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eBook Category: Humor/Science Fiction
eBook Description: School lunch, weird teachers, horrifying lunchroom employees and all the terror of a hundred-thousand dreams of showing up for class in nothing but your underwear. Marty Ruckerman and chums find out the horrible secrets lurking in the teacher's lounge at Emerpathy Middle School. [Publisher Note: Also available in the anthology switch.blade: School's Out]

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: switch.blade: School's Out, ed. Amy Sterling Casil, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2003

50 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [74 KB], eReader (PDB) [30 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [17 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [16 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [66 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [87 KB], hiebook (KML) [72 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [48 KB], iSilo (PDB) [14 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [18 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [46 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [27 KB]
Words: 5050
Reading time: 14-20 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"My enjoyment of Tom Gerencer's "Why I Bring a Bag Lunch Now" is a testament to the joy I took in its inspired lunacy. Complete with a talking pepper, evil alien administrators, and a space sheep--er, ship--disguised as a high school, "Why I Bring a Bag Lunch Now" is by far my favorite story in switch.blade. While plot holes abound, maintaining a logical plot is clearly not the point here. "Why I Bring a Bag Lunch Now" is hilarious nonsense which reaches the level of Daniel Pinkwater's work on several occasions, and for aficionados of absurdist humor, I cannot recommend it too highly."--Alec Austin, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

They were serving cheesy walnut peppers again, which in my experience is never a good way to start a Thursday afternoon. I tried to get Jinx--the school bully and a guy with nothing you could really call a neck--to steal my lunch money after second period, but he was having none of it.

"Keep it," he said, after I'd walked by him for the third time, jingling the contents of my pockets in what I had hoped was an enticing way. "I can last 'til I get home."

I wished I could've said the same. Mrs. Hamshaw caught me trying to sneak out the back door of the cafeteria, and she shooed me back in line.

"You eat your lunch," she said, "or you'll waste away to nothing."

Now, I found that hard to swallow, coming from a woman who probably caused calibration problems in seismological equipment several states away. But sometimes you're the dirt, and sometimes you're the model X-500 Eletrolux Deluxe, and there was no denying which end of that equation I fit into.