by Chris Negron
“Start here, please, Chef,” Graca says, leading me to Kiko’s beef Wellington. He’s not going to give me a choice. There’s no way out of this.
I sigh, pick up a knife and fork, and slice myself a piece.
When I finish tasting the dishes, finish making all my comments, all the while Graca encouraging me to “be honest,” I’m returned to my booth. The headphones are snapped back over my ears, the blindfold tied tight to my head again. This time I’m grateful to descend into the depths of absolute quiet. It gives me a chance to calm down. Or try to, anyway. This is definitely the weirdest challenge yet. If this is actually the challenge. I’m still not sure I understand what’s even happening.
What I do know is that critiquing all the hard work my friends did felt awful, as bad as cheating on a test or telling a big lie. Even though I didn’t lie. The mushroom duxelles in Kiko’s Wellington was a touch oversalted. Bo’s mole was delicious, but the chicken was overcooked. Pepper’s Rundown seemed way too spicy, and Joey’s squid came out extra chewy.
Every comment I made was true, but I still feel slimy for saying those things out loud. It’s just . . . I know how much focus it takes to make a great dish. But in all the competitions I’d ever entered, I never realized how hard it was to be a judge, to say honestly what you really thought about someone else’s food.
At least the other five were locked up in their booths when I said what I did. They couldn’t possibly hear it. They’d never have to know. And I’d never have to find out what they thought about my soufflé, either. This whole exercise had for sure been what Joey thought it was—a way to confirm we could cook the dishes we’d claimed to make in our videos. Then they made us taste them to prove they were the real thing. Like Bo said, it’s weird that they waited for nearly the end of the competition to do this, but at least it’s over.
So it might not have been the best soufflé I ever cooked. It was a soufflé, and I did cook it. I showed whoever was asking that no one helped me the first time. I mean, as if.
The familiar tap on my shoulder comes once more. Same removal of blindfold and headphones. The only difference this go-around is it’s a black-shirt helping me, and he’s brought a laptop with him. He sets it up on a slim booth shelf I hadn’t noticed before. Lifts the lid, nods at the black screen, then leaves me alone, this time with no blindfold, no headphones.
I swipe a finger across the touchpad. The computer wakes up. A video’s been started but sits paused. Chef Graca’s smiling but frozen face fills up the entire frame. When I click the sideways play triangle, he comes to life.
“Hello, Chef Pith,” the big sous chef says. “Here are today’s results. Please listen carefully to what your competitors thought of your dish. Keep an open mind.”
His face disappears, replaced by a wider shot of Bo issuing a reluctant stare down into my soufflé. My roommate reaches out with a spoon, dips it into my ramekin, tastes what comes back. His tongue flicks out of his mouth like a snake as he assesses my work.
I hear Chef Graca’s voice in the background, even as the camera stays focused on Bo. “Well? What did you think? Be honest, now.”
And Bo, just like I did, hesitates at first. But then, staring off into the distance, he tilts his head. He starts to talk, and each word he says shrinks my heart another size, until all that’s left is about as big as one of those tiny Valentine’s conversation hearts.
The saying written on the remains of my barely pumping muscle is the same as the one I got from Katie Wohlers in first grade, when she handed out a single candy to each classmate.
Mine had read, “Thought U Were Cooler.”
36
“Rubbery!”
Joey makes one full lap around the sectional. Which takes a minute, it’s a pretty big sectional. He stops and spreads his arms out wide, looking at us one by one—first Kiko, then me, next Bo and Pepper, never losing the shocked expression on his face. When none of us replies, his arms flap down to his sides again, hands bouncing off his hips.
“Rubbery!” he repeats, sounding, if possible, even more stunned. He starts another lap.
“Where’s he going?” Bo whispers to me.
“Nowhere,” I say. “None of us is going anywhere.”
He looks up at me strangely. “I would like to be home by Thanksgiving.”
“I know you would, Bo, I know.”
But if he doesn’t realize by now that’s not going to be happening, there’s no use in me being the one to break the news. Not when Wormwood’s already done it. Taylor’s already done it. Our printed schedule’s already done it.
