The Art of French Kissing

by Brianna Shrum

  I swallow through the swift knot in my throat. And I am positive that the sudden wetness around my collar has nothing to do with the humidity.

  “You will be divided into two arbitrary teams for the first part of the competition, where you will be judged as a team and on your ability to work cooperatively in a kitchen. There will be an individual component to judging, as well, which will contribute to the decisions regarding who stays and who goes.”

  I’ve been picking at the fabric of the couch I’m sitting on, and you can definitely see where it’s frayed now. But it was an unconscious thing. I can’t have been the first to nervously deface this property. I make myself breathe.

  Wanting something this badly this early is so dangerous. Wanting something this badly at all is dangerous. It’s what gets people totally trashed drunk, jumping in the pool fully clothed on night one of The Bachelor every year. They can’t hack it. And if you can’t stand the heat—no. I can’t make a joke that corny, even in my own head.

  “Now,” says Dr. Lavell, “your room assignments will be posted just up the stairs. Boys’ rooms on the right, girls’ on the left, and—do not get up yet.” Who here has a death wish? I tense up just from secondhand embarrassment. “I know you’re all tired from traveling, but that doesn’t make much difference here. Before you may go to your rooms, you all need to file out from this building to the large one across campus. Follow signs for the kitchen. Your first challenge awaits.”

  Panic wells in my chest when she turns on her heel and leaves the building, and students scramble up all at once to get to the kitchens. I’d counted on a night of sleep, a few hours of studying, something to wash away the plane grossness on my skin and the jet lag in my bones. Nope. We are being Gordon Ramsayed.

  I jump up with everyone, trailing just behind Reid, who is no more than six inches taller than me, but his legs move like he’s got a foot on me, minimum. I’m huffing and puffing already. Good lord.

  “You coming?” he says over his shoulder, and I know he’s talking to me.

  There’s a laugh in his voice, and a growl in mine when I say, “It’s not a race; it’s a cooking competition.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says. “If my biggest competition is the one showing up last to every challenge, this should be an excellent summer.”

  He moves up ahead and I clench my jaw, head down against the wind. I will not be last.

  I am last.

  This humidity, seriously—I did not take it into account when I planned for this. And the heat. It’s like slogging through a hot spring every time you want to move. I’m sure my hair is just a wonder right now, and the look I get from someone I assume is a judge—with her fancy chef coat and professorial black-rimmed glasses—confirms it. Sweat is glinting off her dark brown skin, shiny and wet under the kitchen lights, so I know she feels it, too. But her hair is not a massive half-purple feat of engineering right now, so point 1 to the disapproving professor judge.

  When I finally get in there, Dr. Lavell, inexplicably, is there already, not a hair out of place. Perhaps I judged the bun too quickly. Apart from the sweat that dampens her skin and shirt, too, she looks like she just teleported here.

  “For this challenge,” Dr. Lavell says, “you will, given the ingredients around you, re-create the food you wrote your entrance essay on. That will be mostly different for each of you, and we have record of what you wrote about, so do not cheat. For those of you who chose foods to write about that take more than thirty minutes to cook, you may draw three dishes randomly from the bowl in front of Dr. Freeman and choose the one with which you are most comfortable.”

  Several students head to the front, and Dr. Lavell allows them all to choose, with the exception of one blonde girl, to whom she says, “If you cannot re-create a cake into cupcakes in thirty minutes, Ms. Richards, we might have a problem.”

  The girl blinks at the floor and heads back to her work station with the rest of us.

  Thank the lord this is a teaching kitchen, so there are a million different ovens and stovetops for us all.

  “Our judges,” says Dr. Lavell, “are Doctors Freeman, Pearce, and Kapoor. We will make proper introductions tomorrow. But for now . . .” She pauses and glances up at the clock. “Begin.”

  Hell yes. Grilled cheese. The problem with having half an hour to make it will be waiting long enough—too early and the cheese will harden. So I take my time. I cross the sudden madhouse of a kitchen amid clangs and crashes so loud it’s like a battlefield in here, but I do so lazily. Slow, because there’s no reason to rush. I pick a nice, heavy-bottomed skillet and grab a loaf of French bread from the pantry. Cut that too soon and the bread will go crusty. This dish requires me to be sluggish.

