Keya was in the disaster movie.
“Can anybody hear me?”
“Here.” I reached around her and pressed the one button she hadn’t, the one marked EMERGENCY.
She gasped as if the button’s purpose were to bring on the emergency, not deal with it.
A second later, we heard ringing coming out of the speaker below the panel.
She made a sound that was half exhale, half laugh.
“Hello, front desk, 611 Fifth Avenue,” a man’s voice said.
“Hey, we’re stuck in one of the elevators,” I said.
“Not again,” he said. “Sorry, we had some maintenance work done recently and I don’t know what they did, but ever since, we’ve been having problems. Just sit tight. We’ll get you moving shortly.”
“Okay, thanks.” There was a click, followed by a long tone. I pressed the button again, and the noise stopped.
Keya took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sorry. I’m not much for elevators.”
“Don’t worry about it. This isn’t my first rodeo.”
“What’s a rodeo?”
“Oh, sorry. I don’t know why I said that anyway. It’s dumb. My dad always says it. He thinks it’s funny.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me what a rodeo is?”
“Sorry.” Why did I keep apologizing? “It’s like a show. People ride bulls to see how long they can stay on before they get thrown off. It’s like a cowboy thing. Cowboys are—”
“I know what cowboys are.”
“Sorry.” I slid down the wall of the elevator. We were going to be there a while. Might as well get comfortable.
Keya sat then too, not against one of the walls but cross-legged right in front of me, smack in the middle of the elevator, which no longer seemed so spacious. “Am I being thick? I still don’t follow. You’ve ridden a bull and this is useful to us in an elevator that has stopped working because…”
“Sorry.” I cringed. Was that the fourth “sorry”? I’d lost count. “I’m being a nuddy. I just meant—”
“You’re being a what?” Keya giggled.
My face went hot. Had I really just called myself a nuddy out in the real world? “Forget I said that. Please.”
“I can’t. I love it.” Her smile was back at full wattage.
“You love what?”
“That word. New-Dee? Nuh-Dee?”
“You love ‘nuddy’?”
“Yes!”
“You can’t. You don’t even know what it means.”
“So what? I love the way it sounds. Nuddy. Nuddy. Nuddy. It makes my mouth want to smile.”
She was always smiling anyway. How could she tell the difference? “Fine. I give up. You love ‘nuddy.’”
“Does it mean something bad?” Her eyes got all big.
“No, it means ‘idiot.’ It’s short for nudnik. It’s Yiddish.”
“Oh.” Keya nodded like now it all made sense.
The panel’s speaker made a clicking noise. Then the man came back on. “The repair guys are here, and they’re working on it. Shouldn’t take too long now.”
“Okay. Thanks for the update,” I called.
There was another click, then the tone. I crawled across the floor and pressed the button to make it stop.
“Can I ask you question?” Keya tucked a dangling bun behind her ear.
“Sure.”
“What country speaks Yiddish?”
I burst out laughing.
“Oh, ha ha.” She scowled at me. “There are twenty-two major languages in India. I bet you can’t even name two!”
“No, no, you don’t understand. I’m laughing because Yiddish, it’s…it’s not spoken anywhere, really. Not anymore. It’s kind of a mishmash of German and Hebrew. I think it’s only spoken now by like, really religious Jews.”
“And your family’s really religious?”
“No, my dad’s not even Jewish. But through my mom we’re…not really religious, but…connected. It’s kind of hard to explain.” I’d never even tried to before now. “We cook the foods, celebrate holidays—some at least—tell stories, and use some Yiddish words. If we worship anything, it’s food.”
“Oh, you’re rememberers.”
“Rememberers?”
“That’s what you call people who use languages that aren’t really spoken anymore. That’s my mom’s thing. Languages, ones that are disappearing. We came here so she could teach at Yale University. Right now, she’s working on a book. It’s all about the last people on the planet to speak a particular language. They’re called ‘terminal speakers.’”
I couldn’t help thinking about Petersville. Was there a word for the last people to live in a particular place?
Keya opened her bag, took out her phone, and began tapping away.
Click-click-click…
Was I boring her?
“Wir zenen stak,” she read off the phone.
“What?”
“It’s ‘We’re stuck,’ in Yiddish. It’s definitely not dead yet. It’s on Google Translate.” She held out the phone to me.
“Are you serious?” I looked at the screen. In the search box were the words: we’re stuck. Then in the box marked Yiddish were Hebrew letters. “Wow. I didn’t even know it was written in Hebrew.”
“Look under the box. It tells you how to pronounce it.”
I typed a sentence into the English box and hit Translate.
I did my best to read what popped up—Aoyb ir gevinen, vos vet ir nutsn di freyz gelt far?—and handed Keya back the phone.
She looked at the screen, then at me. “Plane tickets to England and India, so we can see family and friends whenever we want. You?”
“A Donut Robot.”
“A what?”
