Lizzie thought back to her text exchange with April and her mention of a party. “So what’s the plan? Are you thinking of something similar to the Memorial Day barbecue?”
“Oh, no, no—I mean, yes, there will be a party, and yes, there will be lots of people and food and drinks, but the menu has to be totally different. Many of the guests will be repeats from the barbecue, so I don’t want them thinking we’re a one-trick pony. Speaking of ponies . . .” She tapped her lip as she drifted off in thought. Lizzie couldn’t imagine where she was headed.
“Ponies . . . ?”
Kathryn snapped back to attention. “Sorry—I was just thinking. One of Jim’s friends might bring his granddaughter in the afternoon—before the party really gets going obviously—and I was wondering if we should hire someone to do pony rides. She’s only nine months, so I guess that’s a little young. Do you think?”
Lizzie knew nothing about babies, but she was almost certain pony rides were meant for toddlers and school-age children. “Probably. Can a nine-month-old sit up?”
“Oh, sure. At least I think so? It’s amazing how quickly you forget these things. I mean, it seems like just yesterday Zoe was a baby, but if you asked me when she started to sit up or roll over or talk, I couldn’t tell you. My gosh, at this point it feels as if she’s been talking forever!”
“I know the feeling,” Lizzie said. “So back to the party.”
“Right! The party. We are expecting about fifty people, and as I said, a lot of them came to the Memorial Day celebration. So no chicken or shrimp or beef kebabs. Last year we did the traditional burgers and hot dogs, which worked well, but again—no one-trick ponies here! Let’s try to come up with something different.”
“Different as in grilled swordfish and chicken teriyaki, or chili dogs instead of plain hot dogs?”
“See, this is why I hire a cook—I just don’t know! I guess it’s our country’s birthday, so we should stick with a very American menu. Our party will not be where patriotism goes to die. I’ve never liked chili dogs—they give me the most horrible gas—but I like how you’re thinking. Is there another kind of fancy hot dog you could make?”
“It isn’t fancy, but I could do Chicago-style hot dogs: poppy seed buns, tons of toppings, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, that sounds interesting. Sam will love it. Did you know he’s from Chicago originally? His midwestern accent has all but vanished, but he’s a Chicago boy through and through.”
Lizzie wondered if that meant he supported the Cubs or that his business ethos was reminiscent of Al Capone’s.
“And with all those vegetables,” Kathryn continued, “it sounds like I’ll be able to enjoy a dog myself—without the bun, of course.”
Lizzie wasn’t sure why Kathryn always felt the need to stress the restrictions of her diet. They both knew what they were. Lizzie couldn’t figure out if it was a means of keeping herself on track, or of making herself feel virtuous, or a combination of the two.
“As for the burgers,” Lizzie said, “I could do a riff on a regular burger, like an Asian burger flavored with soy sauce and ginger—”
“Oh, no, I don’t really think that would be appropriate. Do you?”
“Why not?”
“It’s Independence Day—American Independence Day,” Kathryn said.
“Right. . . .” Lizzie wondered if Kathryn was confused and thought America had won its independence from the Chinese. “Is there something wrong with soy sauce?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t feel very American, you know?”
Lizzie was tempted to argue that more Americans probably ordered Chinese takeout on a weekly basis than had ever eaten a Chicago-style hot dog, never mind the fact that a sizable proportion of the U.S. population was of some sort of Asian descent. But she sensed a “melting pot” themed Fourth of July party would not be Kathryn’s style.
“Okay, well, what about . . .” Lizzie stopped herself.
“What?”
“Never mind. I hadn’t really thought the idea all the way through.”
“That’s okay—I’m open to anything! Well, not anything. But you know what I mean. I can’t shoot down an idea if I’ve never even heard it.”
Exactly, Lizzie thought.
“I was just thinking . . . you can’t get more American than McDonald’s, so maybe I could do a riff on a Big Mac? With only one burger instead of two, and maybe even turkey instead of beef, if that’s what you’re into. And I could do a veggie burger version, too, for Zoe and any other vegetarians.”