“I was just being honest,” Pepper calls out in Joey’s direction.
“It is very easy to overcook squid,” Kiko tries from near the big windows. She twists toward us to make her comment. Before that, she’d been gazing out at the city with her arms crossed behind her back.
“Did you really think mine was too spicy?” Pepper, sounding horrified, asks, and I turn to answer her but she’s talking to Kiko. “I swear I used the same recipe as always.”
“Maybe I’m not very used to your dish,” Kiko says. “It is my first time tasting this food.”
Pepper’s tone changes. “Oh, so you don’t know what a rundown is supposed to be like. That’s why you got it wrong.”
“She wasn’t wrong. The scotch bonnet is optional,” Bo says. He pulls a chair out at the dining table and sits. “The rundown does not have to be so spicy as yours was.”
“You do not make Jamaican Rundown without a scotch bonnet,” Pepper scoffs. She points at her feet, like she’s letting us know she won’t be moving from the spot she’s standing in, at least not until we all agree with her. “Not in a hundred years you don’t. My grandmother didn’t, my father doesn’t, and I never will.”
“And salty?” Joey says. He veers out from his second rotation around the sectional, heading toward the kitchen. His focus is on Pepper. “My squid was rubbery and my filling was salty? That’s your feedback?”
“Yeah,” Pepper says, softly at first, but raising her voice with each new word. “That’s my feedback. Problem?”
Pepper and Joey’s shouting fills the room. I take slow, backward steps away from them, in the direction of Kiko. “So my soufflé was eggy?” I whisper from the corner of my mouth when I reach her. Last thing I want is to scream about it like Joey is.
I wish I’d tasted my dish when I had the chance. Maybe then I would know if the comments I heard when that video played—too eggy, overcooked, salty—were on the mark or not. But I didn’t understand what recooking our entry dishes would eventually lead to.
I probably still don’t understand what the whole point was.
If it’s possible, Joey’s voice grows even louder. Gazing around the room, waiting for Kiko to respond, I try to work out the real purpose of the exercise we just went through. So . . . maybe remaking our entry dishes wasn’t about the cooking at all. Maybe the Super Chef wanted to cause all this arguing. But why tear us apart? Unless . . . what if he forces us to work together again tomorrow? And we can’t, because of all this fighting still clouding our vision?
Wow. As each day passes, Taylor’s seeming like less of a hero and more and more like that villain I wondered about.
“Guys . . .” Everyone stops.
Joey directs his harshest glower toward my interruption. He wouldn’t be happy to hear how much like Wormwood he looks right now. “What, Pith? You have some new criticism?”
A pit in my stomach yawns open as I shake my head slowly. What if I’m wrong? On the one hand, it doesn’t feel right to keep these guys in the dark and let them crash and burn. But a tiny part of me pictures the latest standings on the giant scoreboard, reminds me I’ve fallen behind again. Maybe if I’m the only one who sees Taylor’s trap coming . . .
So in the end, I say nothing, and soon Joey returns his anger to Pepper.
Next to me, Kiko is looking out the window again, as if she’ll find the answer to my question outside. New York�
�s lights blink in tune with Pepper and Joey’s rapid-fire shouting. “I did think so, yes.” She pinches her fingers together. “Your dish was just a little bit eggy.”
“Honestly? Only a little bit?” Because now that I’ve heard her reaction—and the others, too, she wasn’t the only one who said that—and remembered my steps . . . well, maybe I did overcook it by a minute or so. Which meant it had probably been super eggy, not just a little bit.
This time she shrugs. “Perhaps . . . more than a little.” She smiles nervously at me.
“Thanks,” I say. “I mean, I guess.”
I’m not sure if I’m happy to know or not. There’s nothing I can do to fix it. Which means knowing I messed it up does me no good. Still, I’m somehow grateful for her honesty. She’s only telling me the truth. That one minute. One stinking minute of lost focus.
Thing is, I’ve had way too many of those kinds of minutes lately.
Kiko doesn’t seem to know what else to say. We just stand across from each other for the next few seconds. Behind her, I catch a glimpse of Bo scribbling notes into a pad.
