by Jon Auerbach
Maybe it was one of those slow-acting apples. You know the ones where you take a bite, go to sleep, and then don’t wake up for a hundred years. Well, if that was the case, the damage was already done. Or maybe the apples needed to be heated for the effects to kick in, hence the request for a pie. In any event, my facilities remained unimpaired so I figured I might as well get the hell out of Dodge before I was discovered. I put the half-eaten apple back in my bag, stopped at a row of trees with yellow apples to cover over the Mutsu, and trudged off back to the rental car. It was late enough in the morning now that the throngs of apple pickers had began to arrive, and so none of the staff noticed the one-booted girl slip by with a bag of potentially magic apples.
When I arrived back at the house, I laid out my haul on the counter: 14 Mutsu apples, enough for two pies with a few leftover. I set to work, nibbling on the extras as I went, all the while hoping that whatever magic they held would kick in eventually. If necessary, I was prepared to eat the whole pie, stomach consequences be damned, to figure out what was so special about these apples. I imagined the answers neatly laid out in the Compendium, hidden on a shelf somewhere in the city.
There would be pages of maps, showing the location of flora and fauna that had magical properties. Tables of recipes and experiments on how to mix disparate ingredients to make something new. A whole chapter on the uses of rats. The pages would be brown and make a satisfying crinkly noise as you turned them. I imagined that each family had a copy that had been passed down from generation to generation, each successive one scribbling notes in the margin with new ideas and new things they’d tried.
Without the Compendium, though, I would need to figure everything out for myself, one Quest at a time. The first pie would be for the Quest and the second one for me (and Duncan if he ever woke up). Just a few more minutes and I would be able to find out if these apples were worth losing my boot over.
The creak of the old wooden stairs betrayed Duncan’s descent into the kitchen. He wore a tattered t-shirt and sweats, the back of his hair was sticking up, and I’m sure he hadn’t brushed his teeth yet, but I didn’t care. It had been so long that I almost had forgotten what it was like to have someone else in my life.
Duncan surveyed the scene in the kitchen with a quizzical look.
“One day in the country and you’ve gone domestic on me.”
“And hello to you too. I didn’t think you were going to wake up in time for the party.”
Duncan walked over to me and gave me a kiss. It was short, more than a peck but less than a haven’t-seen-your-longtime-girlfriend-in-three-weeks type of kiss. He pulled back slightly and I wondered if he was waiting for me to press forward, as if testing me to see if I would continue the kiss, to see if I had missed him more than he had missed me. But then suddenly his hands were around my waist, his lips back against mine, his fingers trying to untie the apron. Our lips never parted as we made our way up to the bedroom, and the distance that had separated us was gone.
We lay together in bed afterward, the sheets and blankets strewn about haphazardly, my head resting on his shoulder, his arm around me. For the first time in awhile, I felt content and calm, as if the world outside the room didn’t exist, as if the Quests were just a bizarre daydream I had created. I closed my eyes and pretended that this could last as long as I didn’t open them.
But the kitchen smoke detector had other plans.
11
An apple pie from scratch
“Over the years, my methods have evolved as my talents have waxed and waned. For the foreseeable future, I will have to rely on my marriage, my pen, and my ink.”
Duncan raced out of the room, still naked, and scampered down the stairs. I threw on half of my clothes quickly, grabbed some of Duncan’s, and followed. The kitchen was full of smoke billowing from the oven when I entered, and the sight of him wearing nothing but oven mitts trying to fish a pie out of the oven was too much so I let out a chuckle.
Duncan looked up, his face red from either the heat or anger, and stopped what he was doing.
“It’s not funny, Jen. You could have burned down the whole house!”
“Oh please. It’s just a bit of smoke! Plus the window’s open, so it mostly went outside already.”
I plopped his clothes on the counter and shooed him away from the oven to survey the damage.
My spare pie was burnt to a crisp, the upper crust charred a deep black and rock hard. Crap. I looked over at my remaining apples on the counter. Just two, not enough for another pie and damned if I was going to go back to that orchard again. I found a fork in one of the drawers and poked the top of the pie with it. It did not give way. I kept poking until finally a chunk of the crust sunk into the apple filling below.
“Umm, Jen, what are you doing?”
Duncan had managed to put on his underwear and t-shirt and so looked a little less ridiculous than before, but he was clearly annoyed that I had ruined the second round of hooking up that he was likely hoping for.
“Trying to see if any part of this pie is salvageable. It took me a long time to make.”
I managed to break away more of the crust so that I could retrieve a good-size bite of the center. The extra heat didn’t seem to have affected the interior of the pie, which was odd and I brought the filling up to my nose. It smelled normal, so I took the plunge and stuck the whole thing in my mouth.
The urge to vomit began almost immediately as I swallowed the last bit. I dropped the fork and raced out of the kitchen to the nearest bathroom. Squatting over the open toilet, I began dry heaving involuntarily and waited for the bile to rise in my throat. But then, just as quick as it had come, the compulsion faded.
When I returned to the kitchen, Duncan was seconds away from cutting into the first pie.
“What are you doing?!?” I said, almost screaming.