Kathryn brightened. “I love it. Love it! Zoe will be thrilled. Mind you, I’m not sure how much she’ll attend. Apparently a bunch of her friends are throwing parties that weekend. But she said she’d stay at least for a little bit, especially if you’re cooking. She seems very happy with your food.”
“Really?”
“Oh, definitely. You couldn’t tell?”
“She can be a little . . . difficult to read.”
“That’s true. But she really does seem pleased—such a change from last summer. I guess things did start off on the right foot with Bob, but they went south pretty quick, as you know.”
Lizzie didn’t know, other than whatever vague allusions Kathryn had made in their previous conversation on the matter. But before she could ask Kathryn to clarify, Kathryn changed the subject.
“Anyway, I’ll send you the final numbers once I have them. Nate threatened to come in for the party, but it looks like he’ll be too busy in DC. In fairness, I guess Washington really is the place to be to celebrate our country’s birth. Not that I think that has anything to do with his reasons.”
It was the first time Kathryn had mentioned Nate since the interview at her house in Gladwyne. “He’ll be coming later in July, though, right?”
Kathryn sighed. “So he says. Hopefully he will spare you the headaches he gives the rest of us.”
Lizzie shared Kathryn’s wish, because if Nate was anything like Zoe she had a long, hard road ahead of her.
“Oh, and I forgot to mention—I think your friend April will be joining us as well.”
“That’s what she said.”
“You two still keep in touch then?”
“A bit,” Lizzie said. That was only true as of the last few weeks, but she didn’t feel like clarifying.
“Oh, good. Because at the Memorial Day barbecue, I got the sense that you’d maybe had a falling-out . . . ?” She raised her eyebrows expectantly, hungry for a juicy scrap of gossip.
Lizzie’s falling-out with April wasn’t a big secret—anyone who’d known them in college knew they’d stopped speaking once Lizzie’s show took off and April was no longer a part of its production—but Lizzie couldn’t bring herself to indulge Kathryn’s unrelenting appetite for rumors and scandal. So instead, she simply said, “Nothing as dramatic as that,” because even if that wasn’t entirely true, she didn’t think she owed it to Kathryn to elaborate.
* * *
When Lizzie met April Sherman on her first day at Penn, she wasn’t sure they’d be friends. April burst into their Hill House dorm room, a small chamber with two lofted extra-long twin beds and very little space between them, and announced her arrival with the sort of fanfare one might expect from a Hollywood star.
“I’m here!” she exclaimed, as if everyone on the floor had been waiting for her to show up and could now relax.
It was a brutally hot August day, and Lizzie and her mom were sweating as they attempted to unpack Lizzie’s things. The room wasn’t air-conditioned, something Lizzie had been prepared for more in theory than practice. She’d brought a fan, but whatever relief it brought was minimal.
Lizzie wiped her brow with the back of her arm and extended her hand toward April.
“Hi, I’m Lizzie,” she said. “Sorry about the mess—there’s even less space than I expected.”
April shook her hand and surveyed the room. “You can say that again. Where am I supposed to put a
ll of my sweaters?”
Sweaters were the last articles of clothing on Lizzie’s mind as she stood in a room whose temperature seemed to hover somewhere around ninety-five degrees. But April had arrived with a wardrobe big enough to clothe half of Philadelphia and was quickly realizing that four small drawers beneath the lofted bed weren’t going to cut it.
“Daddy?” Her father, a tall black man with horn-rimmed glasses, appeared in the doorway, lugging one of April’s suitcases. “Daddy, I think you’re going to need to take one of those back home with you. There isn’t enough space. See?”
He dropped the suitcase at his feet and heaved a sigh. “Didn’t I warn you . . . ?”
“I know, but I didn’t think it would be this small.”
Her dad shook his head and then smiled at Lizzie and her mom. “Sorry—Steve Sherman. April’s dad.”
