How It Feels to Fly (19 page)

THE FIRST THING WE HAVE TO DO WHEN WE ENTER the campus café's kitchen is put on aprons and chef hats. Like, the tall white puffy hats you see in the movies. Then we have to wash our hands. A lot. When I'm done scrubbing, Dr. Lancaster takes me into the pantry to speak in private.

“Do you know why you're here, Sam?”

I look around at the shelves of cooking supplies. I felt fine as we were walking here, but now the first tendrils of anxiety are slithering in. “Because I have some, um, food issues. But I don't see how—”

“Andrew tells me you've been helping him with breakfast in the mornings.”

“Yeah. I'm usually up early, so I thought, why not pitch in?”

I don't mention that I'm up early because I don't want to
shower or get dressed with anyone else around. Or that I'm actually helping with breakfast to be with Andrew.

“But as we've discussed, you have a hard time eating a lot of what we serve.”

I nod, wary. “This challenge is about cooking, right? Not . . . eating?”

“Do you feel better eating when you know all the components of your dish? When you can assemble it yourself? For instance, at a salad bar?”

“I guess so. Maybe.”

“Do you tend to think of some foods as ‘good' and others as ‘bad'?”

That one's easy. “Yes.”

“What if you knew what ingredients were in the ‘bad' food? What if you knew how the same portion sizes of different foods compared, in terms of nutrition? Eating healthily doesn't have to mean stress and deprivation. Learning to cook can help you take back some of the power food has over you.”

“Okay. . . .” Now I'm really feeling anxious. I want to get on with the challenge. Or skip it entirely. Dr. Lancaster leads me back into the kitchen. Everyone's waiting. So is a pan of lasagna.

How did she know?

Lasagna is one of my mom's biggest no-way foods. And I used to love it.

Make good choices, Samantha.

“Sam?” Dr. Lancaster puts her hand on my shoulder.

I find my words: “Do I have to eat that?”

“Not yet. First, you're going to learn how to prepare it.” Dr. Lancaster introduces the middle-aged woman who will be leading the session. “This is Lisa. In addition to being one of my associate psychology professors, she teaches cooking classes as an elective in the health department.”

“Thanks, Debra,” Lisa says, stepping forward. “So, we're all going to make lasagna today. We'll eat some for lunch, and we'll donate the rest to the science department's all-faculty meeting tomorrow.”

They can have it. I don't want it.

Yes, you do. You crave it. You want every last calorie.

Lisa sets each of us up at a station on the counter, complete with a cutting board, a knife, a lasagna pan, and a basket of vegetables and other ingredients. I'm right next to her. Andrew takes the spot on my other side. I try to focus on his calming presence, not how shaken up I feel.

“Rule number one!” Lisa booms. “No playing with knives. A knife is not a toy.” She points at Zoe, who was already brandishing her chef's knife. Zoe smirks at her but puts the knife down. “Rule number two!” Lisa goes on. “Follow my instructions. I'm really not in the mood to get food poisoning today.”

Dominic snorts. Katie laughs too, but when we make eye contact across the shiny metal counter, she mouths,
You okay?

I nod.

“We'll begin by chopping our vegetables. We have carrots, eggplant, zucchini, and spinach. Everything but the spinach gets cut up.” Lisa pulls out a carrot and begins slicing. Her cuts are fast and even.

“You're like an Iron Chef!” Omar says, sounding delighted.

Lisa beams. “I'll tell Bobby Flay you said so.”

“I love the Food Network,” Omar tells Dominic. “Do you ever watch
Chopped
?”

He shakes his head.

“It's this show where four chefs have to compete, but they don't find out the ingredients until the moment the challenge starts. . . .”

I tune him out. I tune all of it out. I select a zucchini. I begin cutting it slowly, methodically, into slices. I find myself counting as I go, under my breath. Twenty-three zucchini circles. The carrots are next. The first one makes seventeen slices, and the second makes twenty-six. The repetitive motion is nice.
Chop, chop, chop, chop.
I can almost forget that this is food.