“Having some pie, what does it look like? I was so confused as to why you even tried the burnt one when you had a perfectly good-”
“Don’t eat that, please,” was all I could say before snatching the pie away from Duncan’s grasp.
“What do you mean? Why else did you make it if we weren’t going to eat it?”
Duncan looked at me like I was a crazy person and he was only half wrong unfortunately.
“Because, umm, well…”
This was not the moment I planned on revealing my secret. I mean, what a dumb way for him to find out, right? I would have rather been caught drinking some arcane concoction, or walking out of the bar with Steve, or even looking at the Quest Board on my computer. But to give it all away for the sake of a stupid pie was absolutely ridiculous. At the same time though, I wanted those tokens and I didn’t care what Duncan thought.
“... because I was baking it for your boss’s party tonight.”
The expression on Duncan’s face held steady for a few seconds before finally settling back to normal.
“Oh, ok. Why didn’t you say so?”
“Sorry; it’s just I worked really hard on this. I picked the apples myself this morning and everything.”
“It’s fine. But you know, there are like farms everywhere here. You could have just bought a pie instead of going through all this trouble.”
“I know. But sometimes it’s good to get your hands dirty.”
Duncan smiled and put his arm around me.
“Say, since we were so rudely interrupted before, why don’t we…”
Without warning, Duncan lifted me onto the counter and began pulling up my shirt while kissing my neck.
“Baby, it’s, oh, that tickles, I told your boss’s wife that I’d drop the pie off soon though. You know how she gets.”
Duncan halted his advance, my shirt already up to my neck. I pulled it back down and slid off the counter.
“Okay, I guess. But you owe me a raincheck, Jellybean.”
“It’s a date.”
I gave him a peck on the cheek and ran upstairs to get my clothes. Alone in the bedroom, I realiz
ed that my lie had now spawned several subsidiary lies, such as why the pie wouldn’t be on the dessert table later. Fortunately Duncan was never one for remembering every little thing and in a few hours he’d be so jetlagged and drunk that he would forget all about the pie. But one step at a time.
I parked a few spots down from the bench and waited in my car for several minutes on the off chance the Requester was still nearby. No one appeared and, anxious to get back to the house, I walked over to the bench and sat down. I had placed the pie inside several layers of plastic bags, which were tied into a tangled knot. I hoped it was enough protection from the elements and so I leaned forward and slid the pie underneath the bench.
Evidently the Requester was very trusting, as the tokens were already waiting in an envelope taped under the bench. I ripped the envelope free and tore it open. Seven iron tokens. Not that I care so much about the tokens themselves. With the whole level ladder revealed to be a fraud by Steve, it didn’t matter how slowly I was progressing through the ranks. Besides, I already knew more than someone at level 25 and my aim at this point was knowledge, not these worthless tokens.
I sat there, still hoping the Requester would show him or herself, but after several minutes it seemed like a lost cause, so I decamped for the car and began the slow, winding drive back to the house. As I meandered by horse farms and neatly planted fields, I speculated on what should have happened when I had tasted the pie.
In Warriors of Olympus, there were magic fruit you could find while exploring. Some restored your health, another cured you if you had been poisoned, and still others bestowed some temporary benefit, like being able to run quicker for a few minutes.
Any of those would be earth-shattering revelations if real. But the cheap reward for the Quest made me suspect that the effect was more mundane than that. I mean, if the orchard was hiding apples that could bring someone back from the dead, the reward should have been a lot more than seven iron. My mind considered the opposite proposition: what if the apples were that amazing but setting the reward further up the token spectrum would have drawn attention to their value and everyone would have just tried to take the apples for themselves. Uggh. This was making my head hurt. I tried to stop the guessing game but my brain had already leaped to the next possibility: the apples were only deadly if you baked them into a pie and by eating said pie, I had unwittingly poisoned myself and would soon die a horrible death.
Thankfully I reached the house before I could dream up any more awful pie scenarios. What’s done was done, I supposed, so I shifted my anxiety to surviving the night’s festivities.
“I hope you’ll at least try to talk to someone tonight.”
It was dark and we were lost in the woods. The roads twisted and turned as our car lurched forward. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or if he had already forgotten the afternoon’s, err, activities, but Duncan was in a foul mood and, as usual, taking it out on me.
“But of course, Professor Higgins, your etiquette lessons have been most helpful. I’m ever so excited for this party.”
Duncan rolled his eyes.
“I think we made a wrong turn. Did you come this way earlier?”
From what I had Google-stalked, Duncan’s boss’s house was something to behold. Twelve bedrooms. Two pools. A private dock. If only I actually had brought the pie over earlier, I might have convinced someone to give me a tour.
“Umm, maybe? I’m not sure. The GPS was working earlier and it wasn’t dark.”
After a few more silent minutes, the woods melted away and we were driving between eight-foot-tall perfectly manicured hedges. Finally, rows of tail lights appeared and we pulled up in the enormous gravel driveway to wait our turn to valet.
“Look, there are going to be some important investors here. Just shake hands and smile and don’t make me look bad.”