Everyone else, though, continues reacting to today’s exercise with raised voices. “Kiko, come explain to this dufus what ‘salty’ means. Your duxelles was the same. Why is this so hard to understand? Salty is salty.”
Kiko takes a few steps in their direction. She freezes when Joey starts shouting again. Pepper points a finger in his face and gives it right back to him. They’re practically nose to nose.
The sound of the door opening interrupts them. Everybody stops and looks.
It’s Kari. She glances around the dorm while biting her lip. She looks toward Bo.
“Time to get ready, Bo. I’ll be back in twenty minutes to take you to your dinner. The Super Chef is really looking forward to spending some time with you tonight.”
At the table, Bo’s hand stops in mid-scribble, and his jaw drops open so wide I’m afraid he might’ve hurt himself.
37
Monday night, the cheering and crazy applause and foot stomping in the arena is louder than ever before. The five of us linger in our usual waiting area outside the double doors, not even lined up yet. Kari walks in, clipboard in hand, talking into her headset. She lifts up the top piece of paper to read something underneath, and the bold “The Last Super Chef, Challenge #5” text centered on the sheet she’s bending back is as clear as day, even upside down.
For the first time, all five handlers are waiting with us. A few feet away from me, Brett and Bo are talking excitedly. It’s easy to notice, because it’s almost comical the way the farm-fed intern from Wisconsin towers over his Mexican assignee.
Ever since Bo came back from his one-on-one last night, he’s been on cloud nine. Which is amazing considering how nervous he was when he left. As always we have no details on what happened. All we can read is the emotion. Joey’s dancing, Pepper’s smile. Kiko’s quiet confidence. Bo’s excitement.
I guess I’m the only one whose “Evening with the Super Chef” was more like “Nightmare with the Super Chef.” Awesome. From across the room, Mel must notice my crestfallen expression. He approaches me and crouches down to my level.
“Hey,” he says, wearing a rare concerned expression. “You okay?”
He’s always been able to calm me down with that warm smile, those gleaming-white, Hollywood teeth. But now for some reason they seem fake. And it makes me wonder: How far does it go? How many of these people besides Taylor know that he’s my father? Mel? Kari? Wormwood? Graca? Any of them? All of them?
“We haven’t talked about your one-on-one the other night,” Mel continues. “What happened out there?”
At this point, I’m about as interested in having a heart-to-heart with him as I was in having one with the Super Chef, so I make an abrupt move to pull away from him. “We had our meeting. We ate Persian.”
“I know,” he says. “I was watching. ‘Live,’ remember? But that wasn’t the Curtis I’ve gotten to know. Where’d you go?”
Kari suddenly bursts into action behind him. Someone must’ve warned her we’re running behind, because she’s wearing that panicked, everything’s-about-to-fall-apart-but-at-the-same-time-I-have-it-completely-under-control look I see on her face often. “Okay, let’s go. Let’s go! Line up. Curtis, you lead.”
Me?
She grabs my shoulders and starts guiding me toward the doors. Mel nearly falls backward in his hurry to clear out of the way.
“You got this, right?” Kari says into my ear.
Before I can answer, the double doors split down the middle, and the bright lights and cameras are on the Super Five once again. I’m pulled forward by the sheer momentum of Super Chef Arena.
“Welcome,” the Super Chef says from the stage as we file in, “to the last challenge of The Last Super Chef. After tonight, we’ll have just one more day of competition, Thursday’s Thanksgiving finale.”
He pauses, letting the information sink in that we’re as close to the end as we are. “The challenge we’re doing tonight is close to my heart. It relates to some work we had our young chefs put in yesterday.” He gestures toward the big screen behind him again. “Let’s have a look.”
My stomach drops at the thought of another video, flashbacks to the horror of seeing Pettynose’s kitchen on this same screen. If it’s possible, though, this film is even worse. Because it’s us, all five of us, cooking our signature dishes for Graca, the cameras capturing it all—Joey’s complaining, our snippy comments back at him. I catch movement in the corner of my eye and look over in time to see Pepper covering her mouth with one hand.
