“Oh yes, in your notebook,” Mebel says.
“Yeah. I like creating new recipes, and I’d go to him and ask if he could look them over and give me some input.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I was sucking up, basically.”
Mebel shrugs. “So? People do it all the time. Is part of business, you smile and pretend to be nice and all that. So what?”
“Well, I think I went overboard and gave him the wrong impression. One night, he just leaned over and kissed me—” Gemma pauses, wincing at the memory of it. “I kind of pulled away, and he looked so confused. He asked me what’s wrong, and I said I wasn’t looking for that kind of relationship, and”—tears well up in her eyes once more—“and he got so angry. He said I’d been leading him on for days and I was trying to take advantage of him by seducing him—”
“What?” Mebel yells. She holds up her hand. “No.”
“But Mebs—”
“No!” Mebel says again. “You are twenty-year-old student, and he is—I don’t know how old he is, sixty-five? He is a boss at the school and he owns multiple restaurants, and at least oneof them has three Michelin stars. He is so rich and so powerful until you cannot imagine, and he says you giving him the wrong impression and taking advantage of him?”
“But—”
“You think he get so far in life by being stupid? You think Alain is stupid?”
Gemma gulps. “Um, no?”
“That’s right. He is not stupid. Nobody get to where he is without understanding how people relationships work. He told me so many times already that everywhere he goes, people are always sucking up to him. They want him to endorse this, stock that in his restaurant, they want him to hire them, blah blah blah. Everywhere he goes, people do this, and he see right through them. So why you think you are so special that he got tricked by you?”
“Um.” Gemma gnaws on her lower lip. “I don’t know.”
“You know what I think?”
“No, but I have a feeling you’re about to tell me,” Gemma says.
“I think Alain is full of shit. He try to have the sex with you and you turn him down, so he is so embarrassed—oh no, his manhood is threatened—so he turn around and bully you. He feed you all this bullshit about how you lead him on, et cetera,” Mebel rants. “And he make you feel like is your fault.”
Gemma doesn’t say anything.
Mebel takes a deep breath, trying to clear the chorus of angry voices in her head. “And that is why you quit?”
Gemma shakes her head. “Not quite.”
“Oh?”
“Well, after he told me off for taking advantage of him, Chef Alain told me that I’ll never find work as a chef in any respectable restaurant in the whole of Europe.” At this, Gemma bursts into a fresh wave of tears.
Mebel is incandescent with rage. The anger inside her is boiling so hot that she feels as though she might combust into literal flames. “He blacklist you?” she hisses.
Gemma nods through her tears.
“Oh, that wang ba dan,” Mebel says. “I will kill him.”
“No,” Gemma sobs. “It’s okay, I mean, like I said, I’m perfectly fine here. I shouldn’t have gone to culinary school. I’m just not cut out for it.”
“Rubbish! You are the best student there. You are made for culinary school. All we have to do is deal with Alain, then it will be fine. Your position will be restore.”
Gemma sniffs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Okay, when you say, ‘deal with him,’ what do you mean? I don’t think we should, like, kill him, you know? I don’t have it in me to chop up a body.”
“There is meat slicer at school,” Mebel points out.
They meet each other’s eyes, then both of them start cackling. Mebel doubles over with laughter, and there is something so wonderful about this moment, a release that both women desperately needed. She laughs until tears leak from her eyes and she runs out of breath. When they finally stop, the awful tension in the air is gone, and Mebel feels like she can think halfway clearly once more.
