Crush du Jour (3 page)

“So, Laine, tell me a little bit about yourself,” she began, smiling kindly at me.

I cleared my throat, the thick, gagging sound filling the room awkwardly. “Um, well, I’m sixteen, and I go to Hillsdale Public—not now, obviously, since it’s the summer, but during the school year, that’s where I go—”

Okay, so I babble when I’m nervous. What of it?

“—and I love to cook, and I love kids. So I think the chance to work with kids and teach them to cook would be the ideal summer job for me.” I finished my spiel and almost hiccupped, I was so out of breath. I was going to have to pace myself if I didn’t want to hyperventilate. I wasn’t exactly screaming professionalism.

Why
hadn’t I let my mother call in a favor?

“Aha,” she said, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t quite sure what to make of me. “And it says here that you’ve been babysitting for the past three years?”

“Yup,” I confirmed. “I’ve done a lot of babysitting. It’s all on the application. I have references. The ages were five, eight, and eleven. The kids’ ages. Not mine.” Obviously.

“Yes, well, these children will be somewhat older,” Nora warned me. “The age range for our beginning class is eleven to thirteen.”

I couldn’t see any real problem with this, so I just blinked involuntarily for a beat and hoped that I was projecting the
vibe of a person qualified to teach cooking to a bunch of eleven- to thirteen-year-olds.

“You realize that preteens are often rowdy? That this position requires a lot of responsibility and hard work?” she pressed.

“Hard work is my middle name.”

(It’s actually Agnes.)

Nora spent what felt like five hours but was probably more like five minutes shuffling a pile of papers around on her desk. It did not look as though there was any rhyme or reason to this shuffling, other than to make me nervous. Which I was. I mean, when I stack and restack big reams of recycling around in my bedroom, it’s usually to make room for my latest project. No one’s employment fate rested on my own semi-obsessive stacking habits. Finally, she seemed to find what she was looking for.

”I understand that your mother is Madison Harper, the chief restaurant critic for the
Tribune.”

“Yes, she was very excited when she heard about this program,” I said.

“Well, I imagine that you will be a wonderful fit here,” she continued, suddenly peering at me as though I were a gnat under the lens of a ginormous microscope. I couldn’t tell
whether my mother’s job was a good thing or a bad thing. If it got me the teaching gig, then I guessed it was a good thing. But Nora looked as though her personal jury was still out, bubbly though she was.

”Great!” I said, perhaps a shade too enthusiastically. I sat ramrod straight in my chair. I quickly adjusted my posture. I mean, I didn’t want to seem
too
desperate or anything, you know?

“I love the idea of teaching latchkey kids to cook for themselves. I was a latchkey kid, you know. So, I mean, I’m pretty familiar with taking basic recipes and jazzing them up a little bit.”

That was what was going to set me apart from the other contenders, I decided. My jazziness in the kitchen. Anyone could fry up a grilled-cheese sandwich; it took a special sort of visionary to use a hunk of Gruyère instead of American cheese slices.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Nora said. “A few details: The ten-week course runs from mid-June to mid-August. The workshops are held on Saturday afternoons, so you should plan to be working through some of your weekends. We also hold a Fourth of July fund-raiser that’s called Fantastic Fourth;
you might have been to one, or heard of it at one point or another. And our summer programming culminates in a carnival that all of our instructors help plan.”

I nodded briskly, trying to convey seriousness and responsibility. “I’m a good planner,” I offered, fully sincere.

“All that’s left, then, is the mock class.”

My back went rigid all over again. “Urn, huh?” I asked. “Mock what?”

I mean, mock
what?
It was my understanding that I had to walk Nora through a lesson plan; teaching a mock class sounded much more involved. And not a little bit scary.

“The class,” Nora repeated patiently. To her credit, she was being very delicate about the fact that I was clearly slow on the uptake. “You’ll need to improvise a class for me and your potential partner.”

Potential
what-ner?
”Who?”

“Your partner,” Nora said. “Who’s already been assigned. We just need to get a sense of how the two of you would interact together.”

This was starting to make a little bit of sense. Not the kind of sense that I was hoping for, where I’d get the job without having to
jump through any major hoops, but, well, you can’t exactly have your cake and eat it too.

