Hot Plastic Cheese

My school’s cafeteria wasn’t a cafeteria but a concession operated by the most responsible of the school’s feckless teens. This is to say: you tossed a fistful of change at someone and they tossed you a molten sub, fresh from the microwave.

These sub sandwiches defied any real efforts at classification and consumption. They were an assortment of wet meat and mayo layered on an 8” bun that was about as authentically Italian as a Pizza Pocket. They also had cheese. Or, perhaps more accurately, “cheeze,” a square of dairy-adjacent milk solids draped on the wet meat to keep it company. It was a sandwich in the way that a donut sliced in half with an egg in the middle is a sandwich: two halves and a filling, the sign of the sandwich but missing the soul.

The subs were always microwaved because to eat one raw would mean flirting with gastric disaster in your post-lunch gym block. The subs looked vaguely sweaty before they went into the microwave, which transformed them into a cursed bolus of meat and regret. Microwaving caused the sub to expand in its wrapper, straining and oozing under the plastic skin. If you ordered the Pizza Sub, the tomato sauce and cheese would melt together and form pulsing bubbles uncomfortably reminsicent of teen acne. You knew your sub was cooked if it throbbed in your hands and you felt the self-conscious urge to pick your face.

The subs cost $5 but were free for honours students. Academic high achievers were rewarded with free sub coupons at the end of each semester to recognize their accomplishment. Maybe that’s why, years later, I associated final exams with hot cheese and would seek out pizza, nachos, and poutine at the end of every university term. A childhood grazing instinct engraved in memory.