by A. Destiny
Add hot sauce and you had my favorite food in the world.
I tried not to inhale too deeply. Why torture myself?
This turned out to be a good tactic for another reason. The wonderful aroma from the kitchen was suddenly replaced by another scent—acrid and musky.
What is that?! Burnt seaweed? Charred kale? I thought desperately. Is that what the vegetarians have to eat?!
“Hi, roomie!”
Annabelle practically skipped up to the table and smiled at me.
I should have known that someone like Annabelle—with her long, earth-goddess ringlets and her jangly third-world jewelry—would be a vegetarian. And not just an “oh, burgers make me bloated” vegetarian. No, she was definitely going to be one of those “save the world with soy!” types. With her willowy, muscular limbs, she looked like someone who existed on a diet of Swiss chard, quinoa, and yoga.
“Oh, hi,” I said, smiling weakly. “So you’re a vegetarian? I mean, er, you’re a vegetarian too?”
“Of course!” Annabelle said. “I mean, how could you not be?!”
Then she launched into another cheery diatribe, her pretty brown eyes sparkling.
“. . . and oh my God, the corn subsidies . . . and methane gas . . .”
As she went on (and on and on), Annabelle tossed her hair back over her shoulder. Another wave of the smoky smell hit me.
“Um, did you just do that smudging thing in our room?” I asked her.
“Yesssss!” Annabelle said rapturously. “It was incredible, Nell. I wish you’d been there. Talk about a total melding of the spirit, the corporeal, and nature, you know?”
No, I really, really don’t, I thought.
I must have looked grossed out in addition to confused, because Annabelle lifted a hank of her hair to her nose to give it a sniff.
“I know,” she admitted. “I totally reek.”
I laughed. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but . . .”
“Whoa, what’s that smell? Is that burnt sage?”
Annabelle and I both pivoted as a boy approached our table with a wrinkled nose. He was tall and lanky and had sand-colored curls that were just a little too long. His face was tan and freckly and pretty cute.
Annabelle jumped to her feet to face him. I braced myself. Was she going to launch into a lecture about respecting nature (even when nature smelled like overripe shoes)? Maybe she would try to explain that spiritual-corporeal melding thing to him.
But instead Annabelle just said, “Um, sorry about that.”
Then, after giving the boy a long look, she added, “I’m Annabelle.”
She pulled out the chair next to her, inviting the boy to sit down.
He smiled, big and toothy.
“I’m not a vegetarian,” he said. “So I don’t think I’m supposed to take a spot here. But I wish I could have some of that sage dish I smell. It reminds me of this butternut squash soup my grandma used to make.”
“Oh, so you like that scent?” Annabelle asked.
The boy shuddered. “No way! My grandma was a terrible cook. But she was the best grandma. That smell makes me miss her.”
The boy looked at the ceiling, his eyes a little distant as he clearly lost himself in some happy, if foul-smelling, memory.
When he came back to earth, he seemed to really see Annabelle for the first time, instead of just smelling her. His eyes went from murky to riveted. There was another long pause before he seemed to realize that he needed to say something. Anything.
“I’m”—the boy’s eyes flickered to the big green V on our table—“not a vegetarian.”
He’d said this once already. But this time, his voice was full of regret.
Annabelle’s shoulders sagged a bit too.
“Well,” she said, “I guess you better find a seat then. . . .”
“Owen,” the boy said.
He stuck his hand out, and Annabelle looked at it in surprise before giving it a shake.
Owen laughed self-consciously.
“Sorry,” he said, “that’s another thing my grandma did—made me shake hands whenever I met someone new. I know it’s kind of dumb, but I can never seem to lose the habit.”
“Oh,” Annabelle breathed.
I frowned at her back. Where was her lecture about honoring one’s heritage or whatever?
As Owen headed across the dining hall, Annabelle watched him go with eyes as soft as melted chocolate.
“Annabelle,” I whispered to her. “Did you hear what the guy said? He’s not a vegetarian. Don’t you have some, y’know, opinions about that?”