And what does that even mean, anyway? Of
course
you can have your cake and eat it too. That’s the whole point of even having cake to begin with.
Unless
it’s a Bundt cake or one of those disgusting fruitcakes with the tiny pieces of chopped nuts that everyone’s always trying to unload on each other around Christmastime, and—

Oh, right. The interview.

“That’s fine,” I lied smoothly. I could always do a little practice session with Anna, who loved it when I went all Rachael Ray on her. “When would we do this?”

She looked at me, puzzled, for a beat. My heart sank. I had a feeling I knew what was coming next.

She smiled at me, perkier than she’d been throughout the interview. “We can do it right now!”

Three

When I wandered into the rec center, I’d had no idea that, if I got this job, I would (1) be working with a partner and (2) be forced to perform in front of said partner before I could officially be offered the job.

And yet.

Here I was, at 2:46 on a Tuesday afternoon, being marched down the hallway at a determined clip, on my way to meet a person, probably the same age as I, whose first impression of me would determine the rest of my summer. Or at least the rest of the day.

Not that I was opposed to working in twos, to be honest. It was just sort of jarring to be told that I’d be paired up with some random who’d been hired ages ago. What if
we hated each other? What if she was someone whose boyfriend I’d actually flirted with at the Cabana Club once upon a time? (This has been known to happen.)

What if she liked fat-free ice cream?

I shuddered. The walls were a blur of finger paintings and fliers about racial diversity. I was starting to feel dizzy. Just as I was about to completely pass out, Nora stopped in front of a set of industrial double doors and pulled them open.

“Here we are,” she said briskly. “The kitchen.”

Holy heck, she really was going to make me cook.

It was a good thing I was so comfortable with culinary improv.

Past the industrial doors, the space was actually a little bit sad. I don’t know what I was expecting, since obviously a community center wouldn’t be tricked out like the set of
Iron Chef
, but what I found here amounted to several long cafeteria-style tables set up to face a bare-bones facsimile of a kitchen.

However.

Dismal as the kitchen itself may have been, there was one thing in that room that was absolutely … breathtaking.

It was my would-be partner.

The she was a he.

A very-super-extra-adorable he.

Eat your heart out, Laine
.

Even my
brain
thought he was out of my league, that’s how adorable he was.

Good grief. How in the name of all that is yummy and fatty and very, very bad for you (e.g., ice cream, cookie dough, and white frosting out of the tub) was I going to be able to audition with this dude evaluating my every move? Nora really should have mentioned his debilitating (to me, that is) level of hotness.

“Laine Harper, this is Seth McFadden.”

I sighed dreamily. Even his name was cute.

“Hi, Laine.” Seth pushed his squeaky folding chair away from the table and stood to shake my hand.

I quickly rubbed my palms against the front of my jeans to shield Seth from what seemed to be a recent-onset glandular problem.

“Hi.” I stuck my hand out and grabbed his. He had a firm handshake, which impressed me. I had a sneaking suspicion that my own handshake was more of a deft
impression of overboiled pasta. Everything about Seth was confident and well put together, but not in any kind of aggressive, macho-y way. He was almost perfect, in fact—as near as I could tell. Meanwhile, I was sweaty, scattered, and completely unprepared. Awesome.

Sweaty, scattered, and unprepared was a familiar sensation. It meant something, beyond the temperature in the room.

It meant I was crushing, hard.

This was totally unacceptable. I had officially sworn off crushes for this summer. (Seriously. Anna made me a plaque on her computer and everything. It was
official.)

“What are you going to be teaching us today, Laine?” Nora asked sweetly as she pulled out a folding chair of her own and made herself comfortable.

This was it. This was the moment of truth. I had perfect confidence that I could teach a class smoothly enough—if only I could decide what I would be teaching. I had visions of tumbleweeds blowing gently across the landscape of my brain. This was ridiculous. After weeks of playing with sample recipes and experimenting in the
kitchen, suddenly the jukebox in my mind read TILT.

Five seconds in the room with a cute guy, and my brain was already mush. Do you see why a crush would be way too distracting? Anyway, how does that saying go? “Fake it until you make it?” That’s what I needed to do.

