On the dark and stormy night of March 1st, 2024 at 11:30 PM, the first Allderdice student arrived at UPMC Shadyside Hospital with a case of extreme food poisoning and liver malfunction. The student, a sophomore who went to school feeling completely fine just the day before and had no prior history of liver or stomach problems, was immediately checked into the intensive care unit. He cited his school’s cafeteria lunch that day as the reason for his food poisoning just before he began aggressively vomiting onto the nurse carrying him through the hospital hallway.

Little did the hospital staff know, that in fact would not be their last Allderdice student of the night. Throughout the next several hours, countless more students checked in to the intensive care unit, all having increasingly worse symptoms of foodborne illnesses. By dawn, the hallways of the building were full of regurgitated Dice cafeteria meals.

“It was nothing like we had ever seen before,” said a nurse during the night shift at the hospital, “The high school students came pouring in, one after another, each rambling on about what their school’s food had done to them.”

“Mass food poisoning can actually be quite common,” explained Dr. Smith, an expert on foodborne illness, during a press conference a few days after the initial night, “but the level at which this occurred is certainly most unprecedented.”

In total, there were over three hundred students, all with extreme cases of nausea and vomiting, that ended up checking in to the hospital. The students ranged from freshmen to seniors, the highest to the lowest GPAs, and from all genders and ethnicities. It was truly a universal terror throughout the Allderdice student body.

While most students ended up getting out of the facility within only a few days, some students’ conditions ended up turning fatal. At least a dozen students’ lives were tragically ended at the hands of the cafeteria meals, with many of their last words being recited as “Wait, can I have an Uncrustable?” just before they took their final breath.

Autopsies were immediately performed upon the student’s passing, revealing much information previously unknown. Many students’ livers had been completely destroyed and rendered unable to function due to substances that had passed through. Traces of substances such as uranium-238, arsenic trioxide, Ms. Gorwul’s toenail clippings, Meadows jungle juice, Big Bad Brad’s forehead sweat, and of course a slight amount of marijuana were all found in the digested cafeteria food. 

What puzzled the doctors most about the mass sickness was not why it happened, that much was quite clear, but which food specifically caused it. Dice serves many different meals, all of which seem at least a little suspicious in some way.

“It was the burgers,” said an anonymous student as she was walking out of the hospital after many sleepless nights, “definitely the burgers.”

This sentiment seemed common throughout the students who suffered through the event. The Allderdice burgers were infamous in school for being made out of some strange, classified substance.

“We don’t exactly know what those burgers are made out of,” one of the Lunch Servers in the cafeteria told The Backword. “Every Monday, we meet these big weird-looking dudes wearing large black coats outside the school. They hand us a box of the already-cooked patties and tell us not to ask any questions regarding the product. One day Brenda, one of the ladies on our team, asked the guys what they put in them. They carried her back to their white van and drove away. We never saw Brenda again.”

Upon returning to further interview the same lunch server the subsequent day regarding her story, The Backword was informed that the PPS employee had been “terminated immediately with no prior notice” due to “exposing classified district information.”

Then only a week after, following a thorough investigation by the FBI,  the head of nutrition for Pittsburgh Public Schools was promptly arrested for  “possession and distribution of illegal substances” along with “disturbing the peace.”

Currently, all the students who survived the food poisoning are home and well, barring a few exceptions that unfortunately decided to eat two burgers instead of just one. The mass sickness and several fatal outcomes were a big hit for the Allderdice community, but the school will continue to power through it, with the same cafeteria menu of course. The district would never dare change that.