Chapter 10: Public Servant
The notification chimed on Patricia’s phone, a soft, cheerful sound that cut through the low din of the dining hall. She didn’t need to look. She knew. It was Sean, finally. She’d been waiting for his response for twenty-four hours, letting the silence stretch, letting Ben marinate in it. She scooped up a forkful of salad, chewed slowly, and only then, with deliberate calm, swiped the screen open.
It was a single line of text. What the hell was that, Pat?
She smiled, a private, thin curve of her lips. She typed back, her thumbs flying. Just a hard match. He wanted to prove a point, I proved mine. Didn’t mean to cause drama. Is he okay?
She sent it and placed the phone face-down on the table, resuming her lunch. The power wasn’t in the confrontation; it was in the benevolent, concerned facade. Let Sean wrestle with that. Was she being cruel or was Ben just a sore loser? The ambiguity was the poison.
Ben sat three tables away, alone. He was pushing a soggy french fry around a greasy plate, his shoulders hunched as if against a cold wind. The dining hall was packed with the lunchtime roar—clattering trays, shouted conversations, the occasional burst of laughter—but he sat in a pocket of dead air. He’d been avoiding eye contact since he shuffled in, finding a seat in the partial shelter of a large pillar.
Patricia watched him from her spot with her usual cohort: Jess, Mara, and Kyle from the swim team. They were laughing about a professor’s terrible haircut, but her attention was elsewhere. Ben looked hollowed out. Good. The digital scar was fresher than the physical ones.
“Earth to Pat,” Jess said, waving a hand. “You’re zoning. Still riding the high from pinning Thompson?”
Patricia’s eyes glinted. “Something like that.” She took a long drink of iced tea, her gaze still fixed on Ben’s solitary figure. “He looks lonely over there.”
Mara followed her look and snorted. “He looks like he slept in a ditch. What did you do to him, exactly? The guys on the team are saying he won’t talk about it.”
“Just a little… perspective adjustment,” Patricia said, her voice light. She stood up, brushing nonexistent crumbs from her leggings. “Be right back. Gonna check on our defeated warrior.”
“Ooh, savage,” Kyle chuckled, not understanding the half of it.
She walked with purpose, her sneakers squeaking faintly on the linoleum. She didn’t go straight to him. She detoured past the condiment station, picking up a half-empty bottle of ketchup and a small packet of mustard. Then she approached his table.
He didn’t look up until her shadow fell over his plate. When he saw her, a full-body flinch went through him. His eyes, bloodshot and wary, darted from her face to the bottles in her hands and back.
“You’re not eating, Ben,” she said, her voice carrying just enough to be heard by the tables nearby. A few heads turned. “You need to keep your strength up. For next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” he muttered, looking back at his plate.
“Sure there will.” She set the ketchup and mustard down with a soft clink. “But for now, you look like you could use a pick-me-up.” Her tone was sickly sweet, a parody of concern. “I noticed your shoes are looking a little dirty. From all that… crawling around yesterday.”
Ben’s knuckles turned white around his fork. He said nothing.
Patricia leaned in, lowering her voice to a confidential murmur only he could hear. “Sean texted me. He’s worried about you. Thinks I was too hard on you.” She paused, letting that sink in. “I told him you’re a big boy. That you can take it. But now I’m not so sure. You’re sitting here all mopey. It’s bad for morale.”
“What do you want, Patricia?” His voice was flat, exhausted.
“I want you to demonstrate a better attitude. Publicly.” She straightened up, her voice returning to its normal, carrying pitch. “See, I think you learned a valuable lesson yesterday about respect. About your place. But lessons need reinforcement.”
She casually nudged his chair with her foot. “Why don’t you get under the table and give my sneakers a clean? They got grimy from the gym floor. You know, from when you were down there.”
A few kids at the next table had stopped talking. They were watching, trying to look like they weren’t.
Ben’s face went from pale to a sickly grey. “You’re insane,” he whispered.
“Am I?” Patricia’s smile didn’t waver. She pulled out her phone, held it low, and showed him the screen. It was the direct message screen with Sean. She hadn’t sent her last reply yet. Her thumb hovered over the send button. “Or am I just a friend checking in with your brother? Asking if he’s seen you, because you seem… unstable. Maybe talking about quitting the team. Having a hard time coping with a simple loss.”
The threat was crystalline. She would gaslight him to his own family, use his humiliation as proof of his weakness, not her cruelty. The video was one thing. This was a live, ongoing erosion of his reality.