  As I make my way to the refrigerator, I see Reid, head inside it. He glances at me when he pops back out, eyes shining. “Still moving slow, Purple Haze?”

  “The best things in life are not about speed, my friend.”

  His mouth jerks in an almost-smile, then he says, “Need something?”

  “Butter. And provolone.”

  He tosses me a stick of butter. Twenty minutes sitting close enough to a stove will soften it perfectly.

  “Not seeing any provolone here,” he says.

  “That can’t be right.” I furrow my brow and push past him into the fridge. He just shrugs and walks off, quickly—whatever he’s making is clearly going to take him the whole thirty. The fridge about levels me with a blast of cold air, and the hum buzzes louder and louder in my ears the longer I look. It’s stuffed with everything—greens, fruits, herbs, cheeses. I rummage through the stack of cheese about a million times and find nothing. He was right. There’s no provolone here. Shit. Shit, oh shit. The whole magic of this is in the cheese!

  Suddenly my heart is racing and my palms are sweating—over cheese—and how could they not have this? Like what, do they not have milk either, in this professional kitchen? Sorry, we’re out of bread here! Nah, we didn’t think of stocking salt!

  “Hey, the rest of us need the fridge, too. Time’s up.” Some jerk guy behind me.

  I grit my teeth and yank out some mozzarella and muenster, then rage my way over to my table.

  “Twenty minutes!” Lavell calls out.

  Have I been moving that slow? Crap. I set my butter pretty close to this impossibly confident-looking girl’s hot burner, close enough that I have to really watch it to make sure it doesn’t liquefy and run all over the counter. Then I chop at the French bread, but that does nothing but mutilate it, so I force myself to calm the hell down and saw it thinly. If I can’t make my dish with provolone, I’m going to get this right. The bread comes out perfectly and now the time really is ticking, so I slam my skillet down on the burner, letting it heat, and spread the butter on each piece of bread.

  “You okay?” says Reid, and I can do nothing but snarl at him. He laughs and goes back to whatever it is he’s making, which I’m sure they had all the ingredients for.

  I shake my head as I toast the first two sandwiches, stuck together with freaking mozzarella and muenster, and for a second, the smell of butter calms me. This is my happy place. It is. It’s fine. I shut my eyes, absorbing a million sweet and savory smells, until one rises above the rest: smoke.

  My eyes fly open and I see it’s coming from my pan. CURSE BUTTER; CURSE IT TO THE DEPTHS. Half my stuff is burned and eight minutes are left on the clock. So I rinse out the skillet, hissing as the skin of my arm rubs against it—and it feels like fire. The pretty, absurdly calm and confident girl beside me doesn’t look up from her powdered sugar, but says, “You okay?”

  I throw out a hurried, “Yeah,” almost annoyed that anyone noticed. But not enough that I can do anything but like her automatically.

  I turn back to my newly clean skillet, ignoring my arm, and frantically will it to heat again. I crowd the thing, so the edges of each of my tiny grilled cheeses rub up against each other.

  This time, I keep my eyes on them; these absolutely cannot b
urn. I straighten and flip them, heat from the pan scorching into my burn, and swear so loudly that I’m sure everyone in the room hears me.

  “Two minutes!” Lavell yells.

  If my brain were on broadcast right now, it would have to be shown on HBO. It’s nothing but swear words. They need a full minute to finish cooking. Damn, I should have made some candied bacon to overlay it for plating—

  “One minute!”

  No time. I toss them onto my four plates and my hands are in the air just as she calls time. I note disasters and masterpieces down the row, and mine could not look more boring. I shouldn’t have been so slow at the beginning.

  My eyes immediately dart to Reid’s plate and narrow instantly. “What kind of cheese is that? On that grilled eggplant?”

  He just looks at me, then turns back to Lavell.