But when we start layering noodles and sauce and cheese and veggies, it starts to look like the thing I'm dreading. I'm trying to follow instructions, but it's hard for me to put on as much cheese as Lisa wants. Even though it says “light” on the package, I keep trying to skimp. But Lisa catches me.

“Math problem!” she calls out. “How many servings are in this lasagna pan?”

I stare at it. “Um. Eight?”

“Wrong! Twelve.” She indicates with her knife where the cuts will be. “How many calories are in this package of ricotta?”

I read the label and gulp. “Seven hundred.” That's, like, an entire meal. I have to put the container down fast. I feel gross just touching it.

You
are
gross. So disgusting—

“What is seven hundred divided by twelve?”

“Uh.” I flounder until Dominic rescues me:

“Fifty-eight and a third.”

Katie gapes at him.

“What?” he says. “I'm good at math.”

Lisa takes my chin with two fingers and tips my face up toward hers. “If we use one container of this ricotta on each layer of lasagna, that's just over a hundred and sixteen calories' worth of ricotta in a single serving. How do you feel about that?”

Mortified. I feel mortified. “Better, I guess.”

“And what are these?” She shakes the pasta box at me.

“Whole-wheat noodles . . .”

“Right.”

“So basically, this lasagna is going to taste like cardboard,” Zoe cracks.

“I'm sorry, what was that?” Lisa asks Zoe, widening her eyes in mock horror.

“I said, this is going to taste like—”

“I
thought
you said you wanted to help me clean the
kitchen when we're done!”

“What? No!” Zoe steps away from the counter. “No way.”

“It'll be good for you. Cleaning builds character.”

When Lisa walks across the kitchen to check the oven temperature, Zoe flings a piece of carrot in her direction. It misses and lands between me and Andrew. I'm so keyed up that I don't stop to think about what I'm doing. I pick the bit of carrot up and throw it back at her.

Zoe looks from the carrot to me, a smile breaking across her face. “Oh, it's
on
.”

“Zoe . . . ,” Andrew starts, his tone a warning. Then he gets hit in the head with a piece of uncooked pasta.

“Twenty points to Slytherin!” Zoe spins and launches a slimy slice of eggplant at Jenna. It hits her bare arm and drops to the floor with a splat.

“Ew.” Jenna wrinkles her nose. She lobs a slice of zucchini at Zoe in return.

“Guys, stop!” Yasmin shouts, but it's too late.

Omar throws a handful of spinach across the counter at Dominic, and Dominic tosses a globe of mozzarella at Katie, and Katie sends a lump of ricotta toward Jenna, and Zoe unscrews the lid to her jar of marinara and—

“Hey!” Dr. Lancaster shouts. Hearing her raise her voice is almost as surprising as the fact that we just had a food fight. A short food fight, sure. But it happened. And it was enough to release the tension inside me. For now.

I glance at Andrew. His mouth is twitching.

“It's all right,” Lisa says dryly from her spot over by the ovens, where she watched the whole twenty-second drama unfold. “They've
all
just earned themselves kitchen cleaning jobs.”

Everyone groans, but no one seems too upset.

We finish assembling our lasagnas and get them into the oven. Then Lisa doles out the chores. I'm put in charge of rinsing dirty dishes, Dominic gets handed a mop, Omar has to put away ingredients, Katie wipes down the countertops, Jenna sets the table for lunch, and Zoe has to take out the trash. Not just the trash we created over the past hour—yesterday's garbage, too. Zoe struggles past me, holding a giant bag at arm's length. It smells
terrible
.

Andrew stays next to me, loading items I've rinsed into the industrial-sized dishwasher. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

I spray down a bowl. “Weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn't love that—but I didn't have a panic attack. That's progress, right?”

“How do you think you would have done if this was your first day here?”

“A lot worse.” I shudder and hand him the bowl.

“Then yes, I'd say today was progress.”

“What was your individual challenge, when you were a camper?”

“Dr. Lancaster had me write down all the things my
coach and my dad and everyone else said to me, about football. Positive and negative. And then everyone read them at me while I ran passing drills.”

“Wow. That sounds intense.”

