“You know what?” Henry said. “Let’s go find a chicken.”
“Find a chicken,” Rosie repeated. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go find a chicken and break it down.”
“Okay, yeah, sure, great. Let me go get my chicken-catching hat on.” Rosie mimed pulling on some kind of cap. “Seriously. What are you talking about?”
“I mean we’re going to break down a chicken right now.” Henry stood. “And then you’ll see it’s not that bad.”
“Where are you going to get a chicken?” she asked, but she was pushing herself up, and she’d shoved her notebook into her backpack.
“Downstairs. They’ve got to be in the walk-in by now.”
“Downstairs, like, where we have class?” He was already walking out of the room, spurred by a burst of confidence in the chicken. Rosie followed. “Are we allowed to go in there after class? Is it even open?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
They turned and headed down the stairs to the big kitchen, the path already a familiar one.
“You can’t take a chicken out of the walk-in, Henry. What if they only have enough for each of us?”
“I’ll count them. If there’s more than twenty, we’re good to go.”
“I don’t want to get in trouble.” She paused, right at the threshold.
“They didn’t say we couldn’t get a chicken,” he argued.
“Well, I guess that’s Chef Martinet’s fault, then,” she said, and Henry answered her grin with his own. “She should really be more specific about where students can and can’t get chickens.”
Inside, the kitchen was dark. Henry hit the switch next to the door, and the lights flickered on. The space was so familiar and yet, at night, there was a quality that rendered it foreign. Like Henry felt he should whisper. Or maybe not talk at all. So he crept, silently, to the walk-in, pulling open the heavy steel door and letting the cold air blast them.
“I guess we can take a chicken,” Rosie said. There was a wall of chickens stacked up higher than his head.
“I’ll get the chicken. Can you grab a chef’s knife—a sharp one—and a cleaver?” Poultry shears would be better. Easier. But Chef Martinet seemed like the kind of person who was going to make them do it with a cleaver.
“Sure,” she said. “Believe me, I know where the knives are.” And there was something bitter in her voice when she said it.
She was waiting for him at his station when he left the walk-in with the chicken, knife and cleaver on the cutting board, and there was no more bitterness in her voice when she said, “This is probably going to be gross, isn’t it?”
“Not gross at all.” He plopped the chicken down on the cutting board. It looked like a good one—there was a creamy quality to the fat beneath the skin that made Henry think this chicken had been fed a good diet, or maybe grazed free-range on some farm in the French countryside. “Grab the drumstick and pull it to the side. Don’t rip it off—just pull enough that the skin is stretched out.”
“I always forget how unpleasant this texture is,” Rosie said as she pulled. “Until the next time I’m handling raw chicken, and then I’m reminded all over again.”
“Now cut through the skin—just the skin, none of the meat.”
Sighing, Rosie picked up the chef’s knife and cut. She really was bad with a knife. It looked awkward in her hand, like it didn’t belong there. Henry always felt like his knife was an extension of himself, like it automatically went where he wanted it to go and did what he wanted it to do. But Rosie’s knife looked like it was fighting her.
“Pop the joint.”
“What?”
“Pop the joint out of its socket. Just grab the leg and twist. It’ll come out easier than you think.”
“Ricky dislocated his shoulder once.” Rosie shuddered. “On the field, during a game. I’ll never forget the popping sound that made.”
“This is not going to sound like that. Trust me.”
“How about you do this first leg?” she asked. “I’ll do the second one. Promise.”
“Here,” he said, and he reached from behind her, his arm alongside hers, the warmth of her pressed against his chest, the faint vanilla smell of her skin. It probably would have been romantic if they hadn’t been holding a chicken carcass. “Pull.”
They twisted, and the leg popped out of its socket. Rosie turned to Henry, surprised. Her face was so close to his, only a breath away. All Henry had wanted to do since they had kissed was kiss her again, and finally, it felt right. He watched Rosie’s eyes flutter closed and he leaned in, brushing his lips softly against hers.
Something vibrated against his leg. Rosie yelped and shot away from him, leaping back.
“It’s my phone!” Henry said shrilly as he pulled the offending device out of his pocket.
