Disclaimer: I don't own anything OC related.
AN: Jessica said in a review of my last piece posted
here: "i mean you could write about a paper bag and i would read
it"
Well, this is for you. :) Thanks for inspiring me!
Ryan wasn't going to pack his lunch anymore.
He remembered the first day of Harbor for a lot of reasons, and one of them was the utter lack of brown paper bags.
In Chino, he remembered cutting the green off the bread and smearing it with a rationed spoonful of peanut butter before wrapping it in a paper towel and putting it into whatever wrinkled brown paper bag he could find.
There were plenty of bags in Chino. Vodka, scotch, whiskey, beer, they all came in the same plain paper bag.
And he'd only have to glance around to find one to carry his lunch to school.
The Cohens didn't have paper bags.
Rosa does the shopping and she saves all the flimsy plastic sacks in a bin hidden away in the pantry.
The few times he tried to pack his own lunch, he'd had to put the Ziploc bag sandwich in one of the pockets of his new backpack and by the time he'd gone to lunch, it had been squished beyond recognition.
Dawn hadn't saved the bags on purpose, they'd just lingered. Ryan was the only one that took out the trash anyway.
He hated the smell of garbage.
He'd take out the receipts for the cheap liquor and fold the bags neatly and put them in the bill drawer where he knew they'd stay intact.
He liked the anonymity of carrying a bag lunch. It had worked on the construction site. It wasn't flashy.
It was practical. Plain brown bag.
Kirsten had caught him putting his sandwich in his backpack and the next day a lunchbox appeared on his desk. It was one of those rectangular ones with a strap and was padded to keep things fresh.
It was like every other Newpsie Harbor kid was carrying if they had the guts to carry a lunchbox.
He hated the fact that he couldn't get comfortable with paying six dollars for a gourmet mass produced product in the cafeteria when he could have a $0.75 peanut butter sandwich instead.
And when he started to find brown paper bags folded neatly over Rosa's grocery bag bin, he knew that he'd never pack his lunch again.