The scene changes to some of us tasting the other’s dishes. Pepper puckers her lips in disgust after trying Joey’s filling, Kiko frantically reaches for water after swallowing Pepper’s on-fire rundown, Joey almost spits out my soufflé, crying, “Oh, man, way overcooked.” I tell Graca that Bo’s chicken is dry; Bo asks if beef Wellington is supposed to be so salty.
But the worst part is still to come. The arguments.
The screen changes again, and the aerial cameras in the dorm capture us shouting at each other, hanging our heads, making laps around the sectional. Pepper and Joey nose to nose. Kiko waving her hands as she joins their argument, Bo shaking his head at the table. Me, looking confused and mostly alone. Like I have no idea what I’m doing. Like I don’t even belong.
Wormwood shakes her head. “Mmm. Hard to watch.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Chef Taylor says, his face twisted like his heart is broken over what ended up happening. As if he hadn’t planned it from the very beginning of his and Graca’s challenge #5 “preparatory” exercise.
“I say we give them another chance, though,” Wormwood says, before holding up her index finger and glancing at the crowd. “I say . . . let’s cook these dishes one more time!” With each word she points her finger higher in the air. Usually it’s Joey behind me who groans, but tonight the sound comes from my left. Kiko.
The crowd erupts again, joining in with a booming chant. “One more time! One more time! One more . . . !”
I inhale, bite my bottom lip, fight back threatening tears. For the first time during an actual episode, I try to find Kari lurking offstage. Maybe she can help me drop out. Sure, it’s live, yes, it would be embarrassing, but after last night’s meeting, after the video they just showed, can I actually make another soufflé?
Chef Graca steps forward now, rubbing his hands together greedily, the same way he did yesterday. “You heard them, Chefs! Same drill! Into the pantry. Get your ingredients. Let’s do these dishes over. By now you should be able to make them blindfolded.”
Frantic, I scan the sidelines of the arena, looking for the black-shirts to come pouring out of their secret doors with blindfolds. But nothing moves there; Graca was only kidding. Although now that I think of it, blindfolds might come in kinda handy.
Then I wouldn’t have to actually witness what’s about to happen.
38
We
have one hour again, same as yesterday. Plenty of time to make another soufflé, as long as I can convince my brain to stop racing around the inside of my head like a salad spinner.
I’m only dimly aware of Joey and Kiko dancing around each other here in the pantry. Joey’s hand darts in front of Kiko’s face to grab the fennel he needs. He ends up stepping on my foot as he careens away from both of us.
The pain actually helps me focus, somehow reminds me of Tre and Paige circling the bonfire back home, Pettynose chasing them. I blink, breathe deep. Can’t push Paige’s smiling face out of my vision.
There’s still time to win that money for her, still a chance, however slim, to give my sister the life she deserves.
I race for the cheese station and grab the best hunk of gruyère I can find.
Minutes later, I’m ready to slide my ramekins into the oven. Yes, ramekins, as in multiple. I’m determined to taste one this time. I’ve been careful with the salt and other seasonings. I took each step slowly, watching for mistakes. Every fold and whip and turn. Gently, I shut the oven door. Now, just like in Pettynose’s kitchen, there’s only one thing left for me to do. Wait.
I keep peeking through the glass window at my slowly rising soufflé, resisting the urge to open the door. Guesstimating. Praying.
The cameras have been swinging around us the whole hour, zooming in, getting different angles, but for now they focus on the other competitors, the ones still working. I have a rare moment to breathe easy.
Taylor and Graca stand up on the stage while Wormwood paces around the arena. I can’t hear the Super Chef’s hushed conversation with his old Portuguese friend. But just as Chef Wormwood calls out, “Two minutes. Two minutes remaining!” from behind me, I’m able to read the Super Chef’s lips. Eyes on me, he leans toward Graca and whispers, “Overcooked.”
I swear that’s what he says. I’m as sure of it, suddenly, as I am that I’ve overcooked my dish again, that my soufflé will be eggy once more. That all I’ve done with my slow carefulness over the last hour is verify my father’s opinion of me. I don’t belong here. I never did.