“Oh. Um. Ha-ha.” Rosie laughed an awkward, strangled laugh. “You should probably get that.”
“No, I don’t need to—”
“It’s fine. Tell your Mom I said hi.” She gestured at the screen, where, sure enough, MOM was flashing on top of a baby picture of Henry. Why had Henry let his mom program in a baby picture of him to display when she called?! If he hadn’t been so busy trying not to die of embarrassment, he would have almost been impressed by the new lows of mortification he had sunk to. “It’s okay—you can answer it,” Rosie whispered.
There was no reason not to. The moment had been pretty thoroughly ruined.
“What?” Henry barked into the phone. “I mean, hello,” he amended, noticing Rosie’s shocked face.
“What’s this B-minus on your English paper?”
“Nice to talk to you, too, Mom,” Henry muttered. He pointed to the door and walked out of the kitchen, into the stairwell. Probably better if Rosie didn’t overhear this conversation.
“I thought you were going to try.”
“I am trying, Mom.” Henry gritted his teeth, trying not to raise his voice. “Mr. Bertram is a really hard grader. I don’t think anyone got an A.”
“I don’t care if everyone gets an A; I care if you get an A. I need to see that you’re making an effort, Henry,” Mom warned him. “Or you’re coming home.”
“It was one paper, Mom!” Seriously? One B-minus, and she was already threatening to pull him out of the École? Henry was trying. He was trying harder than he’d ever tried before. But what if Henry’s best wasn’t good enough, and Mom made him leave anyway? Henry couldn’t even think about that without flinching, like the idea of leaving the École was a hot griddle that would burn him if he let his hand linger too long near the surface.
“Where do you think grades come from? Papers!”
“I get it, okay?” Henry wanted to get Dad on the phone, wanted Dad to help him explain that this wasn’t a big deal. Or maybe he just wanted Dad to reassure him that Henry wasn’t in danger of losing everything he’d ever wanted because Mr. Bertram thought his paper suffered from strained transitions, but Henry was so pissed at Mom for ruining the moment—or maybe at himself for not putting his phone on silent—that he just wanted this conversation to end. Immediately. “Look, Mom, I have to go.”
“You have to go,” she repeated. “Go where? Go try to see if you can earn some extra credit by revising your paper? Because that sounds like an excellent idea.”
“Yeah. I’ll go do that.”
He hung up on her. Henry tried to remember what Dad had said about Mom just wanting him to have options, but he was so frustrated that Mom couldn’t see the effort he was making, he was having a hard time looking at anything from her point of view.
“Everything okay?” Rosie asked when he made his way back into the kitchen. She was leaning against the counter, her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine,” he said. “I just have to go do some work on the English paper.”
“The one we just got back?” she asked, confused.
“Yeah. It’s a whole thing—don’t worry about it.” T
he last thing he wanted to do was get into how nuts Mom was being and how scared he was about the possibility of leaving. “We can do a chicken later, okay?”
“Sure.”
Rosie smiled at him, and if there was something unsure in her smile, Henry tried not to notice it. So they packed the chicken up in a Ziploc bag, cleaned the cutting board and the knives, and by the time they left, it looked like they had never been there.
When they got back upstairs, Seydou, Anna, and Cecilia were standing in front of a small piece of paper taped to the glass of the French doors leading into the lounge.
“What’s that?” Henry asked.
“It is a dance,” Anna said. “For Halloween. They are having a dance here, at the École.”
“Halloween? Already?” Rosie asked as Anna, Seydou, and Cecilia went back into the lounge, chatting.
“Well, it is October,” Henry said.
She looked surprised, and then sort of stricken. Henry wondered what she was thinking about.
“Are you—are you gonna go to the dance?” he blurted out, wanting to keep her there for just a minute longer, even though he had been the one to hustle them out of the kitchen.
“Probably.” She shrugged. “It might be fun, right? I bet I could make a costume out of something I have here. Be a black cat, maybe. Something easy. Although I don’t really have any black clothes, so maybe that’s not such a good idea. . . .”
