I graduated from high school last week, but I don’t feel like a graduate. People keep asking me about the future, about the “next chapter,” but I can’t seem to find the words. The world feels like it has stopped on a static frame, and everyone forgot to hit “play.” Even now, standing in our quiet house, everything still smells like her—a mixture of warm yeast rolls, industrial cleaning spray, and the faint, floral scent of the lavender soap she used on Sundays. Sometimes I think I hear her footsteps creaking on the floorboards of the kitchen, and for a split second, I forget that the silence is permanent.
My grandmother, Lorraine, didn’t just help out; she was my entire world. When my parents were killed in a car crash when I was just a toddler, she became my mother, my father, and every support beam in the structure of my life. She was fifty-two when she took me in, already working forty hours a week as a cook in the local school cafeteria. She raised me in a house that was older than her, a place where the wind whistled through the window frames, but we never felt cold. She was the woman the town knew as “Miss Lorraine,” or more dismissively, just the “Lunch Lady.” To them, she was a fixture of the background, an anonymous figure in a hairnet. To me, she was a miracle in a sunflower-patterned apron.
Every morning, long before the sun dared to rise, she would head to work to prepare meals for hundreds of children. Yet, she never missed packing my own lunch. Every brown paper bag came with a sticky note—messages like “You’re my favorite miracle” or “Eat your fruit or I’ll haunt you.” We were poor, but she possessed a genius for making lack feel like an adventure. When the heater failed one winter, she lit dozens of candles and called it a “Victorian spa night.” When I needed a prom dress, she took an eighteen-dollar thrift store find and stayed up until midnight stitching rhinestones onto the straps, humming Billie Holiday tunes as she worked. “I don’t need to be rich,” she’d tell me, her eyes bright with a fierce kind of love. “I just want you to be okay.”
But high school is a cruel ecosystem for the “different.” The mockery started in my freshman year. It began with whispers in the hallway—cowardly, low-volume comments about how my grandmother might “spit in the soup” if I got into trouble. I was branded with nicknames like “Lunch Girl” and the “PB&J Princess.” I watched classmates I’d grown up with, kids who had eaten popsicles in our backyard as children, mock her soft Southern accent or mimic her habit of calling everyone “sugar.” I remember Brittany, a girl whose social standing was as sharp as her tongue, asking me in front of a crowd if my grandmother “packed my panties with my lunch.” The hallway erupted in laughter. I stood there, frozen, feeling every snicker like a chip against my soul.
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