Aisling's Summer Diary

Chapter 12 | What's Cooking, Good Looking?

What ever plan Siobhan’s got in the works RE: our desperate lack of funds, she’s keeping it to herself.  And in the meantime, she’s ordering the rest of us around like the head mistress at school!  I REALLY hope all of these so-called sacrifices are worth it.  When I signed that contract, I didn’t just give up “boys”!  I gave up FUN!  Let’s hope when all of this is said and done I don’t have to give up my best friend too. 

12 p.m.

Siobhan led me into the kitchen and presented me with an apron and one of those floofy chef’s hats.  So I get to look and feel ridiculous?! I thought to myself.  I don’t know the first thing about cooking!  I can manage an almost passable omelet, but my Dad won’t even eat it.  One time, Rory and I tried to make Mom a surprise birthday dinner.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  We decided on roast chicken and veg.  Simple, right?  Well I didn’t know you’re supposed to put a tray under the chicken to catch all the gunk that drips off of it.  The whole thing went up in a big greasy ball of flames, and we ended up at the Chinese take-away.

As I was having chicken-fireball-flashbacks, Siobhan was setting out mixing bowls and measuring cups.  “You should have everything you’ll need here,” Siobhan said, nodding to the counter.  She had laid out a row of ingredients—eggs, milk, butter, flour.  Oh dear god.  Not bread!  The last time I tried to bake a loaf of bread was for my seventh grade Home Economics class.  Let’s just say mine could have doubled for a football. 

I COULD NOT let Siobhan know that I was clueless in the kitchen.  She already seemed to think I wasn’t much good at anything.  “Irish dancing, flash-mobbing, and flirting,” she’d said.  “Doesn’t really add up to anything useful.”  I grabbed up the apron and slipped it over my head.  “Right, I’ll get to it then.”  Siobhan smirked a teensy bit and left to start on her “networking” campaign.  I’m pretty sure that means she’s going to call around and more or less beg for money.  I mean, where else are we going to come up with two grand?!

I flicked open the cook book Siobhan had left handy.  Irish Cooking Made Easy.  Yeah right.  Soda bread: 2 cups whole-meal flour, 1 cup white flour (unbleached), 2 cups strong flour.  Strong flour?  What the heck was that?    

Through the window, I could just make out Ali down on the beach practicing his latest illusion.  He swooped about in grand arcs, his cape flapping behind him like a mad red wing.  Why couldn’t I be outside?!  Look at that sunshine!  I could’ve given Ali a hand—his glamorous assistant like at the school fund raiser...  Uh-oh.  Did I just pour one and three quarter liters of milk into the batter...or three and one quarter?  This is going to be a disaster!   

 

12:45 p.m.

After almost an hour mucking around in the kitchen, all I had to show were three big lumps of sticky, sour-smelling dough and a tangle of flour-knotted hair.  If Murphy could see me now, right?!  And you should have seen the cooker.  It was ANCIENT.  It took me ages just to figure out how to light it and even longer for it to heat up.  In a huff, I threw the bread tins in and slammed the door shut, then got to work on the next batch.  My arm seriously felt like it was going to fall off.  No electric mixers here—just one mammoth wooden spoon.  “Apparently,” I said to myself, “here at the Sea Crest, we cook old school.” 

Just when I was cracking the last egg, I got a whiff of something sort of mealy and HOT.  Wait, is that...smoke???  NOOO!  Before I could fling open the window, the fire alarm wailed to life, and a long white snake of smoke eeked out of the oven!  I swear I had the timer set for twenty minutes! 

In a panic, I yanked one of the trays out, my eyes burning to tears and that stupid chef’s hat flopping every which way.  “Need any help?”  OMG.  It was Slater!  This just keeps getting better.  “No, I’m fine,” I said, fanning at the smoke with a tea towel.  When pulled the second loaf free, my heart sank—burnt to a crisp.  “You’re sure you don’t need any help?” Slater asked again, smiling as always.  He was not going to make this easy on me, was he? 

I dumped the charred loaf into the bin.  “I want to do it by myself,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.  “OK,” he said, wafting smoke with his hands, “But I can cook, you know.  One of the advantages of living on the Ashram.”  You lived on an ASHRAM?!  Hundreds of questions crowded into my head:  Did you grow up in India?!  What’s it like there?  Are the cows really allowed to wander around shops and airport terminals?  Is the food anything at all like the restaurants in Dublin?    

But I didn’t ask a single one of them because I suddenly had this awful vision of Siobhan bursting in, seeing Slater and me and the blackened bread, and exploding in a rant of “I told you so’s”.  Maybe I should just tell him what’s going on.  Who knows—he might understand.  And then I wouldn’t feel so bad about sending him away. 

“It’s just,” I tried to spit it out and couldn’t.  Slater smiled broadly, urging me on with his eyes.  “I made this pact...”  One of his eyebrows cocked, wryly.  “Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” I blurted.  “The point is this is something I have to do by myself.”  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing myself say.  How could it not matter?  How could Slater NOT matter?!  He gave me a sad, puppyish look, and I wanted so badly to say, “Forget everything I just said!  And STAY!” 

But there was no way I could do that.  Deep down I knew that, pact or not pact, that I needed some time for myself.  I mean, as much as I hate to admit it, Siobhan was right.  I meet someone, and everything else—my family, my friends, whatever—ends up side-lined.  As much as I like Slater, I don’t want to be THAT girl, the one who’s always bailing on the people she cares about for some boy.  Something tells me that girl ends up alone at the end of the story. 

I dug my spoon into the batter and whisked the sticky mash, my eyes downcast.  “You should go,” I said half-heartedly.  I could feel Slater’s watching me, but I didn’t look up.  “Alright,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.  He turned away, and I watched—with sad, puppyish eyes, I’m sure—as he left. 

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