“I have a black hoodie.” Henry gestured to it, as he was, in fact, wearing it. “You can borrow it, if you want.”
She wouldn’t want his hoodie. And even if she did, he was going to have to clean his hoodie thoroughly, to ensure it smelled the best any hoodie had ever smelled since the dawn of time.
“Thanks.” Rosie smiled. “I’d love to borrow it. I’ll be the coziest cat in town.”
Rosie was going to the dance.
And she was wearing his hoodie.
And that, at least, was something.
Rosie had kind of assumed no one would go to the dance.
She didn’t know why, really. Maybe because so many of the students here were international. Rosie couldn’t imagine Anna from pre-calc at a dance back home in Berlin. And she somehow doubted that Fernando had ever stood under streamers in a gym in Barcelona. The whole idea of a school dance just seemed so American.
She couldn’t help but think of the last dance she’d been to, back at home, with Brady. He’d kept her at such a pronounced distance, Rosie felt like she’d had YOUR FRIEND’S LITTLE SISTER stamped on her forehead the whole time. Brady had been nice, though. And he’d taken her to Applebee’s after. And kissed her, once, quickly, when he dropped her off at the end of the night. She’d wondered if they might date or something, but he never said anything to her besides a friendly, casual “Hi” in the halls from that point on. Rosie wondered if she should have been more disappointed by that.
But she hadn’t felt much of anything, really. Not for Brady, and not for anyone else at East Liberty High. She’d sit in the cafeteria and listen to the giggles and whispers around her, watching the girls at her table blush and sneak glances over at guys who blushed right back, but whenever it was Rosie’s turn to share who she liked, she always came up blank. But here . . . something was different. Something. Rosie chided herself—she knew exactly what was different.
It was Henry. He was different.
Rosie tore her eyes away from the door—she had to stop looking for him, she was in danger of being pathetic—and looked around the cafeteria. Whoever had decorated had definitely taken a page from the East Liberty High dance decor playbook. There were orange and black streamers, and what looked like computer print-out pictures of black cats and ghosts taped to the walls. The tables had been pushed to the side of the room with chairs facing inward. Priya was lying down across three chairs, which pretty much indicated the general level of activity. Rosie grabbed another pumpkin cookie from the snack table she’d stationed herself in front of for lack of anywhere better to go. The cookies were good: buttery, nice crumb structure, extremely neat piping on the pumpkin. Rosie wondered who had made them. They looked way too American to have been produced by the École’s regular cooking staff. The French made a lot of excellent desserts, but the frosted sugar cookie wasn’t exactly in their usual culinary repertoire.
Roland, who had driven the van back on the very first day, was in charge of the DJ station, which was a computer hooked up to a set of speakers. So far he had played a bunch of French techno Rosie had never heard before, and “Monster Mash” three times. Rosie sighed, unsure why she had come. Priya had been the one who had been most excited about it, spending even more time than usual on her makeup and building fairy wings out of cardboard. But now those fairy wings were slowly being crushed by her impromptu nap. As were Priya’s hopes and dreams for what this dance could be, most likely. Almost their whole class was there, but no one was actually doing anything.
Rosie wiggled her nose, trying to get rid of the itch without smearing the kitty-cat whiskers Priya had drawn on her with eyeliner. She’d expended pretty minimal effort on her costume. Priya had done the cat makeup, and she’d borrowed a pair of Yumi’s black yoga pants and Henry’s black hoodie, which fell almost to her knees. She’d pulled the hood up over her head and had tried to tape some construction paper ears on, but they definitely weren’t standing up the right way. Rosie might have been a lot of things, but crafty wasn’t one of them.
Henry’s hoodie. It smelled so much like clean laundry, it smelled like a candle Mom had called “Clean Cotton.” It was soft, and warm, and Rosie didn’t want to give it back.
“This is exactly what I expected,” Yumi said from her spot by the snack table. “Total snooze.”
