Love À La Mode

by Stephanie Kate Strohm

  “There’s only one possibility!” Henry exploded. “For me. There’s only one possibility for me. And that’s cooking, Mom. It’s all I want to do. It’s all I can do. It’s me. And I don’t understand why you have such a problem with that. Culinary school was good enough for Dad, right? It’s good enough for me.”

  “You know, Henry, when I met your father—”

  “Waiting under the CTA heat lamps for the El to arrive at Merchandise Mart, yeah, I know.”

  Henry had heard this story many times before. His father had offered his mother a sip of the hot chocolate he’d taken home from the restaurant he’d been working at in the loop at the time, and the two of them had stayed under the heat lamps for hours, talking so much that they hadn’t noticed the trains passing by. Henry had a hard time reconciling that carefree young CPA who took a chance on his dad’s dreams with the mom he knew who never drank sweetened beverages and seemed to view the restaurant as nothing more than a series of spreadsheets.

  “I had no idea how much of our lives running the restaurant would consume,” she continued like Henry hadn’t interrupted her. “No idea. Weekends, evenings, holidays. Your father spent your entire infancy in the kitchen—fourteen, sixteen hours a day, while I was alone with you, trying to balance the books, trying to make the restaurant turn a profit.”

  “And you did it, Mom. But this is different. I’ve been in the restaurant my whole life. I know what it’s like.”

  “No, you don’t, Henry. Not really.” Henry tried not to bristle at her dismissive tone. “Helping out at the register on the weekends is not the same as being responsible for the entire business.”

  Henry heard her inhale and then exhale, like she was trying to calm down. He was the one who needed to calm down. Fine. He hadn’t run his own restaurant. But that didn’t mean he had no idea what he was in for. And, quite frankly, he thought the idea of spending sixteen hours in a kitchen sounded pretty great.

  “She just wants you to have options, Henry.”

  “Dad?”

  Apparently Mom had handed off the phone. Henry could hear rustling noises, and his father pacing around, probably walking into the hallway.

  “She’s not saying no. She’s not saying never. This isn’t like when I told my parents I wanted to be a chef and they kicked me out of the house.”

  “I know.” In the face of what his dad had gone through with his grandparents, who had arrived from Korea with expectations for their son that in no way included working in a kitchen, Henry felt embarrassed complaining about a math packet.

  “But my parents came around. Eventually. And your mother will, too. This isn’t really about school. It’s about her wanting you to be able to do whatever you want to do, and right now, she sees pulling up your grades—and putting in some more time with your math work—as the best way to make that happen.”

  “But I suck at math.”

  “I don’t think you suck at math. I think it just doesn’t interest you enough to try.”

  Sometimes, Dad was too perceptive for his own good.

  “You’re smart, Henry. I know you can do it if you focus. Did you or did you not singlehandedly make a beef Wellington when you were only twelve?”

  “I did.” Henry didn’t want to smile. But it was happening.

  “See? This extra work will be nothing for you. Math is easy. Medium rare is hard.”

  Henry laughed, remembering the astonished and delighted look on Dad’s face when he’d cut into the Wellington so long ago, the flaky puff pastry yielding to reveal the perfect pink of medium rare. It was one of his favorite food memories.

  “You’ve got this, Henry,” Dad said gently. “I know you can keep your grades up if you try. Show Mom you can get all As this semester, and go show Chef you’re the best one in the kitchen.”

  Sighing, Henry thanked his dad, hung up, and put the phone back in his pocket. He was grateful to Dad for understanding, but the unfairness of it all still gnawed at him. Extra math was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Henry was half tempted to head back up to his room to sulk. But the idea of stewing in his room, alone, just made him feel worse. At least if he went to lunch he could drown his sorrows in the École’s excellent hot chocolate. So he headed down the stairs to the cafeteria.

  “Quiche!” Rosie announced excitedly as he walked through the door. She was waiting with two plates, each with two slices of quiche. “Did you know that it’s called quiche Lorraine because the original quiche recipe came from the Lorraine region of France, near Germany?” she asked as she handed him a plate. “The recipe first appeared as early as 1373, although some people say it didn’t have bacon then, and some people say it didn’t have cheese then. Food history is always kind of foggy.”

