This adventure starts with fellow LHS student Mark Frantz and I. The following events are real.

In this cold, snowless winter with little to do, boredom overcomes the teenage mind. With this boredom we set out with a plan to review a buffet that had a small price tag, little did we know the we would pay the price later. The restaurant in mind was Cici’s Pizza, a buffet style pizza joint with promises of a wide variety of wings and pizza. It daunted us with a rather high review of 3.4/5 stars which is a somewhat good review for a buffet, however I believe the true review should be 1/5 stars and I’ll tell you why.

Upon arriving we were greeted with an overwhelming amount of trash on the ground and on the tables. We kept our wits as we went to go get our food. When we saw the food we realized how unappealing the pizza looked. It was thin and lacked sauce under the cheese and the toppings were either burnt or scattered so unevenly across the pizza. I still made the horrible decision to eat and get my $6 out of it.

We grabbed 2 slices of plain cheese as the aforementioned pizzas with toppings were so visually unappetizing I don’t think a normal human body could handle it. Now to my surprise the first bite was not bad but I noticed a very weird grimy taste that came with a strange crunch. This was odd because the pizza itself was rather soft and may have been undercooked because the cheese was a very odd consistency, that was when I realized something horrible. I flipped the pizza upside down and realized that the pan that the pizza was cooked had not properly been greased so a lot of little black bits of pan were stuck to the bottom of the pizza. This had greatly upset me as the pizza itself was not good and now was covered in foreign non edible items.

After that event I now knew that I could not get my money’s worth without a drink which had now bumped my final price tag to $8.91. Without hesitation I scurried to get a drink which happened to be Dr. Pepper and with my bad luck it was flatter than the Great Plains. At this point I had become so upset that it only drove me to get more of my unlimited $6 pizza. After receiving and finishing two more slices I started to feel violently ill out of nowhere. I got up with Mark to investigate the bathroom and prayed that it would be a beacon of hope for this place.

Naturally I was wrong and was met with a foul, smelly, and disgusting display of a bathroom. The ceiling was the same blocky office tiles as the school but they were way worse and were covered in all sorts of nasty particles that I can’t dare to think of. One of the tiles was torn, another was a sickly green. The light would flicker as if the bathroom was a bunker during wartime. The bathroom gave me an extreme feeling of hopelessness and no future for humanity, it was like I had walked into hell. Coming back to my senses I knew had to leave immediately and that’s just what we did.

As we sped home I knew I was sick. My chest hurt badly every time I took a breath and my vision was slowly fading as my sight was tunneling. The 23 minute drive there was nowhere near as bad as the 23 minute drive back. We had to get back to Mark’s house as fast as we could and now we were stuck in traffic and surrounded by the terrible drivers of Parma. We fortunately found a quicker route back to Mark’s and once we finally returned we realized how sick we truly were and felt like we were going to pass out. I quickly fell asleep feeling very cold whereas Mark stayed up. I woke up an hour later feeling very hot but not as sick. Mark also stated that he was feeling better which was some relief.

Though days later, I still feel somewhat sick and entirely blame Cici’s Pizza. I’m still haunted by what poor practices I saw from the workers and how distasteful the pizza was.

Cici’s Pizza could have saved the world, instead it destroyed us.