When the thought of the update progress of the fan manga she was following floated through Barbara's mind, the first slurping sound finally echoed in the cafeteria.
It was very loud.
Loud to the point of completely stripping away any dignity.
A boy, so skinny that his jacket looked like it was hanging on a clothes hanger, squatted beside a long table. His left hand pressed down tightly on the meal box, while his right hand held a disposable fork. He used the fork like a bulldozer, shoveling the pasta, chicken, and mashed potatoes into a jumbled mess and stuffing it into his mouth in a matter of seconds.
His cheeks bulged out, and his throat moved up and down with great difficulty.
Someone next to him reminded him to slow down.
He ignored them.
Children from the East End of Gotham had a natural distrust of the words "slow down."
If you slow down, the food is gone.
If you slow down, the person behind you in line moves up.
If you slow down, the world will take away your share of things, and then tell you to come earlier next time.
So, he ate as if he were racing against the entire city for time.
Halfway through his meal, he suddenly muttered a slurred curse:
"That dog, Wayne."
Barbara's hand paused for a moment.
Beside her, Chen Mo also paused as he took his meal box out of his bag again.
Hearing these words come out of a child whose mouth was still stuffed with a subsidized meal from the Wayne Foundation made the scene feel somewhat like a piece of Gotham-style religious absurdity.
It was like someone finishing Holy Communion in a church, then lowering their head to curse God for the bread being too dry.
The boy did not stop.
He wiped the meat sauce from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, his eyes still red, his voice hoarse.
"They promised lunch and dinner, but what happened? If things hadn't blown up today, wouldn't these meals have been saved again for those people in suits to take pictures with? Isn't Bruce Wayne filthy rich? Damn it, if he bought one less watch, how long would that feed us?"
A girl nearby pushed her carrots to the corner of her meal box and chimed in coldly:
"You're going too easy on him. The news said 'every child deserves a future.' Where is the future? Right now, all I see is a piece of chicken, and it's a future that came from being slammed onto the ground."
"This food was supposed to be ours in the first place."
Another boy hugged his meal box even tighter, as if holding an inheritance.
"Don't make it look like we're taking a massive advantage of him. He promised it. The people at the community station said it loud and clear yesterday--come to school, and meals are covered. We came, so where's the food? Now that we're eating a bite, we're supposed to thank him? Thank him my ass."
"Exactly."
The first boy swallowed a huge mouthful of food, choking to the point that tears almost came out, yet he still stiffened his neck and said:
"Wayne is treating us, Wayne isn't giving handouts. Inviting guests over and then letting them starve at the door for half the day, that's what you call a lack of upbringing."
This statement was so ridiculous.
It was so ridiculous that Chen Mo almost felt a surge of respect.
In the slums of Gotham, a child who probably couldn't even say for sure where his own parents were was accusing Bruce Wayne of having a poor upbringing.
If this news ever reached Wayne Manor, Alfred would probably first fall into an elegant silence for three seconds, and then sharpen the silver dinner knives a bit more.
Barbara frowned.
She wanted to say something.
But in the end, she said nothing.
Because she saw that the boy who had cursed the loudest had scraped the very last bit of sauce from his meal box with his fork after speaking.
The plastic fork scraped against the bottom of the container, making a sharp, grating sound.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
Like some sort of very cheap gavel.
He felt no gratitude.
He felt no happiness.
He was just finally a little less hungry.
This made him seem like a real jerk.
But in Gotham, being a jerk was sometimes just the first vital sign of a person regaining their strength.
On the other side of the cafeteria, the tables of the middle-class students also began to make noise.
It was the sound of complaints in lowered voices.
The students over there were visibly dressed much cleaner. There were no holes in their jackets, and while their shoes weren't limited-edition pairs expensive enough to get them mugged, at least the shoelaces were intact.
To call them middle-class was actually an overstatement; they were just the children of working-class families who could still afford to send their kids to school but couldn't pay the exorbitant tuition of private high schools.
A brown-haired boy pushed his tray a little further away, his expression looking as if someone had placed a trash bag on his desk.
"So disgusting."
He looked at the people gorging themselves on the other side of the cafeteria, his voice not loud, but just enough for the circle of people around him to hear.
"They eat like animals."
A girl beside him immediately lowered her voice: "Don't say that. If a teacher hears you, they'll accuse us of discrimination again."
"Is stating facts called discrimination?"
The brown-haired boy sneered.
"It's their first day here, and someone already brought a knife into the classroom. They almost started a fight during lunchtime. What about the future? Are we even going to have classes? My mom sent me to school so I could get into college, not so I could participate in the Hunger Games with street urchins from the East End."
"What exactly is the Wayne Foundation thinking?"
Another girl wearing glasses held up her phone, where messages in a parents' group chat were already flooding the screen.
"Do they think that as long as they stuff a bunch of troubled street kids into a school, they've saved Gotham? This isn't a movie."
Someone added:
"At least movies have age-rating warnings."
A few light chuckles echoed around the table.
The laughter confirmed that they belonged to the same species.
The brown-haired boy spoke more and more fluidly.
"My dad pays taxes every year, and my mom even donated laboratory equipment to the school. And now? The school's lunch budget is being eaten up by these people, and the teachers have to handle their fighting, stealing, and drug dealing before they can even teach a class. So what about us? Do ordinary students just deserve to be sacrificed?"
"I heard they get dinner too."
