Free Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal Page B

Shakespeare Garden. The lavender was bloomy as fuck and did the trick; all better.
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    After she swiped her WildCARD student ID at the gym’s front desk, she noticed that everything at SPAC seemed doused in the citrusy alcohol-based cleaner they used to wipe down the equipment. People were so anal about each other’s sweat and germs, especially the weekend warriors and noncompetitive athletes. Braque was a softball player. That’s a life in the dirt, a life touching dirt, a life touching things that touch dirt. Did Dot Richardson sterilize everything she touched until she was handed a gold medal? As if. Braque waited until she knew people were looking at her, then spat in her hands and lifted a 17.5-pound kettlebell from the rack. Patricia Bernal, her workout partner and fellow Academic All-American award-winning softball player, would be here in thirty minutes to spot her, and she’d do k-bell swings and stairs until then.
    It was hardly more difficult to do swings with a 17.5-pounder as opposed to her usual 15, but today, ugh. It didn’t feel like abdominaltightening. It felt like a fist had broken through her intestinal wall and extended its fingers inside her. She felt the bile chuckling in her throat. The kettlebell clanked to the floor.
     • • • 
    She stood facing the toilet, tasting the bile she spit into the water. She could hear another woman vomit a few stalls down, and another woman take a dump, and the goddamn smells of shit and bile were just too much. She covered her nose with the back of her left hand and let the vomit burst from her mouth. She puked so much, her eyes started to tear.
     • • • 
    Afterward, she wiped off her face and washed her mouth out several times, so the stomach acid wouldn’t chew up her enamel. It sucked having to bail on her weights partner, but it also sucked having probable food poisoning. She wondered if Patricia had the same bug. They had eaten the same thing at least once yesterday—grilled chicken and vegetables, which had never made them sick before, but who knows. As her second baseman—her partner in the middle infield—they often thought and moved in tandem.
    8:51 A . M .
    Braque had never been at Whole Foods this time of morning before. It was way less slammed with rubes than at lunchtime. It sucked balls having to skip weight training, but after vomiting, she needed two bananas, reverse-osmosis water, and a protein shake to replenish, along with an extra protein shake for Patricia to make it up to her.
    While she was reading the ingredients on an N. W. Gratz brand Vegan Protein Smoothie, she saw something weird written amid the Nutritional Facts: the phrase SWET PEPER JELY , all caps, large type.
    Something about it made her shiver. As she set the protein smoothie back on its shelf, the three strange words leapt out at her; she turnedthe bottle around so the front faced out instead. This was some creepy-ass bullshit, for sure. Still, fear is a choice, she reminded herself, and why choose it? She made up her mind that the strange words on the bottle didn’t exist and never existed. It was just her nutrition-starved brain shorting out on her.
    After a moment, she picked up the bottle and looked at it again. The bold text was gone, replaced by the usual crap about soy protein isolate and organic cane sugar. Sure as shit, she was going hypoglycemic from the food poisoning and not having eaten. Her temples began to ache; she needed to get something in her system, stat.
    Then Braque saw someone down the aisle who she hated, and it gave her a huge sense of relief. There were Lolo McCaffrey’s thick braids and patchouli-oil smell, crouched down by the nutritional bars, her moon face staring at the label of a Clif Bar like someone who can’t read. Lolo was the strength and conditioning coach for the team who made everyone do hot yoga and meditation and was covertly seeing senior shortstop Tarah Sarrazin, the player who incoming first-year