14
“Did you and Kyle have a fight?” Andrea asked as soon as I walked into her office. I hadn’t even closed the door behind me.
“Hello to you, too,” I said, sitting down in the chair across from her.
“I never see him in the dining hall,” she continued. “Only at The Horse.”
“I didn’t know you frequented The Horse.” I certainly didn’t those days. When I wasn’t working in the dining hall, I was either in my apartment watching the most recent season of Never Have I Ever (an excellent show), or I was on a date with Heath. We had gone bowling and to an escape room. We made out behind a set of funhouse mirrors that we stumbled upon. It felt a lot like a high school relationship, except I didn’t have to go home to my parents. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it was a hell of a lot less complicated than dealing with Kyle.
“Once in a while, a girl needs a five-dollar Long Island Iced Tea,” Andrea said, tapping a pen absentmindedly on her desk. I shuddered thinking of the quality or lack thereof in those well liquors. “But I hear things.”
Of course, she does. “Everything with Kyle and me is complicated. Even when we try not to let it be, it somehow still is.”
Andrea pushed a single sheet of paper in front of me. It was the latest copy of The Underground Stallion . “Looks like it’s gotten more so.”
There were side-by-side pictures of me in black and white. The one on the left was the shot of Kyle and me kissing that we knew would emerge eventually, and here it was. On the right was a photo of Heath and me at the pub in Portsmouth. Our very first kiss. How did someone capture that? I hadn’t seen anyone there who had looked in the least bit familiar, or even anyone under the age of twenty-one. Underneath the images—in bold, all-caps text—it posed the question:
LOVE TRIANGLE?
I didn’t bother to read the short article that followed and pushed the paper back at Andrea. “I very recently started seeing a guy who lives in town. A paramedic.”
“Yes,” she said, pointing back at the article. “Heath Davis.”
I grabbed it back off the desk. “They know his last name? I just learned his last name the other day.”
“Never underestimate The Underground Stallion ,” she said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. “Look, you’re the least of my worries right now. Things aren’t good. As you know, there are people protesting that piece of art day and night. Usually, we get a surge of applications this time of year because people become fed up with their local public schools around October for whatever reason, and I think Admissions has gotten maybe two in the past week. Word has gotten out about all of this, and it’s fucking embarrassing.” I had never heard Andrea swear like that. The poor woman was stressed.
“You gotta wonder about those two who applied, right?” I posed, trying to inject some levity. I turned toward the window, which was cracked open enough that I could hear a woman screeching into a megaphone about neighbors’ rights to be free of smut.
“They’re probably the next reporters for this rag,” Andrea grumbled, balling up the sheet of paper and aiming it at the recycling bin. She missed the shot. “I need your basketball player to teach me how to play.”
“Okay, so Midsy,” I said, ready to shift gears. “Tell me what you need from me.”
Andrea groaned. “First of all, everyone on staff needs to call it by its formal name. It’s ‘Night of a Thousand Laughs.’ We have been trying to keep the humor aspect of the evening but move it away from scandalous pranks. Instead, we will have performances set up around campus that night. The improv troupe will perform in the auditorium. Then everyone will move to the gym for all three a cappella groups, who will entertain us with lighthearted selections.”
“Like what?” I asked, imagining Weird “Al” Yankovic or something along those lines.
“I believe the coed group—the Ponies—is planning to sing Harry Nilsson’s classic ‘Coconut’ song.”
“Okay,” I said with a yawn. I was ready to get to the part where she told me all the things I was responsible for.
She gave me a pointed look and continued. “And then we travel to the amphitheater for the faculty rock band.”
“It’s going to be maybe forty degrees out.”
“We’ll be providing hot chocolate and cider, plus we take attendance at each stop,” she replied. Which meant I would be making these warm refreshments happen. “Besides, I want to keep everyone moving and make them very tired. And then, finally, they will venture to the dining hall for a late breakfast and karaoke.”
“That’s where I come in. In addition to everything before that.”
Andrea put her glasses back on her face and spun her laptop around so I could see it. On the screen were pictures of students very nicely dressed, sitting formally at a meal. “We also have a candlelit dinner to precede all the festivities. This is from last year before all hell broke out on this campus with the leadership. So, a nice dinner, followed by entertainment all around Rockwood with desserts available at each stop, and then a midnight breakfast.”
My head was spinning. “I need to serve them dinner and then breakfast like six hours later?”
She nodded. “Yes. We’re going to exhaust them. Then stuff their bellies and send them to bed.”
“So that they won’t terrorize the campus.”
“Precisely.”
I sat back in my chair and paused. “How well has this plan worked in the past?”
“Not well,” Andrea admitted. “But we’ve added the karaoke and breakfast, plus the faculty rock band. We’re hoping this will all add to their fatigue, and they’ll be too tired for hijinks.”
“Is a faculty rock band that much of a draw?” I couldn’t imagine who would be involved in such a thing unless it was made up of the twenty-two-year-old teachers. But given how early it was in the school year, it was unlikely they would even know about this “opportunity,” let alone have time to organize and practice.
“Oh, students find them amusing,” Andrea said with an air of distance like she was thinking of a million other things. She could have been distracted by the protestors, who were now chanting, “Connelly is a creep. Connelly is a creep.” She sifted through some stacks of books and paper until she found an old yearbook. “Here’s a picture from a while back. Ryland Dennis is the lead guitarist.”