“Hmmm?” she said vaguely. She was still staring after Owen, still speechless.
I noticed people starting to walk through the dining hall and remembered how meals worked at Camden. A few people from each table fetched big platters of food from the kitchen’s service window. Then we ate our meals family-style off handmade crockery dishes and rustic cloth napkins. The idea was that tablemates would get to know one another more easily if they were constantly passing the potatoes.
When I was a kid at Camden, everybody at my table quickly learned that Nanny took her iced tea with a brimming tablespoon of simple syrup, that my little brother lived on bread and butter alone, and that I would hog the drumsticks on fried chicken night.
Today I figured I would hear everyone’s vegetarian backstories. They’d probably talk about caged chickens and overfed pigs and insist that tempeh tasted even better than steak. After that, skulking away to eat meat at one of the other tables would become an impossibility, or at least, incredibly awkward.
With a sigh of resignation, I stood up to go fetch one of our table’s sad, tasteless, not-meat dishes. But as I turned to head to the kitchen, I narrowly missed crashing into a platter full of gloppy broccoli casserole.
“Ah!” I said, jumping backward.
That’s when I saw who was holding the platter.
It was that fiddle student, Jacob.
“Oh, hi,” I said. “So you’re a vegetarian too.”
Jacob cast a fishy glance at the giant green V that marked our table.
“Yeah, but what’s with the scarlet letter?” he whispered. “I mean, even if it’s not red, it’s kind of in your face, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t that the point?” I replied, also whispering. “You know, to make people think twice about eating meat?”
“Well, if that’s your point . . . ,” Jacob said. Now he was directing his fishy look at me.
“No!” I blurted. “Not even close. I’m not even veg—”
I clamped my mouth shut just in time. I glanced over Jacob’s shoulder at the kitchen.
“There’s more food up there, I hope?”
“Yup,” Jacob said, putting his casserole onto the table with a thunk. “I’ll help you.”
As we walked toward the window, he added, “I’m glad it’s not just, like, salad, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to reserve my answer until after I’ve tasted the casserole,” I said. We reached the kitchen. The vegetarian food was placed on the left edge of the window’s counter, far from the platters of crispy chicken parts. I gave the fried meat a longing stare before grabbing some coleslaw and a basket of rolls. Jacob got a bowl of pickled beets and some deviled eggs.
“So, Annabelle’s your roommate, right?” Jacob asked as we began wending our way back through the crowded dining hall. At this point, the torturous smell of the chicken was practically tangible. I found myself dodging plumes of the aroma, the way you sidestep travelers in a busy airport.
“Yeah,” I answered. “She seems cool. Very . . . informative.”
“She kind of reminds me of my older sister,” Jacob said. “Last summer, before she started her freshman year at Cornell, she acted like she had a PhD in life. It was like she knew everything about everything. One month in, she started calling my parents and crying about how dumb she felt.”
I snorted. “Well, that story’s encouraging-slash-discouraging,” I said
.
“I was going for funny-hyphen-sympathetic,” Jacob said, “but I’ll take encouraging-slash-discouraging.”
Then he smiled at me.
It was such a bright smile, it made me wonder if he’d stopped thinking of me as my grandmother’s handbag.
Just before we reached our table, I glanced at the basket of fluffy Parker House rolls in my hand.
“White bread,” I reported to Jacob. “I have a feeling Annabelle’s not going to like this. She seems like a sprouted wheat kind of girl.”
“Maybe it would help if she made a sandwich out of these,” Jacob said, holding up his tray of deviled eggs. “If you ask me, mayonnaise makes everything taste better.”
“Then you’ll feel right at home here,” I said. “We definitely have a bit of a mayo fixation in the South.”
“I guess it goes with the twang?” Jacob said.
“Well, that I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Since I don’t have a twang.”
We’d arrived at our table. As he put down his serving dishes and took a seat, Jacob raised one eyebrow at me.
“What?” I demanded, sitting down myself. Only after I scooched my chair in and grabbed my napkin did I realize that I’d plunked myself into the chair next to Jacob’s, even though there were three other open seats at the table, including one next to Annabelle. It had felt so natural, I hadn’t even thought about it.
