The guys race off the bus, jostling to be the first on the ground. When Hakulani sees I’m not behind them, he waits for me to catch up.
“Are you excited?” I ask, thinking back to his conversation with his girlfriend. I lean closer to him so Oscar doesn’t hear me. “I thought you hated the idea of working on a food truck.”
“I don’t know. I guess there are worse things a person could do. You get to make your own hours, your menu.”
“That’s true,” I agree.
Oscar unlocks the back of the truck and motions for us to step up. Everything is shiny and new, from the smooth grill-top to the pristine cutting boards. “This is amazing,” I say.
“I promise you, not all trucks look this nice—especially after a couple months on the street.”
Hakulani stands, completely stunned, while I check out the cabinets and the small fridge. “Too bad we don’t have the food yet,” I say. “We could start prepping.”
Jessica pops her head in. “Are you guys already talking about getting to work?” she asks.
Hakulani nods. “No food.”
She nods. “And the design team still needs to finish the outside.”
“That sucks,” Hakulani says.
“Plus side,” Jessica says, “we found the shaved ice machine you wanted.”
“That will make things go much easier,” he says, turning to me. “There’s a little trick to making the perfect dome, but this machine will help make it a lot easier, since neither of us have done it before.”
“Will someone be able to bring the ice tomorrow? We’ll need several blocks.”
She nods. “I think you’ll find everything you need when you arrive.”
“Don’t forget the rice,” Hakulani reminds her.
“We’ve got it covered,” she assures him.
Paulie and Malik pop their heads in. “Looks a lot like ours,” Malik says.
“Inside, they’re twins,” Eddie says. He stands back and looks between the two trucks. “But you couldn’t tell from the outside.”
“Now that you’ve seen where you’re going to work tomorrow, we should probably head back to the apartment. You’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” Jessica says.
“How early?” I ask, knowing I don’t want to hear the answer.
“Five-thirty,” Oscar says, taking a step back.
“In the morning?” I ask, sure that he must be messing with me.
“Hey, be glad the network has filming permits and we can park the truck for you, or it would be even earlier.”
“And you would have at least three or four parking tickets, too,” Eddie chimes in.
“Fine. But I won’t be cheerful,” I assure Oscar.
“Noted.”
We load back onto the bus for the drive back to the apartment. The driver makes a detour so Jessica can show us where our trucks will be parked the next day.
The next morning, the bus drops us off around the corner from where our food trucks are supposed to be parked. “Why did Jessica have the driver let us off here?” I ask through a yawn.
“So we can get your reaction to the finished designs,” she says, coming around the corner. The woman needs a bell around her neck so I know where she is.
Eddie and Oscar are with her. “Not to mention you need the time to stock your truck and get used to it. This isn’t like your stations back at the studio. You need to go inside and decide who is going to do what and practice moving around in there with each other.” Oscar grins. “Working in a truck like this is a little like a dance.”
“Exactly. Now, let’s go see your trucks.”
The truck closest to the corner is Stick to Your Ribs.
“I feel like you need a leather jacket and a Harley to eat here,” I say. “Checking out the menu, I’m impressed with what they’ve come up with.”
I nervously look at Hakulani, but he shakes his head. “Not even a little worried. We’re going to crush them.”
Next to the black truck is our baby, complete with the wave on top. Jessica motions for us to come over. “The design team wanted to give you a little wow factor, so if you stand over here…” she says, motioning for us to come over. When I do, I feel the slightest mist of cool water.
“No way,” I say. “There’s a mister up there?”
She nods. “And hidden speakers that will play all the Hawaiian music you want.”
“Hey,” Paulie says. “We don’t have music.”
I spin around on him. “You have an outdoor grill,” I remind him.
“Yes, and I really need to get it started so I can have something to serve.”
Paulie heads for his truck. “Gotta get started on Grannie’s gravy.” He gives us a hang ten sign before disappearing up the steps.
“Let’s get started,” Oscar says, stepping out of our way so we have more room to check out the kitchen, move a few things, and start figuring out how to divide up the responsibilities.
“What happens when we run out of a dish?” I ask out the window to Oscar. “There’s no way to run and make more.”
“When you run out, you run out,” he shrugs. “You’ll have a lot of white rice, which is a big component of most of your dishes.”
With that bit of advice and a quick glance at the truck, we begin reviewing the menu and come up with a plan for prepping everything once the food arrives.
“Now might be a good time for me to write out the menu on the front of the truck, too,” I say, grabbing some chalk stashed in a drawer. When I get outside, I pull out the price list I came up with when Oscar was helping us with our supply list.
Oscar watches as I write out the menu and says, “You’ll need to make sure you cover your food costs and labor at least. Otherwise, you could be in for a surprise at the end of the day.”
“Are any of them under- or overpriced?” I ask, stepping back to check my work.
Oscar moves to stand next to me. “I would charge for the add-ons for the shaved ice, but other than that, it looks pretty good. Because you used chalk, you can always adjust the prices if something isn’t selling. Call it a special and mark it down; the goal is to sell out of everything by the end of the day.”
