sounds like it’d be okay, at least in flavor, if not in texture?” said Laylee. When no one else came in to either agree with or condemn her, she hurriedly added, “I mean, if you added cinnamon and sugar, like with regular oatmeal.”

“Cinnamon can cover up a world of hurt,” Valerie agreed.

“Yeah, wish I’d thought of that,” said Wash.

As much as Laylee struggled to find much interesting to discuss on the subject of bland, pastoral cuisine, talking with her friends at least made for good practice. The cadence and rhythm of casual chats gradually became more comfortable the more time the four of them spent together. They’d even grown close enough to begin exchanging minor secrets. Laylee and Wash had learned each other’s Christian names, and they had also uncovered Valerie’s closely-guarded middle name. Laylee had been excited to learn it was Krystal. The full name Valerie Krystal Forrest created the mental image of majestic trees of quartz and sapphire, reaching up into Heaven and as expansive as the eye could see. Laylee loved that image, yet Valerie seemed embarrassed by the name and whatever image she associated with it. Wash, meanwhile, had picked up on Valerie’s embarrassment. She and Valerie now remained locked in a cold war, each threatening to publically use the other’s hidden name, should they ever be sufficiently incited.

The girls knew one more secret about Laylee. General Beauregard High took in students from two of the local middle schools. This led essentially all of Laylee’s fellow freshmen to assume, when they did not recognize her in class or in the hallway, that she had simply been a student of whichever school was the other one. The three other girls at the table were the only ones to know that Laylee hadn’t been in school since second grade. They would never be told why.

Laylee tore off and ate another sliver of bread, and then she perceived it. 

It was on the ceiling, sprawled across the width of one of the panels. It held to the roof through no discernible mechanism, having no arms or legs. Most of its mass was blood, swirling into itself as if caught by some self-generated gravity, the perfect sphere of its body deformed where the daemon dragged itself across the ceiling. Reddened bones floated within the current of itself, metacarpals drifting beside teeth beside ossicles. Nothing large and immediately recognizable, neither skull, nor rib, nor femur, lay beneath the surface tension of its body. Laylee supposed that if you one were to take a person and erase them bit by bit, naming each part as they vanished, the creature on the ceiling could be made from the leftovers that the list-maker forgot. As she stared at it, attempting to discern whether there was anything more to it, it slithered closer to her, leaving a bloody smear behind. Fluorescent light warped, dancing through and around its liquid body as it passed over a luminescent plexiglass rectangle. For an instant, the whole room turned red.

No instinct arose in Laylee to run, to hide, or to scream. It was already too late. The daemon moved above Amelia and Valerie. A heavy drop of bloody mucus fell directly between them, and they naturally did not notice. Laylee knew they wouldn’t, because the daemon wasn’t really above them. It now lived in her eyes. It had crawled its way inside her body and latched itself onto her soul. Judging from the length of the blood trail, it must have done so only a few moments ago.

The bloody surface of the daemon rippled, and beneath it, several bones collided. Laylee understood the motion, not so much as words, but as their meaning —

P E R I L

“You, uh, good, Laylee?” asked Wash.

Laylee’s eyes snapped towards Wash. Wash, meanwhile, had her concerned expression moving between Laylee and the spot where Laylee had been staring.

“There was a spider up there.” Laylee pointed at the monster.

“Oh my god, where?” Valerie flinched, nearly throwing herself out of her seat to get out from under the alleged spider and look upwards to where it supposedly had been. Amelia also flinched and moved away, seemingly more as a reaction to Valerie than the possibility of a bug in the cafeteria. 

“It crawled into one of the ceiling panels. Sorry I didn’t warn you, I kind of just froze up,” Laylee explained.

“Jesus, ugh.” Valerie still searched around the ceiling. “Aren’t they supposed to spray this place for bugs? How do they keep getting in here?”

“Spiders eat other bugs. I bet they’ll help a lot with, like, the crickets that keep getting into the gym,” said Wash.

“Yeah, but Val’s saying spiders wouldn’t be looking for food here if they did a better job killing the other ones.” Amelia scooted back to the center of her seat.

Wash conceded with a simple, “Fair enough.”

Laylee kept her eyes down, off of the ceiling. The daemon had chosen to be up there, and she didn’t believe it could easily relocate in her spatial perception. That meant all she had to do to make it through lunch was look straight ahead.

Another drip of bloody slime fell from the ceiling, landing at the center of the table. Then another, this time at the end of her tray. When another came, it landed with vile, targeted precision on the bread roll in Laylee’s hand. 

She looked for a second at the roll. The viscera trickled down the side, then onto the back of her thumbnail. It was mixed, red and clear, thick and warm. She tore off another piece and pulled it farther away than normal in order to break the trail of slime between her piece and the roll. Laylee then dragged it across the butter and placed it in her mouth.

It tasted sweeter than she would have thought.