  “Thanks.” He grabbed the plate from her, wincing a little as her eyes widened at his short response. Maybe he was still more annoyed at Mom than he’d thought.

  “Henry,” she said, her voice low. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” he said tersely. “I’m fine.”

  Great. She looked hurt. But Henry didn’t want to talk about it. And the more he thought about not wanting to talk about it, the more annoyed he felt. It was like that snake eating its tail, like Rosie had mentioned back when they’d first met.

  Rosie and Henry sat down together at their usual table, everyone busy eating lunch. He could feel Rosie looking at him. Self-consciously, Henry stabbed a forkful of quiche as Marquis talked about Advanced French.

  “There’s a crazy range of ability in that class. It makes no sense. They’ve thrown everyone who has any sort of background in French together.” Marquis rolled his eyes. “Seydou is fluent, and then this one can’t even remember how to form the pluparfait.”

  “I panicked!” Priya protested. “I can pluparfait under normal circumstances!”

  “Who is Seydou?” Hampus asked. Henry took another stabby forkful of quiche.

  “He’s from Senegal. Which is why he’s fluent. Over there.” Marquis waved at the table next to them, and the guy with wire-rimmed glasses who shared Bodie Tal’s table in class waved back, grinning at them. “The teacher said he could just pick a book he liked and read it during class and write a report on it.”

  “I wish I could just sit in the back of the class reading,” Yumi said wistfully. “Madame Huppert made us talk. Out loud. In front of everyone.”

  “You love talking,” Marquis said. “Or at least I assume you do. Because you never stop.”

  “I love talking in a casual way, on subjects I have chosen myself, in one of the two languages I happen to be fluent in, which is more than most people here can say. Except for that Seydou guy. And Hampus. And Fernando, probably. And maybe lots of other people here. Oh, forget it. I’m not special.”

  “Henry,” Rosie said quietly, again. “What’s going on? Do you want to talk? We could go somewhere—”

  “I’m fine,” he barked, loudly enough that everyone stopped talking, even Yumi. Henry felt hot as they all turned to stare at him, and then he felt awful as he registered the confusion and hurt in Rosie’s eyes. “Sorry,” he muttered immediately. “I’m sorry, I just . . . I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “Totally okay,” she said, but she couldn’t quite meet his gaze as she took another bite of her quiche.

  Sighing, Henry turned back to his lunch, and let the conversation flow around him.

  Rosie was right—knife cuts came next. And she had also been right that her knife cuts were terrible. The students at the École had cut up thousands of onions and carrots this week, all in an effort to improve their knife skills. They’d started off on Monday learning the different names for ways to cut vegetables: julienne meant vegetables cut in long skinny sticks, batonnet meant thicker sticks, and batons were the thickest. And then there was Rosie’s personal nightmare, the dices, all the different-size cubes, the difference between them marked only by a millimeter on Chef’s ruler.

  It pro
bably didn’t help that she was having such a hard time paying attention in class, finding herself constantly distracted by staring at the back of Henry’s head. What had happened? One day they were making out, and the next, it was like he wanted nothing to do with her. Did she do something wrong? Or maybe—and this was the fear that kept haunting Rosie as she tried to dice—even though he’d seemed enthusiastic, maybe Henry hadn’t wanted to kiss her at all. After all, she had kissed him. Maybe he had just gone along with it to be nice. Or maybe he had cooled off because he didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, didn’t want her to expect him to be her boyfriend or something.

  Rosie desperately wanted to talk to Priya and Yumi about it. She’d almost told them a dozen times. But she was too embarrassed to admit to them that she’d thrown herself at Henry, and she didn’t want to make things weird for everybody else. At least Henry had warmed up a bit since that awful lunch where he’d snapped at her, but he still wasn’t himself. He was moody, and distracted, and it seemed like kissing Rosie was the very last thing he wanted to do.

  After a long Thursday afternoon of dicing, dicing, and more dicing, Rosie wanted to ask Priya to explain guys to her. But instead, she asked her about vegetables.