  “You will receive your evaluations and team assignments tomorrow. Leave your plates where they are. Judging will typically be conducted publicly, but for this number of students, until you are placed in your teams tomorrow, that will be impossible. So head back to the dorms, and I suggest you get some sleep.”

  I can’t stop thinking about that cheese.

  When Reid leaves his table, I see it: provolone. Leftover provolone. Scads. Of provolone.

  “You asshole,” I hiss the second we’re back outside.

  “Hmm?” He arches a brow and keeps walking.

  “The provolone. You said—”

  “I said it wasn’t in the refrigerator. It wasn’t.”

  “It was in your hand!”

  “So you understand.”

  I can feel the rage bubbling up from my toes to my throat. My head is going to explode.

  “Why?” is all I can manage.

  “Come on,” he says, and the phrase I’m not here to make friends flashes through my brain. That’s what this is. A competition. And I can play dirty, too.

  We are nearing the dorms now. He and I will go our separate ways, thank the lord. And just as he pulls ahead of me, I say a bit too loudly, “Wait until tomorrow, you cocky ass. You won’t know what hit you.”

  He stops straight, then, and waits for me to catch up. “Pumpkin,” he says, and I bristle. He leans down and says into my ear, “I will destroy you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I am still on fire when I finally crest the stairs and get my room assignment from the woman I assaulted with my BB-8 suitcase earlier. She looks a little pinched when she hands it to me, but not flat-out resentful, which is probably the best I can ask for, foot injuries considered.

  I fold the sheet of paper, neat and symmetrically creased, and slide it into my back pocket, then wrestle my bag over the soft carpet down the hall. Room 209. I knock softly just in case, then push the door open. There’s someone in there already, back turned to me, and she has claimed the bed by the window. Fine by me; no sun streaming into my face in the morning.

  “Hi,” I say, and she turns around, mouth ticking up into a smile. Her hair falls in black waves all the way to her waist and she’s wearing yoga pants and a magenta ribbed tank that’s bright against her brown skin. The confident girl from the kitchen. The one who checked on my burn. She nods at me.

  “Hey. How’s that arm?”

  I laugh, half-embarrassed. “I’ll survive. I’m Carter. Looks like we’re rooming together?”

  “Riya,” she says. “What’s your specialty, Carter?”

  “I’m a skillet kind of girl. Despite what my injury might tell you.”

  “Oh good,” she says. “Should be a while before we have to be at each other’s throats then. I am sugar and spice and everything . . . baking. I bake, mostly. And am clearly a poet.”

  “Clearly.”

  She laughs and goes back to trying to fluff the pillows on her little bed, which seems like a pretty fruitless endeavor to me. These pillows are pancakes and nothing can be done to force them to rise.

  I try to get a hand through my hair and it snags four hundred times. “Humidity,” I mumble, and Riya snorts.

  “Yeah, it’s hell on hair. I assume you hail from the desert? Or the . . . non-swamp?”

  “Montana,” I say.

  “Wow. Mountain woman.”

  I grin. “Not exactly.”

  “West Virginia,” she says. “Not western Virginia, if you’re wondering. West Virginia. It’s a state.”

  I laugh. “I believe you.”

  She cocks her head, eyeing my unruly hair. “Just embrace it. A little mousse and going out there like you planned it. Best policy for most things, I’ve found.”

  I purse my lips when my fingers snag yet again and nod. “I’ll give it my best effort.”

  Then I turn to my side and start the slow, painful process of unpacking as the sun sets. It’s vibrant down here, bright pink and blue. It makes the Spanish moss outside look like something out of a fairytale.

  I sigh. And hang everything up one by one. The sooner this is done, the sooner I can sleep. Riya is friendly but not a chatterer, which means that in an hour, I can crawl into bed and embrace the quiet and try to get rid of the headache that has been building behind my eyes since I was brutally betrayed by an arrogant boy and a package of provolone.

  Morning comes early. It comes particularly early because Riya wakes up practically at sunrise, and she does it to the Avengers theme song, which is both unexpected and very, very loud. I go with her suggestion—embracing the mop of insanity on my head—because it allows me to lie around a little longer. Just a little mousse and brush my teeth, then throw a T-shirt on over my sleep shorts, and I’m padding down the stairs in my socks.