Ben’s breath hitched. He looked from her cold eyes to the phone, to the curious faces now openly staring. The weight of it all—the lingering smell of her on his skin from yesterday, the digital leash around his neck, the isolation—pressed down, collapsing his resolve. The fight left his eyes, replaced by a dull, horrifying acceptance.
Slowly, with movements that were stiff and robotic, he slid his chair back. The screech of its legs on the floor silenced the immediate surrounding tables. He sank from the chair to his knees on the sticky floor. Then, head bowed, he shuffled forward on all fours and disappeared under the long lunch table.
A wave of whispers rippled out from the epicenter. Patricia stepped back, giving the audience a clear view. She positioned her right foot, clad in a grass-stained white Converse, directly where he could reach it.
“They’re pretty scuffed,” she announced conversationally to her friends, who had gone quiet, their mouths slightly agape. “Ketchup and mustard from last week’s hot dog incident, I think. And just general grime.” She looked down at the space under the table. “You can start with the licking. Spit is a natural cleaner, I hear.”
For a moment, nothing. Then, a slow, tentative movement. The tip of her sneaker twitched. A stifled sound, like a choked breath, came from beneath the table. She could feel the faint, hesitant pressure of his tongue through the canvas, a damp, shameful blotch forming on the toe.
“Who’s a good little footstool?” Patricia crooned, placing her hands on her hips. A laugh broke out from a table of football players. It wasn’t a kind laugh.
Jess looked horrified, but also fascinated. Mara covered her mouth, her eyes wide.
Patricia reached for the ketchup bottle. She unscrewed the cap, and with a casual squeeze, deposited a gloopy red dollop onto the pristine left sneaker. “Missed a spot, Ben. This one needs extra work.”
From under the table, a low, guttural sound of disgust. Then, the damp pressure returned, working at the new mess. The ketchup smeared, mixing with the old stains and his saliva into a pinkish, grotesque paste.
“Bark if you love the taste of my Converse!” Patricia said, laughing. It was a sharp, commanding sound.
Silence.
She nudged his side with her other foot, not hard, but pointedly. “I said, bark.”
A weak, shuddering “Woof” filtered up from under the table. It was barely audible.
“My dog can do better than that! Let’s hear it for the dining hall! Give us a real one!”
“WOOF!”
This one was louder, strained with a desperate, cracking anger that only made it more pathetic. The cafeteria, for a radius of about thirty feet, had fallen into a hushed, rapt silence. Silverware hung in mid-air. Everyone was watching the blonde athlete and the hidden, barking boy beneath her table.
Kyle tossed a half-eaten bread roll. It bounced off the tabletop and landed on the floor near Patricia’s feet. “Fetch, boy!” he called, grinning nervously, playing along to be part of the show.
Patricia beamed. “See? He’s trainable.” She then took the packet of mustard, tore it open with her teeth, and squirted a yellow zig-zag across the toe of her right shoe. “Almost showroom fresh. Keep at it.”
The scene crystallized: the casual cruelty, the performer and her captive audience, the broken young man reduced to a filthy, unseen function. The smell of fried food and cleaner now mingled with the tang of ketchup and the sour scent of abject shame.
Ben kept working, his world reduced to the dark, crumb-strewn cavern under the table, the taste of synthetic tomato and vinegar and dirt, and the sound of her voice, narrating his destruction to the world. Each lick, each muffled bark, was a brick in a wall she was building around him, a wall everyone could see but no one would breach.
Patricia finally lifted her foot, examining it with a critical eye. “Passable,” she declared. She tapped the top of the table with her knuckles. “You can come out now.”
There was a long pause. Then, slowly, Ben emerged. His face was a mask of streaked red and yellow condiments, his eyes fixed on the floor. He didn’t look at anyone. He just crawled out, stood up on trembling legs, and without a word, turned and walked stiffly toward the exit, leaving his full tray of food behind.
The chatter in the dining hall resumed, louder now, buzzing with the energy of the spectacle. Patricia sat back down with her friends as if nothing had happened, picking up her fork.
“Holy shit, Pat,” Mara breathed, her voice a mix of awe and fear.
Patricia just shrugged, cutting into a piece of chicken. “He needed a reminder,” she said simply. She picked up her phone, finally hitting ‘send’ on the reassuring text to Sean. The message flew into the digital ether, a perfect lie. She then opened her camera, switched to video, and panned it slowly across the faces of her friends, capturing their stunned, complicit expressions, before tilting it down to show her freshly, obscenely cleaned sneakers.
She uploaded it to a private story, titled ‘Lunch Detailing,’ and tagged only Ben.
He might have left the cafeteria. But he was still on his knees.