Olive’s stomach growled loudly. She’d forgotten to pack her lunch, so she lined up in the school cafeteria to grab a meal. Yet when she patted down her pockets, she suddenly recalled she didn’t have a single dollar on her.
“Hey, loser, the line’s moving. Keep up.”
Olive turned around and came face-to-face with Cindy, her constant tormentor from both sophomore math and science classes. Cindy loved picking apart other people’s flaws, making Olive an easy, frequent target. Unwilling to admit she had no money for food, Olive stepped out of the line abruptly—only to crash straight into Noah, who was walking into the cafeteria.
“Skipping lunch?”
Noah almost never skipped meals. Olive knew it was pure self-preservation. His father held him to impossibly high standards, demanding nothing short of perfection, and his mother relied on him to be steady and dependable. Both of his parents poured all their energy into supporting Katie through school, and Olive refused to add any extra weight to Noah’s shoulders.
“Not hungry,” she lied.
“You’re always hungry,” Noah countered, seeing right through her.
“Not today.”
A faint, unreadable emotion flickered across Noah’s eyes before he held out his own packed lunch toward her.
He’d run track early that morning and had a baseball game scheduled for later. He needed those calories far more than she ever could. “No, really, I’m fine,” Olive insisted, shaking her head.
“Olive—”
“I’ve got to go.” She bolted out of the cafeteria in a hurry. She could handle embarrassment, bullying, and hardship, but she could never stand being pitied by anyone—especially Noah.
An hour later, right before her final class of the day, she opened her locker and found a wheat bread turkey sandwich paired with a crisp apple. For a split second, her throat tightened with gratitude, too choked up to eat. The moment passed quickly, though, when she peeled open the sandwich and spotted lettuce and tomatoes—her least favorite topping combination—and absolutely no mayo. Noah had always refused to eat anything he deemed “unclean” or overly processed.
He had no idea what he was missing out on.
Even so, her hunger won out. She devoured the entire sandwich and the apple in seconds. The warm, fuzzy feeling Noah’s kindness left her with was more than enough to make up for the lack of salty chips or sweet cookies in the impromptu meal.
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