Meanwhile, Jacob was still doing that skeptical eyebrow thing.
“Excuse me, I do not have a twang,” I said. “Twangs are country, and I’ve lived in a big city my whole life. Now Nanny—she’s got the twang.”
“Listen, I love Southern accents,” Jacob said, unfolding his napkin. “They’re kind of musical, aren’t they? There’s a rhythm to all those extra syllables. And ‘y’all.’ How awesome is ‘y’all’?”
I grinned and rolled my eyes.
“Oh, you Northerners,” I teased. “You think we’re so quaint, don’t you? Never mind that that’s kind of condescending.”
“Well, why do y’all care if y’all don’t have a Southern accent?” Jacob said. He gave me another sly glance as he scooped broccoli casserole onto his plate.
This time, I laughed outright.
“Um, that’s not exactly how you use it,” I said. “Y’all is plural, and I am singular.”
“But you do say y’all?” Jacob asked.
“Of course I say y’all,” I said with a shrug. “How else am I supposed to talk to people? Plural people, that is.”
“Up north we say ‘you guys,’ ” Jacob said.
“Well, that’s just wrong,” I said, giggling.
I turned away from him to check out the other vegetarians at our table. Most of them were girls whose style echoed Annabelle’s. They had hair that tumbled romantically down their backs and bohemian clothes. Their eyes were alert, almost hungry. I wondered if they were on the lookout for cute boys and if they counted Jacob as one of them.
There was also a younger girl, maybe eleven, but you could tell she wanted us to think she was older. She wore a tank top and cutoff jeans and boots laced up to the knee. She’d chalked an electric-blue stripe into her shiny brown hair. She was listening intently to Annabelle, clearly trying to look like she knew what my roommate was talking about.
“. . . and Sadie, don’t even get me started on GMOs . . . I mean, really, it’s an issue of public health, don’t you think?”
“Mm-hmm!” Sadie said.
The corners of Jacob’s mouth were doing that twitchy thing again.
“Annabelle,” he said, after taking a big bite of his lunch, “I’m not sure what public health officials would say about this broccoli casserole. There’s a lot of cheddar going on in there.”
“Oh,” Annabelle said, her face falling.
She looked like she’d never even used the word “casserole” before, much less eaten one.
“I hate to break it to you, Annabelle,” I said, “but you’re in the South now. It’s not tofu country.”
“What about salad?” Annabelle asked desperately. “Is it salad country?”
“Sure, there’s gelatin salad, ambrosia salad, Waldorf salad, that coleslaw,” Jacob said, motioning to the creamy cabbage that was being passed around the table. “Is that what you mean? You do like mayonnaise, don’t you?”
As Annabelle’s caramel-colored cheeks went a little pale, Jacob laughed.
“Sorry,” he said. “My mom’s always on a diet. The only mayo in our house is this really gross, fat-free goop. She won’t even buy cheese. So I’m kind of in love with this lunch.”
“Just add it to the list of stuff you adore about this place,” I said with a little laugh.
“I better love it,” Jacob replied. “I bagged about two tons of groceries to pay for it.”
“Oh,” I whispered.
Faculty families always got their room and board for free, and their class tuition was heavily discounted. So I’d never thought about how expensive it was for the regular students. Now I felt like a jerk.
“So . . .” I searched for another topic and decided, lamely, to go the way of the big green V. “What’s your reason for being a vegetarian?”
“It’s kind of corny,” he said. “My family had a potbellied pig for a while.”
“No, really?!” I said.
Jacob laughed.
“I know, it’s goofy, but my dad’s allergic to dogs and cats, and he really wanted us to have a pet,” he said. “So he got us this tiny little pig—Sally. She was really cute, I’ve got to admit. She was white, just like the pig in Charlotte’s Web.”
“And then what?” I said apprehensively. I could tell this story wasn’t going in a good direction. Did Sally end up as their Christmas ham?