“It was. But after a few minutes of hearing it all together like that, it just became . . . noise.” He takes a handful of wet silverware from me and drops it into the dishwasher. “I found a way to stop listening to the voices and get done what I needed to get done.”

“Did you get upset?” No matter how much better I'm starting to feel, I'm pretty sure that I would have imploded in Andrew's situation.

“I got frustrated, sure. But it made me focus harder.”

I rinse the last few dishes and then ask, “So do you think learning to cook is a good idea for me?” I know Dr. Lancaster's opinion on the matter, but now I want his.

“Well, you did buy that apron on Friday at the general store. Maybe it's fate.”

I let out a puff of laughter. “Right, fate. But seriously. Will it make it easier for me to eat in front of people? You're a psych major—what do you think?”

“I don't know. So far, most of my coursework has been about history and theory—like, Freud's thoughts on human development versus Jung's versus Erikson's. I did take Abnormal Psychology last semester, but it was an overview of all the mental and emotional disorders out there. We didn't talk so much about treatment.”

“Oh.”

“I guess my question to you, as your peer adviser, would be: how do you feel, knowing we're about to eat that lasagna?”

I peel off my rubber gloves. I think of the look on my mom's face if she caught me with a plate of pasta. “Anxious. But maybe not as anxious as I should be.”

“The whole point is that eating
shouldn't
make you anxious, Sam. Neither should looking at yourself in the mirror, or having other people look at you.”

“But it does. All of it.”

“I know.” He smiles at me. And despite my nerves, his smile makes me feel warm inside. Whatever I think of myself, there's nothing wrong with me in his eyes.

He has a girlfriend.

He said they're having issues. He practically told me they're breaking up.

He's too old for you.

Four years isn't that big a deal, really.

You're a camper. He's a counselor.

I don't care.

When the lasagna comes out of the oven, sizzling and steaming, Lisa gives me the first plate. I cut a small sliver and blow on it to cool it. Everyone is watching me, waiting for the verdict. “Can you all, um, turn around?” I'll never get this bite down with their eyes on me.

Everyone turns except Zoe. She stares at me a few seconds too long before saying, “Oh, you mean right now?” Then she turns.

I open my mouth and I put the lasagna in and I chew. I suppress a moan of satisfaction. It is
so good
. The cheese is creamy and the veggies are tender and the sauce is bright and tart.

“Delicious,” I say to the group. “And hot.” I exhale steam.

“All right, folks—dig in!” Lisa says, slicing more squares.

I eat my entire serving in eleven bites. I use my fork to scoop up the sauce and spinach that remain on my plate. Then I push back from the table. I'm perfectly full. And I'm happy, too. I completed the challenge. I was anxious, and I still saw it through. When I look over at Andrew and see him smiling at me, I feel even better.

AS WE WALK
back to the Perform at Your Peak house, Andrew stays beside me. I wish we were holding hands. I wish he had his arm around my waist.

Once I start thinking about his hands, his arms, I get this picture in my head of us dancing together. I bet he'd be a great dance partner. Strong, attentive, gentle.

I love partnering.

Or at least I used to. Before I gained fourteen pounds.

It isn't necessarily my fault I didn't get to do any pas de deux this year. After Bryce graduated, Theo was the only guy left in our senior company. He's really talented—but he's also shorter and skinnier than me. No way could he lift me more than a few inches off the ground.

But Andrew . . . I bet he could make me fly.

His voice cuts into my thoughts: “What's up? You're making a funny face.”

“Nothing,” I say, rearranging my features.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, it's okay.”

“Come on. I thought we were past that.” He bumps my shoulder, and the tornado swirls up inside me, but instead of anxiety, it's all anticipation.

“I was thinking about partnering.”

“Partnering?”

“Yeah, you know, when a guy and a girl dance together, and the guy lifts the girl—of course, it doesn't have to be a guy and a girl, it could be two guys or two girls, or a whole group—” I'm getting off track. “The point is, I miss it.”

Floating through the air. Leaping farther than I could ever have leaped on my own. Turning faster, balancing longer. Feeling two bodies become one, shaping the space.