  “How are you doing it?” Rosie asked Priya as they waited in line to dump their vegetables into a huge plastic tub at the front of the room. At least the vegetables they’d cut up weren’t going right into the trash. Maybe they were going into their meals here at the École. Maybe one day next week Rosie would recognize one of her own improperly squared carrots as it found its way onto her fork.

  “Doing what?” Priya asked.

  “How do you cut everything so precisely? How do you know what two millimeters looks like?” The only people in line behind them were Bodie and Seydou. At the beginning of the week, Rosie probably would have been too embarrassed to talk about her lack of skills in a place other people might hear. But it certainly wasn’t a secret anymore. She’d failed her way through a whole week of knife cuts, and thanks to Chef Martinet’s loud and frequent criticisms, everyone knew it.

  “I don’t know what two millimeters look like. It’s not as though I’m measuring with my mind’s eye, thinking, Ooo, yes, that’s two millimeters bang on. Well done, Priya.” Priya reached the front of the line and dumped the contents of her board into the bin, using the back of her knife to scrape away a couple clinging bits of onion. “I just know what it looks like because I know what it looks like. And you’d know, too, if you’d spent your entire life dicing a billion bloody onions for curries. I’d love to not know what a fine dice looks like if that would give me some of those stolen hours back.”

  “My knife cuts are also not very good,” someone volunteered from behind Rosie, his voice low, almost lyrical. Rosie turned to see Seydou talking. “It is all right, because that is why we are here—to learn.”

  “And here I thought we were only here for the free white coats,” Priya teased. Seydou laughed, then stepped to Rosie’s side and knocked his veggies into the bin. Liar—his cuts may not have been as precise as Priya’s, but they were certainly heaps better than Rosie’s.

  “I have a theory about you, Rosie,” Bodie said.

  Surprised that Bodie was talking to her, Rosie dumped her veggies into the bin with more force than was necessary, causing an errant carrot to fly up and tumble onto the floor.

  “Do you want to hear my theory?” Bodie asked as he bent over to retrieve the carrot and flicked it into the bin.

  “Um. Sure? Okay. Yes. Sure.”

  That was too many affirmatives. Get a grip, Rosie, she scolded herself. Gosh, why couldn’t she just relax around him? Every time Rosie looked at Bodie Tal, she half expected a Food Network chyron to pop up in the lower right-hand corner of her vision.

  “I think I’ve figured you out.” Bodie leaned in to dump his veggies, and Rosie could tell he was wearing some kind of aftershave. It smelled . . . spicy, almost, but better than the word spicy implied. She took a step back, quickly, away from his heat, away from his scent, away from him.

  “You’ve figured me out,” Rosie repeated. She very much doubted that. They hadn’t had nearly enough interactions for her to be figured out.

  Priya and Seydou must have left at some point because Bodie and Rosie were alone in the kitchen. All of a sudden, his aftershave seemed to be everywhere. It was even stronger than the onions. Rosie reached into her pocket for her plastic pilot’s wings, turning them over and over again, round and round, hoping the repetitive motion would calm her down.

  “So my theory”—a lazy grin stretched across his face—“is that you’re just like me.”

  Rosie stared at him. Famous? Tattooed? Buff ? She was none of those things.

  “I think you’re a pastry chef,” he said.

  “What? How did you know?”

  “Because I’m one, too. I mean, I want to be. I’m bored by all this crap. Who cares that I can’t cut a billion carrots into equally tiny squares? I don’t. I just want to bake. And I think you do, too.”

  “How could you tell?” she asked.

  “Well, for one, your knife cuts are terrible. Which means you probably haven’t been chopping many vegetables. Or butchering things.” Rosie wasn’t even mad when he said her knife cuts were terrible. He was right. “And you measure your salt when you cook with it. Like, you get out the teaspoons. Almost everyone here just tosses salt in until it feels right, which is what a chef would do. A baker would measure it, because baking’s more precise.” She was surprised he had noticed. “And you take an insanely long amount of time to choose what pastries you want at breakfast, but you end up taking one of everything because, I’m assuming, you can’t help yourself.” Now Rosie was blushing. “And I do the same thing. Except I take one of everything right away because I know it’s inevitable.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. To any of it. He had noticed all these things about her; he had seen her, so clearly. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being seen like that.