“Susan Glass,” Lizzie’s mom said, wiping her hand on her shorts before shaking his.
“My wife, Kate, should be here any second,” he said. “She’s unloading more stuff from the car.”
Lizzie wondered if he was waiting for her mom to say something like, So is my husband, but she wouldn’t be saying that because she was divorced, and Lizzie hadn’t wanted her dad to come. It’s not that she didn’t want his help or for him to be a part of this life moment. She just knew moving into her dorm would be stressful and chaotic, and she didn’t want to layer her parents’ awkward post-divorce relationship on top of that. She had enough on her plate as it was. Given the cramped space and stifling heat, Lizzie thought she’d made the right choice.
Moments later, April’s mom showed up with yet another suitcase. She was a petite brunette, with olive skin and shoulder-length straight hair, and her brown eyes widened in disbelief as she surveyed the room.
“Seriously? We’re paying more than forty grand for this?”
Lizzie and her mom laughed because they’d been thinking the same thing themselves, even if the bulk of Lizzie’s tuition was being covered by loans and scholarships. Lizzie appreciated Kate’s bluntness, a trait that, as Lizzie would learn, had been passed on to April in spades.
The two families crammed into the tiny space and did the best they could to make it livable. When Lizzie had found out over the summer that she’d been assigned to Hill House and not The Quad, where most freshmen lived, she was disappointed. She wanted the college experience she’d seen when she’d visited the year before—the Tudor Gothic architecture, the grassy courtyards teeming with undergrads reading books and playing Frisbee. She didn’t want to live a half mile away in what looked like a brick fortress, marooned with a fraction of the freshman class. She tried to convince herself it would be fine, but as she dripped in sweat and watched April unpack more pairs of jeans than seemed possible or necessary she wasn’t so sure.
April was . . . well, she was just so different from Lizzie. For starters, April’s parents worked for the State Department, so April had lived all over the world until her parents eventually settled down outside Washington, DC. Kenya, Russia, Brazil—Lizzie could barely keep track of all the places April had called home. Meanwhile, Lizzie hadn’t lived anywhere but Glenside her whole life. And April was so outgoing and outspoken. Lizzie didn’t consider herself a shrinking violet, but next to April she could almost feel herself disappear. Everything about April was exotic—she was striking and unconventionally beautiful, well traveled, and worldly in a way Lizzie had always wanted to be. Lizzie didn’t see what they could possibly have in common.
But what Lizzie quickly discovered was that they had one very important thing in common: Hill House. To whatever extent Lizzie felt isolated from the rest of the freshman class by her living arrangements, April felt that way, too, even more so, given her convivial nature. And so they became fast friends, leaning on each other for support as they navigated the joys and sorrows of freshman year. Even when they went to different parties and different bars, they’d meet in their room at the end of the night or in the wee hours of the next morning and rehash the evening’s events: who’d made out with whom, who’d gone where, who’d drunk and eaten what.
It was during one of these late-night, alcohol-fueled conversations that April and Lizzie had come up with the idea for Healthy U. One night in February, April had stumbled in with a greasy slice of pizza from Lorenzo’s and Lizzie rolled her eyes, knowing the next morning April would bitch and moan about needing to go on a diet and yell at Lizzie for letting her drunkenly binge on cheese and carbs. April hadn’t gained the dreaded “freshman fifteen,” but she’d put on about five to ten pounds since they’d first met in August.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” April had slurred, taking a bite of the pizza. “It’s de-e-e-elicious.”
“I’m sure it is. And you’ll be complaining about it all day tomorrow.”
She stared down at the oily slice. “Thas-s-s . . . true.”
“Want me to get you something a little healthier?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I think I have carrots and hummus in the mini fridge.”
“Do you feel like eating carrots and hummus when you’re drunk?”
“No,” Lizzie conceded.
“I want carbs-s-s-s-s-s-s.”