Rosie couldn’t look right at Yumi or she’d laugh. Yumi had dressed up as a monster. She’d borrowed a T-shirt of Hampus’s in a particularly alarming shade of green—it was enormous on her—and had taped large construction paper eyeballs all over it. Whenever Rosie made accidental eye contact with any one of Yumi’s eyes, she’d start laughing. And Yumi would protest that she was supposed to be scary, which would only make Rosie laugh harder. It was a vicious cycle.
“It’s only, um, eight-oh-five,” Rosie said, checking the wall clock as she helped herself to another cookie.
“Yeah. Everyone knows things don’t really get bumping until eight fifteen,” Yumi said witheringly, grabbing two gougères off a round serving plate and popping them both into her mouth simultaneously. “It’s Saturday night,” she said through a mouthful of cheesy, puffy pastry. “We could have gone out.”
“We still could.”
“No, we’re committed to this travesty.” Yumi sighed.
And they were, kind of. If they stayed at the dance, they didn’t have to be up in their rooms until the shockingly late hour of eleven p.m., but if they left the dance, they weren’t allowed back in.
“Maybe it’ll get good later,” Rosie said hopefully.
“Sure. At the mythical stroke of eight fifteen. Now move, Radeke. I want some cheese.”
Rosie stepped aside so Yumi could lift a slice of baguette topped with baked brie and red onion jam off the table. Yumi stuffed it whole in her mouth as she looked toward the door rather forlornly, like she was waiting for someone, too.
“I thought Henry and Marquis were coming,” Rosie said, trying to sound casual.
She had spent an exorbitant amount of time imagining a dance with Henry. A slow one, nothing where she’d be required to move with any kind of rhythm, but where they’d be close enough to kiss. Rosie was still replaying that night in the kitchen over and over again, reliving the moment Henry had brushed his lips against hers. But then he’d insisted on leaving the kitchen so he could work on an English paper that they’d already turned in, which made absolutely no sense. Did he want to kiss her or not? Rosie couldn’t figure him out.
“Maybe the guys decided to bail,” Yumi said glumly.
“They wouldn’t,” Rosie said firmly. �
��There’s no way Hampus is missing this.”
He’d been talking about it for weeks, asking Rosie and Henry and Marquis all kinds of questions about American Halloween and American school dances, and Rosie was pretty sure he was going to be devastatingly disappointed, as Hampus had built this evening up to be some kind of prom-as-designed-by-Tim-Burton. Which it most decidedly was not.
And as though his name had conjured him, Hampus burst through the doors. Rosie’s jaw dropped a little. He was wearing head-to-toe white, which made him look not totally dissimilar to the Abominable Snowman, but even from across the room, Rosie could see the pink bow tied around his neck, his pink nose, black whiskers, and little white cat ears that were staying on top of his head much better than Rosie’s were.
“Is he . . . is he the girl cat from Aristocats?” Yumi asked. “You know what? Things are looking better already.”
“Rosie!” Hampus picked her up, lifting her off the ground in a hug that was surprisingly gentle, given the velocity involved. “We are both the cats!”
“You are both the cats,” Yumi agreed. “Let’s take a million pictures of this.”
“Is Henry coming?” Rosie asked Hampus as they stood with their arms around each other, grinning at Yumi’s iPhone.
“Ah, Henry.” Hampus sighed, and then chuckled, fondly. “He is coming, but he is being so slow. I could not wait any longer. Marquis is with him, trying to make him hurry.”
Rosie felt something within her lift as the DJ started playing, of all things, “Lady in Red.” It blasted out of the speakers, somehow louder than the techno had been. Nobody moved toward the dance floor.
“I had no idea a pumpkin could be so fit.”
Priya was so loud that Rosie had heard her over the music, but when she followed Priya’s gaze, it didn’t look like the fit pumpkin had heard her. And the fit pumpkin was, of all people, Bodie Tal, wearing a bright-orange T-shirt with a jack-o’-lantern face on it and bright-orange Beats by Dre headphones, with a little green construction paper stem sticking off the top of them.
“Sweet baby candy corn.” Yumi materialized at Rosie’s elbow. “Why does nothing about Clara’s outfit surprise me? Well, maybe the irony of her choice of costume. Although I doubt she’s self-aware enough to register it as ironic.”
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