“It’s a machine that makes ninety-six dozen doughnuts an hour, so we, my friend Josh and I, can grow our doughnut business.”
“Why doughnuts?” she asked. “That shop you started, The…”
“The Doughnut Stop.”
“Right. I was just curious, what made you want to start a doughnut shop in the first place?”
Before I knew it, I was telling Keya the whole story, how my parents moved us to Petersville, how on the first morning in town I discovered Winnie’s sign in the General Store advertising the chocolate cream doughnuts she didn’t sell anymore, and how I finally got her recipe and then made it my own.
“I didn’t want to move either,” Keya said when I finally finished. “We moved to England from Hyderabad when I was eight. That was hard enough. Then, just when I was really settled, we moved to the States.” She went quiet for a minute. “Do you come back to the city much?”
“A bit. But it’s not the same.”
“It’s weird, right? Like even if you moved back, it would be someplace different. Every time I go back to Hyderabad, I keep trying to make it feel like it did before, but it just doesn’t.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, remembering how I felt that first night in the Airstream sleeping across the street from our old apartment.
“There is one place that still feels the same. My aunt’s house in Leh. Up north. We only ever went for vacations, so going back for vacations now feels just like it did before. And I never spent time with anybody my age there, so it’s not like when we go back to Hyderabad where I see kids who used to be friends but are really kind of strangers now.”
Charlie popped into my head for the first time in months. Charlie, who had been my best friend since the Red Room in preschool. Charlie was a stranger now, a stranger who sent me invitations to birthday parties I knew he hoped I couldn’t come to.
Keya and I were quiet for a while, and I noticed that the display screen wasn’t flashing anymore. It was just black. Unsure whether this was a good sign or a
bad one, I decided not to say anything about it.
Keya was tapping away on her phone again. “Es iz nisht a tsufal,” she read slowly, then handed me the phone.
In the English box were the words: It wasn’t an accident. “What wasn’t an accident?”
“I saw her, Chef JJ. She knocked the box of salt. She made you spill it.”
“On purpose?” I’d been so focused on making the sauce and the clock, I hadn’t even thought about how the spill had happened.
“Definitely on purpose,” she said. “I know it didn’t make a difference, I mean, you won anyway, but I just thought you should know.”
She was right. It didn’t matter, but not because I’d won. It didn’t matter because I felt just as bad about cheating as I had before. Only now, I was confused too. I’d seen Chef JJ mess with contestants in all kinds of ways, but this? This was sabotage. Did she do this kind of thing regularly and they just didn’t show it? Or was she just doing it to me?
“You know, everybody thinks Chef JJ favors me because she knows my mom.”
“Yeah, she’s definitely not favoring you. If anything, it kind of seems like the opposite. How does she know your mom again?”
“They worked together at a restaurant for a long time.”
Just then, the speaker came to life with a low hum. “Hello?”
“Yup, still here,” I said.
“We’re good to go,” the man said. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“Great,” I said at the same time Keya called, “Thank you!”
A moment later, the display began flashing again. Then the elevator shuddered into motion.
21…20…19…
We scrambled to our feet and faced forward like we were preparing to bow at the end of a play.
12…11…10…
“Newdee?” the girl in the elevator doors said.
“Nuddy.”
“Nuddy. Got it.”
3…2…
The doors slid open. A man with worried eyebrows and Keya’s face thrust his hand out to keep them from closing again. “Keya!”
“See you at the next rodeo,” she whispered, then got out.
“You all right?” the man said as they headed for the lobby’s side exit.
“I’m fine.” I could hear an eye-roll, as if it had been some other girl in the disaster movie.
I started across the lobby in the opposite direction.
“Tris!”
“Yeah?”
Keya had stopped and was looking back. “People who work together for a long time don’t always end up liking each other.”
I stood there for a second, thinking.
“You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”
• • •
What Keya had said slowly sunk in as I walked across the plaza.
It wasn’t until I got to the door of the Petersmobile that I remembered what was waiting for me on the other side, and the second I did, I felt every atom of my body pulling me the other way like the Airstream and I were the wrong sides of a magnet.
I forced myself to open the door.
“Your parents said you totally killed it.” Josh gave me a high-five.
“I guess.” I couldn’t look him in the eye.
“Don’t get too excited.” Jeanine sat up in her bunk. “It’s only the second challenge.”
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“At that diner on Fifty-Third. We’re supposed to take you over there to celebrate. I’ll be ready in a sec.” Josh ducked into the bathroom.
“You know, the kids who waste their time celebrating they made it into the State Finals of the Solve-a-Thon never make it to Nationals,” Jeanine said.
“I think Tris can celebrate a little,” Josh called from the bathroom. “Besides, tomorrow is Fourth of July. He’s off.”
Jeanine sat at the table and began putting on her shoes.
“Hey, Jeanine?” I sat down next to her. “Did you ever hear Mom talk about why she and Walter left that place they used to work at with Chef JJ?”
