Page 9 of Best Served Hot

It was definitely my imagination. I was losing it a little. “I don’t need your byline and your health benefits. I am the future, and you are the past.”

Bennett, Ryan the Rhino, and their third friend seemed to shrink a little bit beneath the force of my voice. Ryan actually took a step back. But Bennett swallowed hard and forced out, “That’s a shame. Remember when I said the food pages of the Scroll were expanding? If you really could prove it, I bet that and a good word from me could get you in. At least an interview. Maybe even a column.”

For a moment, all I could see were those blue-gray eyes behind his glasses, and the frames seemed almost like windows to another world. One where we were working side by side for the New York Scroll. Those eyes squinted in laughter as I cracked a joke across our shared desk. (Why was I sharing a desk in my own fantasy?) They widened in impressed enjoyment as they read my first column, one that persuaded stodgy old print readers to get out of their comfort zone and try new things.

But I couldn’t back down now. So my hair and I glared him down, and I thought so hard about how I didn’t want that, that I almost believed it. He glared back, and the air practically sizzled between us. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the grass actually burst into flame.

He was the first to look away, and I found myself a little disappointed when he did, as if the sizzle had been the thing keeping me standing. I stumbled back a step, then two. “Well, I’m not going to waste any more of my time,” Bennett announced. “I’m going to go eat more delicious food.” He took a step back. “You might want to find a hair tie.”

“You might want to find a hair tie!” I called after his retreating back, which, I admit, was not one of my finest comebacks. I turned to Alice, feeling a little sheepish, at least until I noticed she was still holding my phone up in front of her. “Wait, have you been filming this whole time?”

She lowered it, goggling at me. “You didn’t tell me to stop.”

My first instinct was to sigh and grab my phone and delete it all, but I paused after the second step, phone in hand. My interaction with Bennett played silently out on the screen, and yes, I did look extremely fierce.

Maybe I could use this, I thought, and didn’t realize I’d murmured it aloud until Alice said, “What?”

4

For much of the country, Sunday was a day of rest. The Sabbath. Not for me, and not just because I wasn’t Christian. The afternoon after the food festival found me at my laptop in my little bedroom, occasionally glancing wistfully out the window between editing work at the quiet Brooklyn street of brick row homes and my one sad tree.

I was lucky enough that my work at Mr. Decker’s allowed me to do a lot of other work on company time, but I didn’t have my photo or video editing software at the office. Which meant that weekends were my time for editing. I’d already touched up my photos from the food festival that I’d be including in my post—no major filters or anything; I just wanted to quiet any distracting background noise, make the colors of the food really pop, and edit out some of my extra frizz. Now I was left staring at the video of me and Bennett yelling at each other, our voices loud and clear over the buzz of people in the background.

Watching it made me want to yell in chorus with my past self.

Though now I could catch the part of his speech I’d missed the first time, after he’d told me he’d never review “a place like this” in hallowed print, when I’d gotten so pissed off that my thinking had drowned him out. He’d gone on to say that he was here to capture some highlights from the day on social media, because part of the deal of him getting this restaurant critic job was that he’d share a lot of his behind-the-scenes life online, which was new for the paper (they had robust food social media pages with cooking and recipes, but not so much restaurant or fine-dining stuff). That was actually who the guy who wasn’t Ryan the Rhino was: a social media intern from the Scroll.

Guilt flickered inside me at the thought of my behavior in front of him, but it quickly roared into a blaze of anger. How dare he swagger in to do exactly what I did and then proceed to make fun of me for doing exactly what he was trying to do. What a jerk. The Scroll deserved to go out of print if that’s how their employees were going to talk about other people.

My phone buzzed. A text from Alice. Did you decide what you’re going to do with the video yet? Before I could respond, another buzz. You should just delete it and forget it. Focus on your own code.

I assumed those were words of wisdom from her workplace, but they applied to me, too. I couldn’t control what Bennett did, or what the Scroll did. All I could control was my own screen. And sometimes—I thought ruefully, glancing at the video—not even that.

And yet, the anger was still boiling away in my chest. Shouldn’t the people know what the Scroll thought of them? Shouldn’t the people who would follow them online and see what they had to say be aware of what their food critic thought of them and of people like me?

It doesn’t hurt to edit the video into something usable, I told myself. You don’t have to post it right away. You can think about it first.

So that’s how I spent the next hour or so. Fixing the sound so that Bennett’s and my voices came through clearly and didn’t get drowned out by background noise. Editing out pauses and awkward coughs. Not changing anything either Bennett or I said, or cutting anything out to make it sound like either of us said something that we didn’t—that would be wrong. Just cleaning it up. Blurring out Bennett’s and the other guys’ faces, because yeah, I was mad, but I wasn’t going to tank Bennett’s whole career because of it. Editing in pauses so that I could write in some reactions in text and emojis.

When my phone buzzed again, I jumped. I’d never gotten back to Alice, so I assumed it was her, but the name that flashed on the screen was my roommate’s. You still alive in there?

A smile twitched at my lips. Most of the roommates I’d lived with in New York (aside from Alice in college) wouldn’t have cared if I’d died in my room. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have much cared if they’d died in their rooms, either. Sometimes I thought I’d rather have a ghost as a roommate than the girl who never washed her dishes until roaches were eating her crusted-on food or the guy who brought random club hookups in every weekend until one stole his laptop.

But Marcus was different. Yeah, he was a Craigslist roommate like most of the others, and it wasn’t like we were best friends hanging out every night, but we sometimes watched Chef Supreme together in the living room and shared our kitchen staples. And he cared about whether I’d died, which was really nice considering I’d only been in here for—

My eyes bugged out as I saw the time. “It’s been seven hours?” How could it be nine o’clock already? I never lost myself inside my work, no matter how much I loved it. I might be able to hold my bladder for ages, but I never forgot to eat. As if it was furious with me, my stomach let out the loudest growl I’d ever heard. I gave it a pat. “I’m so sorry!” When I stood, my knees cracked, and my back groaned. I winced. My looming thirtieth birthday had never looked less appealing. “Let’s feed you.”

I hustled out of my room to find Marcus sprawled out on the scuffed white couch left here by a past roommate, something with a laugh track blaring on the TV. The framed poster of the New York City subway map—also left behind by a previous roommate—hung slightly crooked above him. He clapped his hands when he saw me. “She lives!”

“She’s starving,” I said grimly, but I smiled. Marcus was wearing worn-in blue basketball shorts and no shirt, the scars from his top surgery a dark brown against his light brown skin. He’d been self-conscious about them after the surgery and had only recently begun going shirtless around the apartment. I typically didn’t enjoy seeing my roommates in various stages of undress, but my feelings made an exception for him. “Is Edna’s still open?”

My hopes for shrimp roti and curried potatoes deflated fast as Marcus shook his head. Most of the restaurants in the area were small mom-and-pop Caribbean joints that served cheap, delicious food cafeteria-style to the immigrant population and closed relatively early; I could order delivery from farther away, but it would take ages to get here. My stomach growled at me again at the very thought.

Marcus let out an overly dramatic gasp. “Does this mean you’re going to . . . cook?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” I said. “I can cook, you know.”

“When’s the last time you’ve cooked?”