I had it. I took a deep breath and pasted a confident smile on my face. “I’ve been a latchkey kid since I was eleven,” I explained, “and I taught myself how to take basic dishes and spice them up—put my own personal flair on them. That’s what I’m going to do with you today!”

I felt not unlike an idiot, speaking to a room full of imaginary eleven-year-olds, but I forged ahead determinedly.

“Anyone can make French onion soup,” I continued, “but what about baking and toasting your own croutons?”

Nora cleared her throat and waved her hands at me. “I don’t think fresh-baked croutons are very practical,” she said. “We don’t have a bread machine here, and I don’t think you’ll have enough time in class to wait for dough to rise.”

I nodded shortly. “Check. No bread.”

“Seth? What would you choose?”

Seth pursed his lips together, appearing to think the question through. After a moment of concentration, he sat up.

“Well, I think sandwiches are a good way to go for one of the earlier lessons, since they’re versatile and also easy. I’d start with cold cuts and cheese. Peanut butter and jelly or other standards can be tricky because of food allergies.”

Ooh. I wanted to wipe the smug expression off his face with a butter knife. But he must have been going in the right direction, because Nora was beaming at him like he’d just single-handedly carved a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey.

“It’s a great idea to start with sandwiches,” Nora gushed. I may have been a little slow this afternoon, but as a general rule I was no dummy. She was totally into Seth and thought he was an awesome instructor. That annoyed me. I liked to be the teacher’s pet. Gross, but true.

“I think week one would be a quick overview of the course, and a refresher on kitchen safety,” Seth added smugly. Nora nodded so enthusiastically that I was afraid
her head was going to snap off at the base of her neck.

OMG, he was
so
the teacher’s pet.

Obviously, sandwiches were not exactly haute cuisine. Technically, sandwiches aren’t even cooking. I had to admit, that sort of bugged me a little bit. Nora and Seth seemed really into precision, whereas I was a little bit more about shooting from the hip in the kitchen. My creativity was the most important thing that I could bring to my students’ table. And it looked like creativity wasn’t what Nora wanted.

But I decided that didn’t matter. The goal, for now, was to get the job. After all, I needed the experience, and I needed the money. I may have found a deli sandwich to be a sort of … uninspired choice for the class, but I needed to find a way to believe in that sandwich, believe in it to my very core.

And believe in that sandwich I did.

“He really said that?
Kitchen safety?”

Anna and I were camped out at Scoops, a local ice cream parlor set up like an old-fashioned soda shop. You know, one of those places that spell it with the extra letters:
SODA SHOPPE. Despite the fact that Anna’s day job had not gotten any easier since the last time I had seen her, my own dire circumstances made an emergency rehash necessary.

Besides, I was doing most of the talking.

“He really did,” I confirmed, slurping forlornly at my root beer float. I narrowed my eyes. “And he disagreed with my choice to teach French onion soup, too. Why, Anna?” I pushed my float away from me and leaned into her, grasping at the collar of her terry-cloth hoodie—
”Why
would someone want to sabotage me that way?”

Anna took a second to pry my vicelike fingers off her person. “I don’t know, Laine,” she replied, pushing me back. “I wasn’t there.”

“But you admit that it’s weird?” I pressed.

Anna sighed. She knew we weren’t going anywhere until she told me what I wanted to hear. “It’s weird,” she agreed, “unless—”

“No, no ’unless’!” I shrieked. A couple at the booth next to us shot me a look. “No ’unless,’” I repeated, this time at a more reasonable volume. “It’s just weird.”

”Unless,”
Anna continued firmly, “he wasn’t trying to sabotage you. I mean,
maybe he just really thinks that cold cuts are the foundation of a healthy latchkey diet.”

“He’s just hot enough to sell that crazy theory, too.” The whole experience had made me extremely flustered and a little bit bitter.

Anna nodded. “That might have something to do with your panic too,” she suggested. “The hotness.”

I snorted. “Unlikely.” She was talking nonsense. I paused for a beat. “How so?” Okay, so I was slightly curious. Can you blame me?