  Breakfast starts in five minutes and hell if I was going to take the extra time away from sleep to dress like a human. I follow a group of four girls in front of me who seem to have bonded really quickly, and Riya and I just walk quietly together. These girls look like they know where they’re going, and I am certain that I do not. We pass the common room, which is filled with old books and framed by the ancient, dual curved staircases that lead to the dorms, and through a little hallway with bathrooms and mystery rooms on either side. Then the hallway opens up into a tiny cafeteria. Everything in here is tiny. Old. Intimate. I think I like it, until I spot Reid across the way sitting at a filled four-person round table. A sour taste fills my mouth when I realize I just thought the words Reid and intimate in the same minute, and the scowl on my face is vicious enough to make Riya say, “Wow, you haven’t even tried the food yet. It’s probably decent; this is a cooking school.”

  “Not the food,” I say, and I can’t tear my eyes off him. He’s just sitting there in these loose plaid pajama pants and an old T-shirt stretched tight over his chest, mouth tilted in this way that has everyone at his table scrambling for his attention. He’s amused, but not really invested, and it’s killing all of them. I hate him and his stupid undercut bedhead and his stupid provolone.

  “Oh, I see,” she says, and I blink over at her.

  “Oh. No. No it’s not . . .”

  “Okay,” says Riya, eyes twinkling.

  “Sorry, I don’t look at guys like I want to rip their throats out if I’m interested.”

  “Suit yourself,” says Riya. “You and I must be laying eyes on very different boys because hello.”

  I roll my eyes and step into the food line, glancing over my shoulder at him one more time, and this time, he’s looking back.

  I feel a jolt all the way down to my toes, because that cocky little smirk that seems like a fixture on his face is gone. And the three people at his table are all clearly trying to get his attention, but the asshole is looking at me. After half a second, he blinks away and I focus on loading up my plate with French toast and powdered sugar and some of the ripest-looking fruit I’ve ever seen.

  I follow Riya to a little table in the corner and slam my plate down with more force than is strictly necessary. She kind of jumps and just looks at me with her wide brown eyes. “What’s your deal?”

  “Reid Yamada. He’
s just an asshole.”

  Riya raises an eyebrow and takes a long drink of her orange juice. “Okayyyy.”

  “He took my freaking provolone yesterday on purpose. In the first challenge. It’s just . . . I mean that’s really shitty, and who cares. But it’s shitty and I’m still mad about it.”

  Riya says, “Be mad. Channel it. Use your hate.” Then an Indian boy I don’t recognize but she obviously does sits beside her.

  I open my mouth to say something terrible about Reid and Riya says, “Eat your toast. Plot the downfall of the Iron Throne later.”

  That startles a laugh from me and I focus on my food. It’s still cafeteria food, but it’s good cafeteria food, so I’m happy.

  “This is Will, by the way,” she says, nodding at the boy next to her, who I’ve just now noticed is extremely attractive. He’s got glasses and a smile that makes my knees go a little weak. Thank the lord I’m sitting. “Also from West Virginia.”

  “You guys know each other?”

  “Yeah,” says Will.

  I say, “Are you, like, together?”

  Riya starts laughing immediately, face going red, and Will lets out a little cough. “No,” he says. “We met at this thing our parents were going to at the India Center, and then just started hanging out. We started cooking together when we realized we were both into it. That’s it, though.”

  “I’m Carter,” I say.

  “What’s up.”

  “What did you make yesterday?” I ask them both.

  Will says, “I happened to kill it on something I grew up with. Chicken biryani.”

  Riya mouths it as the same time he says it and he wrinkles his nose, then flicks hers.

  “Ouch!”

  “Well,” he says.

  “You’re obsessed with that dish.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “And you’ve been paying very close attention to my food habits. Are you obsessed with me?”

  She goes bright red again and rolls her eyes, shoving him. I suppress a grin.