I resented the implication that I was a boor from the wrong side of the tracks who couldn’t be trusted to have a normal conversation with another human being. But one bad night at one of Duncan’s work dinners had evidently given Duncan the impression that I was always on the brink of embarrassing him. Tonight I would comply and be the perfect little New England boarding school-Ivy League alumna that he thought he should be dating, but we would definitely be having a talk about this later.
We walked up the steps to an immense wooden door, which opened into a huge foyer with marble floors and twin staircases leading up to a landing. Duncan’s boss Jeff and his wife Plastic Surgery Face (not her real name) were greeting people in the middle of the room.
“Duncan! Recovered from last night’s festivities?”
“Hey, Jeff. Yeah, the usual Dramamine-Hong Kong overnight flight combo, plus I took another nap this morning at the house we rented.”
“Good, good. And hello there Jen. Good to see you. Sorry for keeping your boyfriend away all the time. But he says you’re working round the clock anyway. Hopefully so you can make us all some money soon?”
Great. Five seconds into the party and I was already forced to bite my tongue. Yes, thanks to the generous investment by The Jeff Fund, we would make it to the end of the year. But, in the process, all of my stock options had been so diluted that at our current valuation, I would maybe net minimum wage this year, while Jeff would make out like a bandit. And Duncan would get nothing because of the conflict. A win-win-win.
“Good to see you too, Jeff. Yeah, we’ve been slammed reworking the engine. It’s been really tou-”
“Marcus! My man!”
The next sycophant walked in behind us, which gave me the perfect excuse to slip away. Besides, Duncan and I both knew that I was a deadweight in these conversations. I would show my face a few times, laugh at someone’s jokes, and my duties for the night would be satisfied. So I excused myself to use the facilities and walked away.
The foyer led into a gigantic kitchen, with dozens of waiters milling about waiting for appetizers to come out of the various ovens. I maneuvered around them to the open glass doors at the back that led out onto the deck. The cool fall air was kept at bay by tall heat lamps placed every few feet. I found a spot at an empty cocktail table, flagged down a waiter for a drink, and waited to see if Duncan would eventually find me.
He didn’t, so I spent the next half hour people watching and admiring the view out onto the bay. It was quite breathtaking. But I could only stare out at the water for so long and despite our earlier conversation, it would look bad if I kept my distance from Duncan the whole night. The kitchen was even more packed than before, a new set of people already laying out dessert on a giant table. I barely managed to squeeze past it when something on the table caught my eye.
My pie.
12
The fruit of good and evil
“My letters have been intercepted, and the results have been as expected. Henry and General Washington continue to be astounded at Howe’s inexplicable refusal to finish off the Continental Army. It makes me smile.”
I stared at the pie way too long to convince myself that it wasn’t mine. But there was no mistaking the small impressions that my fingers had left on the crust that were now baked in to the finished product.
“Can I help you with something?” One of the waitresses was setting down a big tray of apples next to my pie. Her jacket was covered in some kind of dust, her blond hair was frazzled, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
“No, no. Was just admiring the dessert selection.”
“Yeah it is something else. Well, we’ll be bringing it out to the patio a bit later, so...”
“Thanks.”
I walked out of the kitchen reluctantly and went to find Duncan. He hadn’t even made it out of the foyer, where he was talking to a group of people whom I didn’t recognize.
“There you are, Jen. I was wondering where you had run off to. This is Tad, one of the LPs of our newest fund and his wife Julia.”
“Nice to meet you.”
I proceeded to nod along as Tad recounted in great
detail their summer in the south of France. Eventually, the waiters appeared with little plates of Petit fours, so I knew it was time to go pie hunting.
The bigger desserts had been arranged in a buffet out on the deck and by the time I got to the pie, it was already half gone. I grabbed two slices and went to find Duncan.
“Here Dunc, some of my delicious homemade pie.”
Duncan looked at me quizzically.
“Oh, right. I almost forgot you brought that over. An odd choice by Jeff to have the dessert be potluck, but he’s always looking for weird ways to save money.”
“Yeah, strange. Well, cheers!”
We clinked our forks together and each took a bite. The filling was soft and warm and actually tasted good. If this programming gig didn’t work out, maybe I had a second career as a hipster baker.
I took a second bite of just the crust and froze. It tasted like streusel. Streusel that wasn’t on the pie when I left it under the bench earlier. I resisted the urge to spit everything back onto the plate and slowly chewed the crust, the chomping of my teeth amplified with every movement of my jaw up and down. Finally, the bite was gone but my heart was racing. What the heck was going on here?
That’s when the voices started.
“Mmm, this is good pie.”
“I hope Julia didn’t see me talking to Abby.”
“It actually worked.”
I clutched my ears and nearly fell over. The light din of conversation in the foyer had suddenly exploded into a cacophony of voices. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pick out the individual strands, if only for a moment.
“Time for another drink.”
“This house is so pedestrian.”
“Next party I need to have Barbara pick out something for Jen to wear. It’s embarrassing.”
That last voice I recognized. I stared up at Duncan, who was chowing down on the rest of the pie slice, seemingly unaffected by the voices and oblivious to the fact that he had just insulted me.