Half an hour later, there’s a knock on the truck door, and when Hakulani swings it open, a PA instantly begins placing boxes of produce on the floor. Without hesitating, Oscar and I form an assembly line and begin to pile the supplies onto the counters as Hakulani starts to unpack them. It takes almost an hour, but we manage to find a place for everything.
“Is there a fan?” I ask, lifting my hair up and fanning the back of my neck. After unloading everything and turning on the stove and the fryers so we can start cooking, it is starting to get hot in the truck—and it’s not even seven o’clock yet.
“Just the one in the front of the truck,” Oscar says, before pointing to the warming oven. “You know how to work one of these?”
I nod. “Water in the bottom and turn it on?”
“Yep.”
After turning on the warmers, I swing behind Hakulani as he begins to mix up the batter for the breaded shrimp, while Oscar squeezes against the counter where he is chopping cabbage for the slaw. “Someone needs to be the point,” I say. “I don’t know what to do next.”
Suddenly Hakulani stops mixing. “Where’s the rice?” Hakulani and I say at the same time.
We were so busy getting everything unpacked and set up that we forgot to check to make sure our day-old rice was here.
“Did they bring it from the studio?” I ask. “I told them before we left last night to make sure it got brought over. It was on the list.”
“I don’t see it,” Hakulani says.
I lean out of the truck and scan the street. “Where’s a PA when you need one?” I mutter. Half a block away is a camera crew, and I jump out of the truck and race toward them.
They see me coming and immediately grab their cameras.
“Do you know where the PAs are?” I ask, slightly winded.
&
nbsp; The sound guy nods before muttering something into his walkie.
“Be right there,” the speaker crackles.
A minute later, the PA who had dropped off our food appears. “What do you need, Peyton?”
I’m kind of surprised she even knows my name. Normally the PAs just bark at us and usher us from one place to another, so I figured they just knew us as a collective. “We stayed at the studio last night making a bunch of white rice to use today. I left instructions for it to be brought here this morning.”
At the words left instructions, the PA’s eyebrows raise slightly. I guess they don’t like having the tables being turned on them.
“I’ll check on it,” she says, but she doesn’t reach for her phone. She looks at me for a moment more, and when I don’t walk away, she asks, “Was there something else?”
“Um, yeah, could you check on it now? Maybe I can come with you to get it?”
Her eye twitches like she wants to roll her eyes at me, but to her credit, she refrains. “Just let me check on it, okay?” She pulls her phone out and turns her back toward me. Did I interrupt her bubble tea break or something?
She is talking in a hushed tone, but I think I hear her ask, “When can you get here?” And it might have been followed by, “She’s not going away until I tell her something,” but I can’t be sure.
After she hangs up the PA pauses for a moment before spinning around and flashing me a wide smile. “It’s still in the cooler at the network. They’re getting it right now, and it should be here in half an hour.”
“Thank you,” I say curtly. The show employs a lot of production assistants, and some of them are way more chill than others; she’s somewhere in the middle.
As I jog back to our truck, I manage to avoid running into Paulie as he steps down onto the sidewalk. He catches me and swings me around like we’d been rehearsing the move all our lives.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey yourself.”
There is a quiet moment when he looks at me and I feel my cheeks grow warm before he lets me go. I look at the truck to give myself a second to cool off. “It smells so good,” I say. “I wish we would have thought to grill outside. When we’re cooking, the inside of that truck is a bazillion degrees.”
“That is hot,” he says.
“No fraternizing with the enemy,” Malik calls out.
I give him a wave. “Get back to the grill.”
“I better go,” Paulie says, turning back toward the truck, but not without giving me a quick smile.
“We’ve got tough competition next door,” I announce when I get back to the kitchen. “The smell is going to bring people in like crazy.”
Hakulani flips a switch and the sound of Hawaiian music and surf begins to play through the outdoor speakers. “And then we will distract them with visions of a white sand beach.” He puts his hand out for me to take. “Dance with me.”
“We need to prep,” I argue, my earlier confidence fading with each second that the challenge grows closer.
“We can prep in a minute,” he says, tugging me by the hand and leading me down to the sidewalk.
“I’m going to teach you the hula step.”
“That’s what it’s called?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s actually called Kalakaua. Now, start by swaying your hips from side to side.”
“Are we really doing this? On the sidewalk in New York City?”
“I’ll teach you one step and one arm movement. You never know what you might have to do to drum up business.”
I look for any sign that he’s joking, but there’s none. “Fine.”
“All right, now we’re going to start with our right foot. You’re going to step forward, sway your hips, step back together. Tap your foot.”
I do as he instructs, feeling about as elegant as a baby giraffe.
“Good. Now repeat with your left foot.” We repeat the step over and over. “Make sure you sway with each step.”
I try to do what he says and am rewarded with applause from Paulie and Malik.
“I can’t,” I say, pulling away when Hakulani reaches for me. “Thank you. But I’m probably better at watching dance than doing it.”