Lizzie sighed. She wasn’t as drunk as April, but she wanted carbs too. “I think I have some pita bread. If we can find some cheese and tomato sauce, we could make pita pizzas. It isn’t exactly health food, but it’s better than the grease bomb you’re holding in your hand right now.”
Lizzie couldn’t remember exactly how it happened, but they scrounged their hall for pizza ingredients and made their way to the communal kitchen, and before she knew it she and April were scarfing down hot, cheesy pita pizzas, which were surprisingly easy and delicious.
“Oh my God, these are so go-o-o-o-o-od,” April groaned as she tucked into hers.
“And now you can make them for yourself anytime, instead of resorting to Lorenzo’s. You saw how easy they were to make, right?”
April nodded, then looked at Lizzie with narrowed eyes. “You know . . . you should have a show. Like on TV. The Glass Kitchen. Cooking with Lizzie. Sizzle with Lizzle.”
Lizzie laughed. “You’ve pretty much described my dream job.”
“I’m not kidding. It’s not just drunk idiots like me. Half of these clowns would be a lot better off if they knew how to make a pita pizza.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Not probably. Definitely.”
“Okay, so who’s producing this show?”
April wiped the corners of her mouth. “I am. And you’re in front of the camera. And we’ll shoot it right here in this kitchen, and everyone will love it.”
“Can I invite guest chefs?”
“Of course.”
“And use the word ‘spatchcock’?”
“Obviously.”
“Then I think we have ourselves a hit!”
They laughed, but really, neither of them was joking. Lizzie had loved to cook since she was a little girl, and she credited it with getting her through her parents’ divorce. At first, the batches of chocolate chip cookies and Duncan Hines brownies were a way to occupy herself so that she didn’t have to think too much about her father’s absence. But once she’d come to terms with that, she carried on cooking and baking not because it was a distraction but because she actually enjoyed dumping a bunch of ingredients into a bowl or pot and creating something delicious. Having her own cooking show would be a dream come true.
April may not have dreamed of producing a cooking show, but she’d always dreamed of working in TV. She often talked about how after college she planned to move to New York, where she’d work for one of the networks or MTV or CNN or, frankly, anyone who was willing to hire her so that she could get her foot in the door. She already had a summer internship lined up with NBC, which impressed Lizzie, who still hadn’t managed to sort out her summer plans. A cooking show would be a perfect addition to April’s already dazzling résu
mé.
In the months that followed, they continually brought up the idea as a joke, usually when they were drunkenly cooking in the communal kitchen after a night of partying. But soon they started joking in moments of sobriety as well, until it was no longer a joke and they began thinking through what they’d actually need to do to get a show on the air: camera, editing software, a channel on which to air the finished product. What at one time seemed like a gag or a fantasy began to crystallize into an actual thing, and by sophomore year that thing was a campus cooking show on the Penn Video Network.
It took two years for the show to take off, but by Lizzie’s senior year her thirty-minute cooking program was the most-watched student-produced program on Penn’s campus. And that’s when things started to get crazy. First the Daily Pennsylvanian ran an article on Lizzie and April. That article raised their on-campus profile, but it also attracted the interest of a food writer for the New York Times, who happened to be a Penn alum. The reporter featured Lizzie and her show on the front page of the dining section, in a story about the rise in campus cooking. Other schools and students were mentioned, but Lizzie’s Healthy U was the main focus and her picture was splashed across the paper—and, eventually, the Internet, as the story was tweeted and retweeted and shared hundreds of times.
In a matter of days, Lizzie had been contacted by dozens of people who’d read the Times piece: agents, editors, Bon Appétit magazine, The View, the Today show. Lizzie could barely keep up with the volume. Before she knew it, she had a book agent, a film agent, a book deal, and a meeting with executives at the Food Network about a potential show.
Initially, April acted as if she didn’t mind that Lizzie was getting all of the attention, though she was always quick to provide cautionary balance to Lizzie’s elation.
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