I almost gagged but held back. “Fantastic,” I said with as little emotion as possible. “Do you care what I serve them at these meals and various dessert and hot beverage stations? Or should I just come up with something?” My questions hedged on the border of sarcasm, and I knew I was taking a risk. As ridiculous as Andrea could be, she still was my boss, and I didn’t have any great employment options at that moment. And up until my schism with Kyle, I kind of was enjoying my time at Rockwood. Minus Ashlyn and the prying cell phone cameras of The Underground Stallion , of course. I loved my apartment; the fall had been warm and beautiful, and there was an ease and comfort to living on campus. I just wished Andrea wouldn’t keep springing these events on me.
“Whatever you want,” she muttered. “Just don’t let Marnie put anything in a box.”
“She hasn’t tried to do that in a while,” I replied. “Well, except for the box lunches we sent along on the geology field trip. But those were supposed to be in boxes.”
“She’s odd, right?” Andrea asked, her glasses slipping down on her nose. It was a strange question for such a quirky person to ask.
“Um, I don’t know. She takes me by surprise sometimes. I was not expecting to see her working at The Barnacle.”
“She’s a mystery. I put her in charge of dining temporarily because she’s been here the longest, but I soon regretted that. Just because someone is pushing fifty doesn’t mean they’ll be a good manager.” Andrea sighed when her office phone rang. The light on it had flashed multiple times since I had been meeting with her, but this was the first time her assistant had patched the call through. “Hello, Andrea Lark,” she said in a weary voice. “Oh, yes,” she continued, sitting up a bit straighter. “That’s fine. Tomorrow at ten works for me… I’ll see you then.” She hung up and stared at me for a moment. Her eyes looked sad and a bit desperate. “That was the New York Times . They want to visit the campus and interview me. If I had said no, they would write the article without my input. The last thing I need is for only protestors’ voices to be heard. People should get the other side, too.” She drummed her fingers on the desk and looked back up at me. “Devon?”
“What would you like me to prepare for the reporter?” I asked, knowing where this was going. “Cookies?”
“ Those cookies,” she said, looking back toward the window and the sounds of the protests. “You know which ones.”
...
“Are you sure this is a good time?” Adrienne asked as she arrived in the kitchen. It was mid-afternoon, lunch was cleaned up, and dinner preparations were starting, but as dining hall operations went, this was one of the quieter times of the day.
“Sure,” I said, getting out the ingredients for the cookies. I saw Marnie watching us interact out of the corner of her eye, and I wondered how much she knew. It was odd; students who weren’t part-time employees didn’t frequent the kitchen, and it was known to most people that Adrienne was not a student in need of extra cash. I decided to ignore Marnie and focus on Adrienne the best I could. “I make these cookies a lot, but Ms. Lark requested some for a meeting tomorrow, so I figured that would be a good first project for us to work on together.”
“I like these cookies,” she said. “I remember you bringing some to my house a few times. My dad liked to put ice cream in the middle of two of them and make sandwiches for us. He sometimes even rolled them in sprinkles for me. That was good.”
“Doesn’t sound like something your mom would approve of,” I said with trepidation. I didn’t know where the line was regarding what I could say about Adrienne’s parents, so everything felt like a test.
Adrienne scoffed. “He only did that when she was gone. She prefers him to subsist on a kale salad diet—hold the dressing. But enough about them. They make me miserable. How do I make cookies?”
I made myself temporarily forget whose child she was and launched into all of it: why the butter and eggs had been sitting on the counter in advance, why I liked using organic sugar in the recipe, how I had come to the conclusion that both semisweet and white chocolate chips belonged in these cookies, and why I chilled balls of dough on the baking sheets for thirty minutes before popping them into the oven. “I hated my science classes in high school and college, but I love the science behind baking. This makes sense to me,” I relayed to her. “And the results are far more delicious than anything I ever made in a lab.”
Once the dough was prepared, Adrienne took the small ice cream scoop and began carefully dropping scoops on the parchment-lined cookie sheet. “Does this look okay?” she asked.
“You got it,” I said. “What do you want to make next week? It’ll be right before Midsy, so it’s going to be a little crazy, but if you want to come in for some of the preparations, I’m happy to have you here.”
Adrienne shifted a bit on her feet and glanced at me with an air of nervousness. “Could this be an internship?”
I sensed something very uneasy from her. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess so. I could help you write it up if you want, but I’ll be honest: I have no idea what I’m doing. Any particular reason why you want to classify it as an internship?”
Adrienne took a deep breath. “As you know, my high school experience has been, shall we say, disjointed. I have gone to so many schools, and my grades are all over the place. I don’t play sports or do activities.”
“I thought you rode horses,” I said, thinking of her renegade ride to Walden Pond.
“I did, but I hated being told what to do. And the girls at my stable were bitches. So, I quit that. Anyway, I don’t have much except a record of getting kicked out of prestigious schools. But I’m going to try to stay at this one, even though I’m nervous about the whole Connelly thing.”
“It’s his art, not yours, so please don’t worry about this controversy affecting you,” I said, trying to reassure her. What a strange boomerang life was, bringing the daughter of my former lover back to my kitchen, seeking an internship from me. “I want to help you, Adrienne. If you can commit to weekly meetings with me where we continue to work through more complex recipes and kitchen skills, I’ll be able to write you a kickass recommendation letter. If you want to use that for college or anything else you want to do in life, it should help.”
“Thanks,” she said. “That’s what I was hoping for. The Connelly thing makes me nervous more than anything else. Like I’m constantly feeling dread every time I walk past it or hear the protestors. I don’t even know him. I’m not sure why it bothers me.”
“It should calm down soon,” I said, probably with too much optimism. I had no idea what would actually happen. “But in the meantime, you’ll show your motivation and maturity by working with me on a regular basis. It’ll help for anything you decide to do. I’m in.”
“Thanks, Devon,” she said. “No matter what happened with you and my family, I know you’re a good person. I heard my dad tell my mom that.”
“I’m sure that went over really well.”