Wayne, picking up the tab

As thoughts about the update schedule of the fan comic she followed drifted through Barbara's mind, the first slurp finally rang out in the cafeteria.

It was loud.

Loud enough to leave no dignity intact.

A boy so thin that his coat looked as though it hung from a clothes hanger crouched beside a long table, his left hand pinning down his meal container while his right wielded a disposable fork like a front loader, mixing pasta, chicken, and mashed potatoes into a heap and shoveling it into his mouth.

His cheeks bulged, his throat bobbing with difficulty.

Someone beside him told him to slow down.

He ignored them.

The children of Gotham's East End had an instinctive distrust of the words "slow down."

Slow down, and the food would be gone.

Slow down, and the people behind you in line would move up.

Slow down, and the world would carry off your share, then tell you to come earlier next time.

So he ate as though he were racing the entire city.

Halfway through, he suddenly mumbled a curse:

"Wayne, that son of a bitch."

Barbara's hand paused.

Beside her, Chen Mo also paused as he took his meal container back out of his bag.

Coming from a child whose mouth was still stuffed with a Wayne Foundation subsidized meal, the remark made for a scene with a certain Gotham-style religious absurdity.

Like someone receiving communion at church, then lowering his head to curse God for making the bread too dry.

The boy did not stop.

He wiped the gravy from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, his eyes still red, his voice hoarse.

"They promised lunch and dinner, and what happened? If we hadn't made a scene today, would all this food have been saved for those people who show up in suits to take pictures again? Isn't Bruce Wayne supposed to be rich? How long could we eat if he bought one less fucking watch?"

A girl beside him pushed her carrots into a corner of her container and chimed in coldly:

"You're going easy on him. On the news, he said, 'Every child deserves a future.' Where's the future? All I see right now is a piece of chicken, and even that future had to be smashed onto the floor."

"This food was supposed to be ours anyway."

Another boy clutched his meal container tighter, as though holding an inheritance.

"Don't act like we're taking some huge advantage of him. He promised. The people at the community center said it perfectly clearly yesterday: come to school, get fed. We came. Where was the food? Now we finally get a bite, and we're supposed to thank him? Like hell I will."

"Exactly."

The first boy swallowed a huge mouthful, choking so badly that tears nearly came to his eyes, but he still stiffened his neck and said:

"Wayne's picking up the tab, not handing out charity. Invite people to a meal and leave your guests starving at the door for half the day? That's called having no upbringing."

That statement was outrageously absurd.

So absurd that Chen Mo nearly stood in solemn respect.

In a Gotham slum, a child who might not even be able to say where his own parents were was accusing Bruce Wayne of having no upbringing.

If word of this reached Wayne Manor, Alfred might first maintain an elegant silence for three seconds, then polish the silver dinner knives a little brighter.

Barbara frowned.

She wanted to say something.

But in the end, she said nothing.

Because she saw the boy who had cursed the hardest scrape every last bit of sauce from his container with his fork after he finished speaking.

The plastic fork scraped against the bottom of the container with a grating sound.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Like some exceedingly cheap judge's gavel.

He was not grateful.

He was not happy, either.

He was simply, finally, not quite so hungry.

It looked pretty shitty.

But in Gotham, being shitty was sometimes merely the first sign of life after someone regained their strength.

On the other side of the cafeteria, the middle-class students' tables began making noise too.

They were complaints in lowered voices.

The students over there were noticeably cleaner, their coats free of holes, their shoes not limited editions expensive enough to get stolen, but at least their shoelaces were intact.

Calling them middle class was actually overstating things; they were merely children from working-class families who could still afford to send their children to school but could not afford the steep tuition at private high schools.

A brown-haired boy pushed his tray a little farther away, looking as though someone had set a garbage bag on his desk.

"So disgusting."

He looked at the people wolfing down food at the other end of the cafeteria, his voice quiet, but just loud enough for everyone around him to hear.

"They eat like animals."

The girl beside him immediately lowered her voice. "Don't say that. If a teacher hears, they'll accuse us of discrimination again."

"Stating facts is discrimination now?"

The brown-haired boy sneered.

"It's their first day here, and someone already brought a knife into the classroom. They nearly got into a fight at lunch. What about later? Are we still supposed to have classes? My mom sent me to school so I could get into college, not so I could join The Hunger Games with homeless kids from the East End."

"What is the Wayne Foundation even thinking?"

Another girl, wearing glasses, held up her phone, its screen already filling with messages from the parents' group chat.

"Do they think stuffing a bunch of troubled street kids into a school counts as saving Gotham? This isn't a movie."

Someone added:

"At least movies have content ratings."

A few quiet laughs rose around the table.

The laughter confirmed that they belonged to the same species.

The brown-haired boy grew more fluent as he went on.

"My dad pays taxes every year, and my mom even donated lab equipment to the school. And now? These people are eating up the school lunch budget, and before teachers can teach, they have to deal with their fighting, stealing, and drug dealing. So what does that make us? Ordinary students are just supposed to be sacrificed?"

"I heard they get dinner too."

The girl frowned.

"We don't."

"No shit. They're poor."