“You worry too much,” he says.
“What?”
“About what other people think of you. You worry about that a lot.”
I start to argue that he’s wrong, but I don’t get a chance.
“Okay, okay, back to work,” Oscar says out of the window. “Did you find the rice?”
“It’ll be here in thirty minutes or less.”
As I walk back toward the truck, Hakulani grabs my hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you do that, and I really shouldn’t have said what I said.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
He gives me a hard look. “You don’t mean that.”
“Maybe not yet, but I will soon. Let’s just get to work.”
He nods. “Right.”
As soon as we get inside, Hakulani and I busy ourselves with preparations.
“Rice is here,” a voice calls out from the back. Jessica directs a PA to load it in. “Where do you want it?”
Hakulani moves some bowls I just washed out of the way. “Here. I need to get it started. Thanks, Jessica.”
She nods.
Other than the sound of the wooden spoon against the flat top grill and knives on the cutting board, the truck is quiet. With all the activity and appliances going, it starts to really warm up. Oscar jokes that we should be glad we didn’t get the black truck and assures us that this is normal. I push open the windows at the front of the truck for extra ventilation. I would personally like to sit under the mister, but Hakulani reminds me that it’s for paying customers.
As we work together to get the dishes prepared, every step we make becomes a part of some improvised dance. Shifting here, stretching there, doing everything we can to stay out of each other’s way as we prepare to open at eleven. In a short time, the tension between us dissipates and I start smiling.
Just before we’re supposed to start taking orders, I glance out the window and see the line outside the truck. And not just any line. A line all the way down the sidewalk and around the corner. I would brag about it, but the line next door at the other truck is about the same length.
“There’s a hungry crowd out here,” I say, turning back with a look of panic in my eyes.
“Are we ready?” Oscar asks.
We all look at each other.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think we are.”
“Then get ready to rock and roll,” Oscar says.
I give Hakulani and Oscar each a high five and then grab the order pad to take the first order.
“Loco moco with sticky rice and mochiko with fried,” I call over my shoulder as I rip off the ticket and place it on the order strip by Oscar, who starts filling paper boats with rice. I grab two cups and quickly fill them with shaved ice, then pour green apple syrup over one, spritzing it with sour spray, and flavor one with tiger’s blood, a combination of strawberry and watermelon with just a hint of coconut and blue raspberry topped with sweetened condensed milk. After that moment, everything seems to pass as a blur of tickets, rice, shaved ice, and money exchanging hands.
At some point during the day, I remember Jessica stopping by to see how we were doing, but the lines were so long and I was so focused on making sure that I kept an eye on the fryer, that I barely had time to say anything. By the time we sell out of everything, I feel like I can say: I make a mean Hawaiian shaved ice.
“That was intense,” I say, looking at Oscar while we wipe down the inside of the truck. “You do this every day?”
“Six days a week. We take Sunday off unless we’re working a festival or private event.”
“What about nights?” I ask. “I bet you could make a killing when the clubs close.”
“Sure,” he says with a shrug and a laugh, “but then I would have to claim the truck as my permanent r
esidence. Running a food truck is a lot of fun. It’s a lot of work, too. You have to find the balance in your life. Work too much, you ignore friends and family, and then you wake up and no one’s around but your staff.”
Hakulani nods. “I get that. I don’t know what I would do if I had to give up surfing because I was running some big kitchen somewhere.”
I hand everyone a shaved ice as we continue to wipe down the truck, preparing it for the next person who’ll get a chance to own a piece of their dream.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
I CLOSE THE DOOR, LOCKING IT BEFORE HANDING the keys over to Oscar. “Thank you so much,” I say, smiling at him. “I had more fun cooking today than I have in a while.”
“Yeah,” Hakulani adds. “I know it was a competition, but it didn’t feel like it.”
“You two are a good team,” Oscar says, pushing the key into his pocket. “Who knows. Someday you might give us a run for our money.”
“Don’t count on it,” I say. “It was fun, but getting up that early every morning? No thank you.”
Hakulani puts out his hand to shake Oscar’s as a PA arrives to corral us to the sidewalk, where Jessica is waiting to announce the winners.
“Good afternoon,” Jessica says to everyone as the cameras set up around us. “Our filming permit is about to expire, so we’re going to have to make this quick.”
“What?” Malik says. “You mean you won’t be putting us through painful suspenseful pauses?”
“If I didn’t do that, you would think I didn’t care.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but why are they so long?”
“It’s a rite of passage. My host did it to me, and now I do it to you. And if you’re lucky, the network will ask you to come back and host, and then you can do it to a future round of aspiring chefs.”
“That’s not a rite of passage,” Paulie says. “That’s hazing, and forty-four states have laws against it.”
The camera guy clears his throat and spins the camera toward Jessica.
“Just for that, I might make you wait. And wait. And wait,” she says, staring into the camera. I’m not sure if she’s talking to us or the camera guy, but the red light turns on before anyone has a chance to ask for clarification.
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