  “I think we’re the only ones,” he said, almost conspiratorially. “The only bakers. Which makes sense, since this isn’t a pastry program. But there isn’t anything of a similar caliber for pastry. Believe me, I checked. Denis told me we’ll get to pastry eventually, though. There’s even a specific pastry teacher. We just have to get through all this foundational stuff first.”

  Denis. It took Rosie a beat too long to realize he meant Chef Laurent, his godfather.

  “Huh,” Rosie said, which was wholly inadequate, given everything he’d just said, but she had no idea how to respond.

  “So that was my theory. We’re in this together. Alone.”

  She looked at him, and he looked back at her, and she was completely unsure of how she felt about this Bodie Tal, the one who also loved baking and noticed things about her—not the one who was on TV and in People magazine.

  “Should we get some dinner, then?” he asked. “Maybe there’ll be a new kind of roll and you can analyze its crumb structure for a solid three minutes again.”

  She had done that.

  Bodie Tal had been looking at her. A lot.

  And now, Rosie didn’t know how to look at him.

  “I’m gonna go, um, change,” she blurted, and practically ran out of the kitchen.

  He wanted to get dinner. Did that mean he wanted to sit with them? Rosie tried to picture him, squeezed in next to Hampus and across from Priya, and couldn’t. He didn’t belong with them. He belonged over at the cool table, where no one ever wore their pajamas to breakfast.

  Why had he even been looking at her, anyway? Rosie climbed the stairs up to her dorm two at a time, hurtling through the École at unprecedented speeds—speeds she’d definitely never reached in gym class. Bodie couldn’t possibly . . . like her, could he? Rosie could practically hear Priya insisting that he did. But the whole idea of it was totally insane. Rosie was so . . . ordinary. But still, the idea of Bodie Tal watching her pick out pastries made her feel all clammy. S
hould she shower? She felt like she needed a shower. But she didn’t want to miss dinner, so instead, back in her dorm, she just shucked off her whites and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Normal. Rosie needed something normal. She pulled out her phone and saw a new e-mail from Mom, subject line: CHAMPS!

  It was accompanied by a picture of a muddy Ricky in his soccer uniform, holding Owen upside down as he shrieked with laughter, a surly-looking Reed standing next to them. Rosie loved seeing pictures of her brothers, but she wished she could get one of Mom, too. She had so few pictures of Mom. Mom had spent Rosie’s whole childhood behind the camera.

  “Ellen, get in this one!” Rosie could still hear her dad say. The last Fourth of July he’d been there, the last Fourth of July they’d done the big barbecue with all their friends and neighbors in the backyard. Mom had taken a picture of Dad at the grill, Rosie standing at his side, already eating her second burger. Mom had protested, but Dad had gotten Mrs. Hansen from down the street to take their picture, and Rosie still had it. Dad showing off his THRILL OF THE GRILL apron, Mom smiling self-consciously in her American flag T-shirt, and Rosie, covered in ketchup, a half-eaten burger in her hands. It was her last picture—one of her only pictures—of just the three of them together.

  She’d left it behind, in its frame, in her bedroom at home. She wasn’t even sure anymore why she hadn’t brought it—maybe she’d been afraid of talking about Dad, afraid of having to answer a polite question about him from someone new, but now, she wished she had it here.

  Rosie read mom’s e-mail:

  Another win for East Liberty High last night! Your brother executed a particularly spectacular belly slide that somehow resulted in the winning goal. Ricky went out with the team, and then I took Owen and Reed over to the Dairy Queen in Alliance. It wasn’t the same without you telling us about butterfat percentages in different types of ice cream!

  There was another picture beneath that, Owen grinning with Oreo Blizard all over his face, and Reed next to him, attempting to hide in the hood of his sweatshirt. Rosie would have loved a Blizzard. Actually, what she would have loved was Mom. And Ricky and Owen and Cole home from college and even Reed rolling his eyes in the corner. She missed them. All of them. And she missed normal. She missed being part of a world where her self-worth wasn’t defined by how quickly she could cut a carrot into tiny squares. She missed the safety of her bedroom at home and her pictures of Dad and knowing that Mom was right down the hall, always there for her, whatever she needed.