“Well, let’s just say that if you want your potbellied pig to stay little and cute,” Jacob said, “you have to keep her on a very strict diet. Sally got sort of huge. We eventually had to give her to a petting zoo.”
“Oh, that’s so sad,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Jacob said matter-of-factly. “Sally’s much better off there, and she makes a lot of kids happy. We go visit her every once in a while. And now, none of us can go near a ham sandwich. It’s been five years since we had Sally, and even my dad hasn’t caved. And this is a guy who used to put bacon on everything, even ice cream.”
“Wow, go Sally,” I said with a laugh. “But what about chicken and steak and stuff?”
Jacob shrugged.
“My family eats those things, but I just don’t want them anymore. Once you start imagining your pork chop with your pet’s face on it, it’s pretty easy to make that connection with all meat. It wasn’t hard to give it up.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, even though I seemed to be having trouble forgoing fried chicken for one lousy meal.
I took a bite of pickled beet and tried not to wince at its vinegary sweetness. Then I switched back to the broccoli casserole, chewing miserably. Despite the fact that the casserole was creamy and cheesy and sprinkled with fried onions—not exactly prisoner’s rations—I, once again, felt trapped.
If I was home, I complained to myself, I could be eating whatever I wanted right now. I wouldn’t be pretending to be a vegetarian or a blacksmith. I could just be me.
On the other hand, the me at home was a Finlayson.
I could never escape that.
If I were anything like Jacob, I thought, I wouldn’t want to escape it. I’d be psyched to see my name in liner notes, even if nobody reads liner notes anymore. I’d think of Camden as a gift, not a jail.
Maybe I’d look forward to hanging out with a bunch of other fiddlers in Nanny’s log cabin classroom.
Maybe I’d even be up for a duet with this way-too-earnest vegetarian who had ocean-colored eyes and a thing for mayonnaise and Southern accents.
Maybe . . .
But the fact was, I wasn’t anything like Jacob. So, I told myself, there wasn’t any point in thinking about those things.
C
hapter Five
Until the next day, my first day of class, I’d never actually seen what went on in the dark, mysterious blacksmithing barn. I’d only glimpsed the plumes of black smoke emerging from its stovepipe chimneys. And I’d heard weighty, rhythmic clangs coming through the grimy, half-open windows. Most of all, I’d seen the blacksmithing students around campus.
They always seemed to sit together in the dining hall (definitely not at a vegetarian table). Their skin always had a sooty, sweaty sheen. Their nails were permanently rimmed in black, and their hair was dusted with ash.
I’d felt like such a badass when I’d signed up for the class. Nothing seemed more different from playing the violin than pounding on molten metal with a very large hammer.
But now, as I slipped through the tall, heavy barn doors, I did not feel tough or brave. I felt small. And for a girl who’d hit five feet seven inches before I even stepped foot in high school, that was a feat.
Everything in the barn seemed to be oversize—the long, thick-legged tables with blackened steel tops, the two massive, blazing forges, the hammers and tongs and other tools dangling from a network of hooks on the wall. The students, too, were big. The kind of big that made you wonder if they’d gone through puberty at age ten. They looked like they all played football when they weren’t at Camden—any position that tackled. Either that, or they operated all the heavy machinery on their families’ farms. They had meaty arms, enormous, clompy boots, and chins that were mottled with either scruff or soot.
There were no other girls.
When I arrived, the guys were already busy grabbing tools and carving out workstations. They clearly were returning students who knew what they were doing.
“Look who we have here!” said a man who was clearly the instructor. He’d spotted me cowering by the doors. “You must be Annie’s granddaughter. When Mrs. Teagle told me you were taking my class, I couldn’t believe it. You’re going to risk your fiddler’s fingers in here?”
Reflexively I curled my hands into fists and slipped them behind my back.
“Um, what?” I said. “I thought losing fingers was more of a woodworking thing.”
“Relax,” the man said, laughing as he clomped over to me in his big, lace-up boots. “We haven’t lost a finger in years! Now as for thumbs . . .”
