Page 15 of A Fool's Game

“The prep guys don’t wash their own dishes? They just leave it here for you?” It seems incredibly disrespectful, but I guess I have a lot to learn about how a kitchen like this operates.If how my new manager addresses me is any indication, disrespect may just be part of the package.

“It looks like this every morning.”

“How can I help?”

“You ever work a dish room before?”

I shake my head, and he shakes his back at me. “Didn’t think so. Well,” he glances around the complete chaos of dirty pans and haphazardly stacked plates and bowls. “Why don’t you start on pans. Most of them don’t go through the machine, and even if they do, they have to be scrubbed out first in the triple sink.”

“Triple sink?”

“Yeah. Wash, rinse, sanitize. Everything that leaves this room either has to go through the machine or it has to go through all three sinks. You gotta leave things in the last sink for at least a minute. I usually just leave them there for a few rounds of washing and then take it all out. No one really checks on us.”

He hands me a pair of elbow length gloves. “Be sure to spray out most of the food stuff before you put them in the wash sink or you’re just going to make yourself soup.”

I laugh at his joke and pull on the gloves. “I’m on it.”

It’s grueling work, especially for someone in my condition. Hot and wet and sweaty—and not in the good way. I make it through the pans I sprayed and piled next to my wash sink and turn triumphantly to tell Seth, but there’s a new pile of pans waiting on the stainless-steel counter behind me that I didn’t notice people bringing in.

“How do you ever finish if they just keep bringing in more stuff?”

Seth pulls steaming hot plates from a clean rack with a sopping wet towel. “You don’t really finish. I mean,your shift ends, and someone else comes to do the dishes. But the pile never gets smaller.”

I blow a breath out through my lips and turn back to the endless pile of dirty pots and pans.

Seth takes me on break with him, and I’m grateful for the fresh air—even if it’s just through a cracked window in the small, dimly lit break room. It’s pretty clear that he would rather be on his phone, but he tucks it away politely when I don’t produce my own.

We sit down to our meal of mac and cheese and sloppily thrown together ham sandwiches just as another group of kitchen workers arrives with their own plates in hand. Soon, the room is just as noisy and stuffy as the dish pit.

“What’s your major?” I ask Seth, raising my voice slightly to be heard over the other voices.

He cocks his head questioningly. “I don’t go here,” he replies, as if that should have been obvious.

“Oh,” I reply, and glance around the room. “Do any of these people?”

He shakes his head. “We have a few work study people, and random people like you who come in for a while, but no. For the most part everyone just works here.”

“Huh.” I can’t think of anything else to say. I just assumed all the campus workers were students.

“Shove over.” The grunt comes from my left side, and I look up to see none other than the asshole himself, Taylor.

I blink at him a couple of times before snapping into action, sliding myself and my plate a seat closer to the guy on my other side so he can sit down. Seth doesn’t slide over on the other side of the table, so I’m now sitting diagonally from him, with a woman who could be in her sixties directly across from me.

“Hi, I’m Ainsley,” I say to the woman, offeringmy hand.

She glances up from her phone screen and blinks at me one time before looking back down.

I hear a huffed laugh beside me and glance over to find Taylor enjoying my snub quite a bit.

“Making friends, huh?” he laughs again, pulling his fork out of his rolled napkin and stirring hot sauce into his bowl of mac and cheese.

“Trying,” I reply.

He ignores me, looking up at Seth. “How’d he do in there? Should I fire him?”

Seth shakes his head adamantly. “No, he did great. He’s better than most of your actual dishwashers. You should hire him permanently.”

Taylor grunts out another laugh. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to work in the dish pit full-time.”

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