“No, why?”
I told her what Keya had seen.
“She did what?” Jeanine was on her feet, one shoe on, the other still off. “We need to call someone! We need to file a complaint. Should we call the police?”
Josh opened the bathroom door. “What happened?”
I started to tell him, but Jeanine jumped in and finished for me. She was in hurricane mode.
“She can’t do that!” Josh looked almost as whipped up as Jeanine.
“I think she can,” I said.
“You know what we need to do.” Jeanine was pacing now.
“What?” I said.
“We need to find out what really happened between Mom and Chef JJ.”
“I think if Mom was going to tell us, she would have by now. I kind of get the feeling she might not even really know.”
“And it’s not as if you can ask Chef JJ,” Josh said.
“We can figure this out,” Jeanine said.
“Oh, really, how?” I said. “Go back in time? Not even you’ve cracked time travel yet.”
Jeanine gave me a dirty look. “It’s called research? Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“Just give it to me,” she snapped.
I handed her the phone.
“What was the name of the restaurant Mom and Walter worked at with Chef JJ?” She tapped away at the screen.
“It was something Spanish. El something.”
“Chef JJ Jordan restaurants,” she said slowly as she typed. “Okay… The Parsonage, Wheat and Chaff, El Mariachi, Port—”
“El Mariachi. It was definitely El Mariachi.”
“El Mariachi, 3 Columbus Circle,” she read.
“Okay, so?”
Jeanine rolled her eyes. “Ever heard of field research?”
“Like when you collected animal poop and put it in the freezer?”
“It’s called scat.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Just think of it as a field trip,” she said.
“To El Mariachi?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“Without the scat though, right?” Josh said.
“Without the scat,” she said.
“Okay, then I’m in,” he said.
“Me too.” Whatever this was, I was pretty sure it was a horrible idea, but it was a horrible idea that would keep me from thinking about the horrible thing I’d done, and right then, that was all I needed to know.
Chapter 20
I had to hand it to Jeanine. The carousel was the perfect cover.
From the second we’d gotten to the city, Zoe had been begging to go to the merry-go-round, but it was a long walk through Central Park, and my parents were refusing to go until the weather broke. Since the night at Nom Wah, the city had been on a slow roast. Heat shimmered up from the sidewalk, and tar patches along the streets stuck to the bottom of your shoes. The weather was showing no signs of breaking, and neither were my parents.
If we offered to take Zoe to the carousel, my parents would be so happy they didn’t have to schlep across the park themselves, they’d give us money for rides and ice cream and send us on our way, no questions asked. Or at least that was Jeanine’s theory, and it sounded pretty solid to me.
Our real mission? To find someone who worked at El Mariachi when Mom did, someone who might be able to give us a clue about how Chef JJ really felt about her.
Jeanine had checked the restaurant’s website, and El Mariachi would be open for a special Fourth of July dinner that evening. So we’d go to the carousel—we’d have to or Zoe would pitch an epic fit—then head over to El Mariachi, which was only a short walk f
rom there.
I barely slept the night before. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d done. I’d gone twelve years without cheating. And now that I had, I worried it was like gambling or something—like now that I’d done it, it would be hard to stop.
Did cheating once make you a cheater forever?
When morning finally came, I couldn’t get out of bed fast enough.
As Jeanine predicted, my parents flipped over our offer to take Zoe to the carousel. We’d all go to breakfast together at Barney’s. Then we’d head to Central Park, and my parents would head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to enjoy world-class art in world-class air-conditioning.
It wasn’t until after breakfast when we were back in the Petersmobile grabbing water bottles that we hit a snag.
“Here.” Mom handed me a tube of sunscreen.
“You just saw me put it on,” I said.
“You’re going to be out all day. You’ll need to reapply.”
“Fine.” There was no way I was going to put more of this glop on, but I put it in the backpack I was using for water bottles and snacks anyway.
“And you should all wear hats,” Dad said. “Seriously, this sun is no joke.”
“Henry doesn’t like hats. They hurt his ears.” Zoe stood up from her bed, a sheet tied around her like a sling, a squirming lump hanging across her chest. “We’re ready.”
“Zo, you can’t take Henry,” Mom said.
“But he’s never ridden the carousel.”
“You’re not going to be able to carry him around like that all day,” Dad said.
“I can. Watch.” Zoe marched from the back of the Airstream up to the driver’s seat. “See!” She spun around, and Henry dropped to the floor.
“There’s just no way, sweetie. I’m sorry.” Mom tried to put sunscreen on Zoe’s cheeks, but she pulled away.
“But I promised!” All the white spaces between Zoe’s freckles were going red. This was headed nowhere good fast.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can take him.”
“See,” Zoe said.
“How?” Mom asked.
I had no idea how.
Dad picked up Henry. “He’s small, but there’s no way Zoe can carry him around all day.”
The Doughnut King Page 14
