Mebel raps her knuckles at the door again, a little bit harder this time. Not quite at the level ofOpen up, this is the FBI and we know you’ve got several dead bodies in there!but at the level ofOpen up, I am a Chinese mother and I can smell wrongdoing in there!which is pretty close.
Still, there is no answer.
“Gemma?” Mebel calls out. After checking to make sure there’s no one else in the hallway, Mebel presses her ear gingerly to the door and tries to pick out any sounds from within the room. Any guilty shuffling? Held breaths? But there is nothing.
And now, Mebel’s brain switches from irritated concern to paranoid worry. As a mother, she excels at paranoia. When Sammy was a newborn, Mebel woke up several times through the night to check that he was still breathing. Sometimes, if he was sleeping too deeply, she would reach into the cot and poke him gently just to make sure he stirred. It drove Henk crazy, because sometimes, Sammy would fully wake up and start to cry. “Leave him alone,” Henk would say. “Haven’t you heard of the saying ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”
Like hell am I going to leave anything alone, Mebel thinks now. What if Gemma was in an accident? Maybe she was crossing the street and got knocked over by a car in a hit-and-run. Or maybe she was eating a pastry she’d filched from the patisserie students and choked while swallowing, and now she is lying dead in her room. The thought of this is so vivid that Mebel can almost see Gemma lying on the old maroon carpetin the bedroom, her eyes wide open with shock, her mouth frozen in a silent cry for help that nobody heard.
With a cry, Mebel rushes down the hallway, nearly falling over on the stairs in her haste to get to the first floor.
“I think Gemma is dead!” she cries as she runs toward Agatha at the front desk.
Agatha, who had a cup of tea halfway up to her mouth, freezes. Then she gently places the tea back down on the table and says, “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I think Gemma is dead,” Mebel says, gesturing madly. Her thoughts are so frenzied her mouth is having a hard time forming the words and putting them into a coherent sentence. “She not show up to class today, and I just go to her room and knock the door, but she didn’t reply. I think maybe she choke on something when she snacking last night and—aiya—quick, we need to open her door!”
“Oh dear,” Agatha says. She looks somewhat saddened by this, though nowhere near alarmed enough, in Mebel’s opinion.
“Quickly!” Mebel snaps. My goodness, what is wrong with Agatha? Why isn’t she doing anything?
“It’s okay, Mebel, Gemma is not dead.”
“How you know?” Mebel cries.
“She withdrew from the course this morning. She’s no longer enrolled at the school, that’s why there was no answer when you knocked on her door. She’s not here anymore.”
For a moment, all Mebel can do is stare blankly at Agatha. Then the words slam through her skull and sear themselves onto her brain and she shouts, “What?”
“Shh,” Agatha says, flapping her hands at Mebel. “Good grief, there are classes going on right now, and you are being quitedistracting. Gemma dropped out, it happens all the time. Every semester, there will be a handful of students who find that they can’t actually cut it at culinary school and drop out.”
“No,” Mebel breathes.
“Oh yes, it happens very frequently. The problem is, these kids are young, and they’re not used to hard work, and they watch too many TikToks and think that cooking is fun and easy to do. Have you seen cooking videos on TikToks? Some of those content creators are out there cooking the most complicated dishes, things that would take six, seven hours to make, and they do it all and then edit it into a thirty-second video, and so kids think the dishes are easy. Then they come here and they’re dismayed to learn that, actually, it is really bloody hard to make a boeuf bourguignon fritter, and they’re like:This is no fun, I quit.” As Agatha speaks, she grows more and more impassioned, and it becomes clear to Mebel that this is perhaps something Agatha has had a long history with.
“But you don’t understand,” Mebel says. “Gemma is not like that. Gemma is very responsible student. She knows all the things already, how difficult everything is, she knows that.”
Agatha throws up her hands. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mebel. Gemma came to me first thing this morning and told me she no longer wants to be a student here.”
“She come to you this morning…” Mebel muses, more to herself than to Agatha. “How she look? She look sad? Angry?”
“I don’t know, she looked normal, I guess,” Agatha says with a shrug.
Mebel shakes her head. “I don’t know why you are being so—so ‘I don’t care.’ ”
“I’m sorry,” Agatha says, and she truly does seem apologetic.“I guess I don’t have much sympathy for students who drop out of their courses because, well, I’ve been saving up to take a course here, and seeing students take the courses for granted is just not very nice, is it?”
“Oh.” Mebel pauses. She hasn’t spared a thought for Agatha. To her, Agatha has always been just a receptionist at the school, and now she feels ashamed for not being more thoughtful, because of course Agatha has her own goals and dreams. Agatha is a person, not just a pleasant face at the front desk. Just like how Mebel isn’t just a trophy wife, but a complete human being with her own hopes and dreams.
You’re getting carried away again and making this about you, her mind says.
Right, Mebel thinks, snapping herself out of her derailed train of thought.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Agatha says.
“No. Thank you.” With one last look at Agatha, Mebel walks out of the school building. Outside, she takes out her phone and calls Gemma. She should’ve done this earlier, now that she thinks of it.
The call doesn’t go through. Instead of ringing, it immediately goes to an automated message that says: “The number you have dialed is not in service.”