Someone spoke with biting sarcasm.

"Being poor is an all-access pass. If you're poor, you get to cut in line, you get the foundation looking after you, you get to turn the school into a shelter. If we complain even once, we lack compassion."

"It's not that I lack compassion."

The girl with glasses immediately added that.

That sentence was important.

Very important.

In the middle-class linguistic system, that sentence served as a fuse.

Say "It's not that I lack compassion" first, and anything could follow.

"It's not that I lack compassion," she repeated, as though stamping her own approval, "but there should be boundaries to helping people, right? Why not build a separate school for them? Why should they affect our learning environment?"

"Because Mr. Wayne needs press photos."

The brown-haired boy spoke.

"Put poor kids and ordinary kids in the same classroom. Imagine how good that looks in pictures. I've even thought of the headline: 'Gotham's future knows no class divisions.'"

He laughed after saying it.

"What a fucking joke. Of course there are class divisions. Otherwise, why doesn't he come eat here?"

A little silence settled around them after those words.

Because they sounded too much like the truth.

At school, the truth was usually more dangerous than profanity.

Barbara stood between two worlds.

On her left were poor students with sauce all over their faces, cursing Bruce Wayne for not giving them enough.

On her right were middle-class students pushing their trays away, cursing Bruce Wayne for letting street trash in.

She suddenly realized something.

They were all sincere.

The poor students sincerely believed Bruce Wayne owed them a meal.

The middle-class students sincerely believed Bruce Wayne owed them a clean, safe learning environment.

Neither side thought they were wrong.

Both sides stood in their own positions, entirely justified, their logic airtight, their evidence plentiful.

And where did Bruce Wayne stand?

At the center of everyone's target.

Chen Mo leaned beside her and shoveled a mouthful of food into his mouth.

Barbara looked at him.

Chen Mo swallowed, his expression serious.

"The chicken's a little dry."

Barbara said, "...Didn't you just say you were taking the food home for your puppy?"

"I thought about it," Chen Mo said, slurping up another mouthful of pasta. "It's still young. It'll have plenty of chances to eat in the future. Not me. I'm more than ten years older than it. Show some consideration for the elderly."

"Aren't you embarrassed to compete for food with a dog that isn't even a year old?" Barbara precisely extracted the useful information from his wisecrack.

"I'm hungry too. You make it sound like I can afford a proper meal."

Chen Mo looked left, then right, lowering his voice.

"It's Gotham. The poor curse him for serving food late, the middle class curse him for feeding the wrong people, the teachers curse him for rushing the program, and the guards curse him for adding to their workload. Bruce Wayne, Gotham's giant public wishing fountain. You can curse him whether you toss in a coin or not."

Barbara was silent for a moment.

"You think they shouldn't complain?"

Chen Mo thought about it.

"I think they all should."

Barbara frowned.

Chen Mo poked the mashed potatoes in his container with his fork.

"Hungry people complaining that the food came late makes sense. People who want quiet classes complaining that the environment's gotten worse also makes sense. Teachers getting twice the work without a raise have even more reason to complain. Parents who paid money or taxes feeling that their children are being affected makes sense too."

He paused there.

"What makes the least sense is that, in the end, the only person everyone curses is the one who stepped up to do something... Don't look at me like that. You're the Gotham local. I haven't been here long."

Barbara, who had come to Gotham at eight but had stayed in boarding school with virtually no contact with the outside world, did not answer.

Because that had not been a joke.

Chen Mo did not continue either.

Because it sounded too much like serious talk, and too much of that would undermine his sunny, cheerful persona.

A few students at the cafeteria entrance had already started filming with their phones.

They filmed the poor students eating.

They filmed the hot meals smashed on the floor.

They filmed the staff members' pale faces.

They filmed Barbara handing out meals beside the serving window.

They filmed Chen Mo too.

Chen Mo ducked aside quite naturally, hiding half his face behind a pillar with movements as smooth as an experienced fugitive's, or a masked vigilante afraid of exposing his identity, like Spider-Man or someone.

Barbara glanced at him.

"What are you hiding for?"

"I'm shy."

"You didn't look shy a moment ago."

"I'm intermittently shy."

Barbara could not be bothered with him.

Ten minutes later, the first video appeared on the school's anonymous internal forum.

The title was:

"Wayne Foundation lunch program crashes on day one: destitute students scramble for food in cafeteria"

The title was not entirely accurate.

But it was very Gotham, very much in line with journalism. The poster had not made anything up, and it even genuinely met the three essential elements of news. That was already pretty good, okay?

Besides, accuracy was a luxury in Gotham's news dissemination system, much like fresh vegetables, mental health, and school bus seats without bullet holes.

Twenty minutes later, a second video came with a different title.

"Chaotic lunch at East End No. 7 Public Middle School: who will protect ordinary students' rights?"

Thirty minutes later, a third video cut out the causes and consequences, leaving only footage of a scrawny boy wolfing down food and another, middle-class boy frowning and backing away.

The caption read:

Bruce Wayne's experiment in educational equality is tearing our campus apart.

An hour later, the parents' group chat exploded.