Goddard Elementary was built by a Roosevelt program in the 1930s and featured a smokestack out of the same brick but just a tad taller than the two-story building. During the six years of Nick's tenure there, two runs in kindergarten then through fourth, he realized the typical aroma was from the custodians shoving in all the single-serve milk cartons from their lunch.
Nick also wondered why there was never a rumor, at least that he heard, that bad kids ended up going in there. Guess that would be hard to sell unless a student were to suddenly disappear and so forth.
So instead of paying for trash service they would just throw it beneath the smokestack, sometimes even during recess so that everyone in the neighborhood on the edge of town could inhale milk cartons.
At one point Nick asked his mom if the name Goddard has to do with the God at church. She said she'd have to look into it but never did.
There were lots of people that she would mention over the years that had started attending services, were getting married, having surgery, going on a trip.
Others would just disappear and the trail would just dry up.
These people just vanished into thin air, just like the milk cartons.
Sometimes individuals would come without their spouse. Sometimes they would be there every Sunday. For a while. Then you realize you haven't seen them for a while. Nobody usually knew why.
Those waxy milk cartons had things to read on them, sometimes a joke, sometimes a fact. College Knowledge.
Sometimes couples would attend for a while then you'd hear they were getting divorced, and you don't see them there again but might run into one of them at the grocery. If you see one of those across a parking lot you just acknowledge them and don't say much else. He or she looks different now.
They used to have high school kids help out in the elementary cafeterias, years later Nick realized as an OWE kind of thing. One of them was a cool dude who would tell Nick he did a good job for eating all of his tray that day. That dude was only around a few times then disappeared.
When Nick's parents changed churches most of the congregation would naturally go poof once they lost touch.
Once you get to high school you can have chocolate milk in one of those little cartons. At some point he realized they no longer used the incinerator, that dank smell was no longer in the air when the wind blew from the school, probably decided the smoke was not a good idea and they should just have the cartons hauled away.
In his junior year he cracked up one of the cooler teachers by pointing out that the plain milk cartons proudly proclaimed HOMO MILK in bold letters by a carton designer who obviously, either didn't understand their target demographic or won one hell of a bet.