The girl frowned.
"We don't get anything."
"Duh, because they're poor."
Someone said sarcastically.
"Being poor is an all-powerful pass. Being poor means you can cut lines, being poor means you get taken care of by the foundation, and being poor means you can turn the school into a shelter. If we complain even a single bit, we're labeled as having no compassion."
"I don't lack compassion."
The girl with glasses immediately added.
This sentence was very important.
Extremely important.
In the linguistic system of the middle class, this sentence was equivalent to a safety fuse.
By saying "I don't lack compassion" first, anything could follow after it.
"I don't lack compassion," she repeated, as if stamping herself with approval, "but helping people should have boundaries, right? Why didn't they build a separate school for them? Why does it have to affect our learning environment?"
"Because Mr. Wayne needs news photos."
The brown-haired boy said.
"Putting poor kids and ordinary kids in the same classroom looks so good when you take a picture. I've already thought of the headline: 'Gotham's Future, No Divide Between Classes'."
He laughed to himself after speaking.
"Hilarious. Of course there's a class divide. Otherwise, why isn't he coming here to eat?"
When these words landed, the surroundings fell a bit quieter.
Because those words sounded too much like the truth.
In a school, the truth was usually more dangerous than profanity.
Barbara stood between the two worlds.
On the left were the poor students whose faces were covered in sauce, cursing Bruce Wayne for not giving them enough.
On the right were the middle-class students who pushed their trays away, cursing Bruce Wayne for stuffing street garbage into their school.
She suddenly realized something.
They were all very sincere.
The poor students sincerely felt that Bruce Wayne owed them a meal.
The middle-class students sincerely felt that Bruce Wayne owed them a clean and safe learning environment.
Neither side felt they were wrong.
Both sides stood firmly in their own positions, completely self-righteous, with airtight logic and ample evidence.
And where did Bruce Wayne stand?
Right in everyone's crosshairs.
Chen Mo leaned beside her, lowering his head to take a bite of his food.
Barbara looked at him.
Chen Mo swallowed the food in his mouth, his expression very serious.
"The chicken is a bit dry."
Barbara: "...Didn't you say just now that you were going to take the food back for your puppy?"
"I thought about it," Chen Mo took another slurp of pasta, "it's still young and will have plenty of chances to eat in the future. I'm different. I'm more than ten years older than it. Let's show some respect to the elderly."
"Are you really not ashamed to steal food from a puppy that isn't even a year old?" Barbara accurately extracted the useful information from his banter.
"I'm hungry too. It's not like I can afford a regular meal."
Chen Mo glanced to the left again, then to the right, lowering his voice.
"It's Gotham, after all. The poor curse him for delivering the food late, the middle class curse him for giving the food to the wrong people, the teachers curse him for rushing the project, and the security guards curse him for increasing their workload. Bruce Wayne is Gotham's massive public wishing well; whether people throw a coin in or not, they can still curse it a couple of times."
Barbara was silent for a moment.
"You think they shouldn't curse him?"
Chen Mo thought for a bit.
"I think they all have a right to curse."
Barbara frowned.
Chen Mo poked the mashed potatoes in his meal box with his fork.
"It's perfectly reasonable for starving people to curse because the food came out late. It's also perfectly reasonable for people who want to study in peace to curse because the environment has worsened. The teachers' workload has doubled without a raise, so it's even more reasonable for them to throw a few curses. Parents spent money or paid taxes, and feeling like their children are being affected is reasonable too."
He paused here for a moment.
"The most unreasonable part is that, in the end, only the one who stood up to actually do something gets cursed by everyone... Don't look at me with that expression. You're the Gotham local, I just got here not long ago."
Barbara, who had actually come to Gotham at the age of eight but had been attending a boarding school with essentially zero contact with the outside world, did not chime in.
Because those words were no joke.
Chen Mo didn't continue speaking either.
Because those words sounded too serious, and speaking too much of it would ruin his bright and cheerful persona.
At the cafeteria entrance, several students had already pulled out their phones and started filming.
They filmed the poor students eating.
They filmed the smashed boxes of hot meals on the floor.
They filmed the pale faces of the staff members.
They filmed Barbara standing by the window distributing food.
And they also filmed Chen Mo.
Chen Mo naturally shrunk to the side, hiding half of his face behind a pillar. His movements were as fluid as an experienced wanted criminal, 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 just now."
"I'm periodically shy."
Barbara couldn't be bothered to pay attention to him.
Ten minutes later, the first video appeared on the school's internal anonymous forum.
The title was:
"Wayne Foundation's Lunch System Fails on Day One, Underprivileged Students Fight for Food in Cafeteria"
The title wasn't entirely accurate.
But it was very Gotham, very much in line with journalism. He hadn't completely made things up; it even actually met the three elements of news, which was already pretty good, alright?
Besides, accuracy in Gotham's news dissemination system was a luxury, right up there with fresh vegetables, mental health, and school bus seats without bullet holes.
Twenty minutes later, a second video appeared under a different title.
"Chaos at Lunch in East End Seventh Public High School: Who Will Protect the Rights of Ordinary Students?"
Thirty minutes later, a third video cut out the cause and effect, retaining only the footage of a skinny boy gorging himself and another middle-class boy frowning and stepping back.
The accompanying text read:
Bruce Wayne's educational equality experiment is tearing our campus apart.
An hour later, the parents' group chat exploded.