Ferry’s & Terry’s Shut Down After Owners Vanish!

The Stuyvesant community was in for a shock last week when they found out that their two favorite lunch places (not including the Stuyvesant cafeteria) had mysteriously closed down. Dozens of hungry students were found crowded outside the bolted doors of Ferry’s and Terry’s, crying like toddlers. Some even brought tents and pillows to the sidewalk, determined to boycott the shutdown and bring back the beloved Bacon Avocado Chipotle on a Roll.

“Ferry’s and Terry’s have been my lifeline ever since my mouth touched cafeteria pizza on that fateful Monday, November 21, 2021, at 11:03 a.m.,” a distressed senior related. “How will I get my parents to shovel more money into my wallet now that they know I won’t be spending it on overpriced sandwiches and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream?” As we were wrapping up the interview, the end bell rang, and the anguished student burst into tears, wailing, “It’s Vegan Friday today, too?! I don’t want to eat dead grass and lettuce that probably came from Soph-Frosh Latin’s green costumes and God knows where else! In fact, I once saw one of the lunch ladies fishing for seaweed in the Hudson River!”

Being the foremost investigative team at Stuyvesant Elementary School, we at the Humor Department naturally decided to dig deeper into the problem in a race against our corroding digestive systems—the human body can only take so many cafeteria pizzas. Of course, who would try to shut down the delicious duo except other, less popular food places? Using this lead, we began our investigation by hiring 23 nosy freshmen (there was no shortage of applicants to choose from) to sniff around McDonald’s, 16 Handles, Whole Foods, and Shake Shack under the cover of night’s darkness. The little raccoons dug through the basements and pantries of each location, desperately searching for the owners of Ferry’s and Terry’s, whom they expected to find tied to steel chairs with duct tape over their mouths.

No such luck. Unfortunately, action movies do not represent real life, no matter what your English teacher might say.

However, their findings were still astonishing. In the dark depths of the Whole Foods basement, they discovered complex floor plans of Ferry’s and Terry’s, covered with more hastily-drawn red marks than your most recent physics test. Actually, maybe not. Next to the maps sat three half-eaten Chicken Pizza Bagels (likely unfit for consumption, but the freshmen, being the little rodents they are, ate them anyway) and a detailed plan of attack. From these plans, it was determined that the owners of Ferry’s and Terry’s were being held hostage in none other than the 12th floor chemistry lab!

The next phase of the investigation involved climbing up 11 flights of stairs in a heroic rescue attempt. Unfortunately, we had to abandon the freshmen at that point, as they lacked the leg strength to climb the stairs, the arm strength to help rescue the store owners, and the mental strength to persevere through our “abuse.” In their place, we sent our very replaceable newbie writers.

Upon reaching the 12th floor, they found that the floor consisted of only one room, which had disturbing sounds coming from inside. The door was bolted shut. At least, the front door was. It took about four seconds for them to realize that the back door was unlocked and slightly ajar. The writers crept in as quietly as 15 children with giant backpacks could—that is, not very quietly.

What they found was shocking. The owners of Ferry’s and Terry’s were not tied up in steel chairs, locked into medieval torture devices, or even being subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of reading 16 pages of an AP European History textbook! If anything, they seemed to be enjoying the peace and quiet. Next to them was an obscenely large pile of pre-prepared pizza bagels, bacon, avocados, and Chipotle sauce!

What happened next is unclear, but according to several writers, the two owners “chased them out of the room with a barrage of lettuce, sharpened avocado pits, and past Global Studies Regents exams.”

In the following days, numerous attempts were made to coax the owners into returning to their posts. Students offered extra credit points (On what, exactly? Their Yelp! ratings?), AP U.S. History Review Packets, and more. Some even had the brilliantly stupid idea to bribe the owners with their own food, with one student yelling, “I’ll give you a hundred of my least moldy mac-and-cheese pizza bagels if you return to Terry’s! And yes, I’ve been stockpiling them since before freshman year!”

Currently, the situation remains unresolved. Will the owners of Terry’s and Ferry’s ever return from their extended vacation on the 12th floor of Stuyvesant Elementary? Will McDonald’s use the extra customer revenue to finally fix their ice cream machines? The dedicated children of the Humor Department will continue to report the latest information as the case continues to unfold.