The Prince (Pt. 1)

The lights went out and, like usual, everyone cheered or gasped. A frazzled lunch monitor had been dragging a gray, industrial sized trash barrel between the ends of the long, rectangular, brown-topped lunch tables, whose two to three person bench seats alternated between dim red and steady green tops. She stopped recuffing the black trash bag over the barrel’s rim. She stopped the pleading command to throw away our trash.

He calmly stood up. We all turned our heads, some lowered at an angle to see in front of the taller ones that popped up, watching. He put both hands on the edge of the table, where his elbows had been, on either side of his lunch try that he’d riddled with various degrees of puncture inflicted by one of the white, plastic butter knives, and sauced with a disgusting blend of milk, ketchup, mustard, and wrappers. He stepped his left foot onto the seat.

When he lunged his right foot up and between his hands, helped with a push from his back foot, he looked like a sprinter on the starting blocks. Just for a millisecond. Then the toe of his right raggedy, black air Jordan with the red thread stitched logo and punctured pump tongue popped the vanilla-colored, four section styrofoam tray – all soiled with various forms of the sauce that covered traces of each section’s original occupant – in a sliding, not quite vertical drive across the table.

Now it looked like a layup as he shoved off from his left foot and triumphantly stood at the end of the lunch table. A slam dunk. The crack at the middle of the table, where the janitors and lunch helpers stand on either side to fold up the tables after lunch and roll them to the walls, bulged up just a bit from his weight at the other end. Two kids across from where he’d been sitting drew back, in vain, from the gross blend the tray spewed at them. He didn’t even look down.

The subtle reflectors stitched along the lacing rise of his Jordans flashed in the near darkness as he kicked the first foot up. In a swooping, foot dragging march, he cleared trays in the path of his right foot. They lifted awkwardly into the air, mooshed on by his foot. This time he was a field goal kicker 45 yards out from the uprights. The stiff leg extension reached out to a 90 degree angle with the other leg. Scraps of food sprayed up, sprawled out. Some kids’ hands flew up to deflect the blast, while others began to clap and cheer.