Mebel grins. “I agree.”
“You do? But you’re sleeping with him.”
Mebel waves a hand flippantly. “Is just sex, not a big deal.”Hah!Her mind crows.Look who’s talking.Mebel ignores it. “The really important issue is, I think Alain is using his power to pressure people to sleep with him, and I think that is not right.”
“You’re damn right it isn’t, but who’s got the balls to stand up to him?”
“I think you mean who got vagina to stand up to him,” Mebel says. “I have idea, but I need your help.”
The next couple of days,Mebel is busy running around and meeting all sorts of people. People who Agatha is putting her in touch with. Women who are rightfully angry. Her phone doesn’t stop dinging with messages, and she is constantly picking up phone calls and getting into heated discussions with the callers. She feels both undone and yet at the same time ready to take on anything. When she has a free moment, she opens up the photos she took of the contract she found in Alain’s room and reads through them slowly, her index finger trailing across the screen as she plods through the document one slow word at a time.
At the end of each day, she calls Gemma to unload everything, and the young woman absorbs everything Mebel tells her and shares her thoughts with her. At one point, when Mebel isten minutes into a rambling tirade, Gemma says, “Mebs, have you ever considered getting assessed for ADHD?”
Mebel pauses in mid-sentence. “What?”
“ADHD. It stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Mebel thinks about it for half a second before saying, “No.” Then, before Gemma can ask why, she says, “I think you young people coming up with so many disorders, everyone has disorder this, disorder that. I don’t see why the need for having a name for everything. And anyway,” she adds, “I am not hyperactive.”
“I think it might be worthwhile to look into it,” Gemma says. “The condition expresses very differently between boys and girls, and I don’t think you should take ‘hyperactive’ quite so literally. I read that in girls, it could be expressed in symptoms like being a chatterbox or tapping your feet or twirling a pen, and all that. It doesn’t actually have to be jumping off the walls or anything as dramatic as that.”
Mebel scoffs. “No. I don’t have that. I am not Gen Z.”
“All right. I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.”
“We focus now on the banquet.”
“There’s that ADHD hyperfocus,” Gemma jokes.
Mebel sighs, her eyes rolling up to the ceiling. God help her, but she really needs this scheme to work.
The banquet takes place inthe Pemberton dining hall, which is probably the most magical room that Mebel has been in. It is a dining hall of epic proportions, easily seatingthree hundred people comfortably at long tables. On one side of the room, torches are attached to the stone walls, filling the cavernous space with ambient light. On the other side of the walls are stained glass windows depicting various scenes from the Bible. At the far end of the room is an altar, which is now filled with huge towers of flowers. Mebel is impressed by the place, not because of the fancy parts, which she is more than used to, but because of the ancient history steeped into its very walls. The presence of its history serves to remind Mebel of the precariousness of life itself, and she resolves to make the best of her time here in Oxford.
They are allowed into the kitchen three hours before the banquet begins, although Mebel, of course, has been allowed an extra ninety minutes prep time back in the school kitchen. By the time she arrives at the Pemberton kitchen, she’s done as much initial prep work as she can in the allotted extra time, and she thanks her lucky stars that Chef Clarke had been amenable to her request, as she clearly needed every extra minute of it. All of the students assemble in the Pemberton kitchen, apron strings double-knotted and knives sharpened. They are all wide-eyed and so nervous that the tension is palpable in the room.
“All right, listen up, everybody,” Chef Clarke says. He is standing next to Alain, who is scanning the room with a somber expression. When his gaze gets to Mebel, he pauses for a second. Mebel squirms. She hasn’t seen him since the night Gemma told her the truth, and seeing him now fills Mebel with both disgust and rage. How dare he stand there in his suit with his hair slicked back, looking so confident, so comfortable in his own skin!
“Tonight is the night you will cook like you have never cooked before,” Chef Clarke says. The students shuffle in place, their eyes shining bright. “I have reviewed all of your recipes and I know how creative they are. You are going to blow everybody’s socks off. This is the day you put your practical skills to the test. I know it is nerve-racking, but you’ve got this. Before you get to work, I’d like to remind you to please respect other people’s spaces and don’t forget to have a bit of fun while you’re at it. Let’s go.”
The moment Chef Clarke finishes talking, the students disperse to their various workstations. Because of the nature of the competition, every pair has been assigned a specific workstation to concoct their dishes from start to finish. They have all been instructed to make enough portions to feed fifty people. Though the banquet itself will have over two hundred guests, the rest will be catered by the college’s chefs, while only the VIPs will be eating food cooked by the Saint Honoré students.
Mebel goes to her workstation, trying to close her mind off from noticing how everyone else is working in a pair. Next to her are Adam and Bella, who have switched into silent work mode, Bella working a potato down a mandolin while Adam chops up some garlic.
Deep breaths, Mebel tells herself.You’ve done this many times over. You can do it again now.
She removed her duck legs from the dry-aging unit earlier, and now she gets to work cutting the crust off. She inspects the meat and nods, satisfied with its color, texture, and smell. She sets it aside and starts to mix the dough needed for the crepe. Chinese crepe is one of the simplest things to make. Its ingredients consist merely of flour and boiling hot water. Mebelsprinkles in a touch of salt as well as a dash of stock powder that she made days in advance for this very purpose, then she starts mixing it. When the dough forms, she lets it rest before shaping it.
Even though they have all gone through every aspect of their dish meticulously, the act of actually doing it, of making every single component and putting it all together while also making sure there is enough for fifty portions, is a massive change. Mebel has only ever made enough for five portions at a time since she is limited by the amount of ingredients she can get her hands on, and it is the same for the others as well.
As the first and then the second hour pass by, the stress levels mount up. The students go from confident well-prepared machines into flustered, irritable messes. One by one, mistakes are made. Cries of “Shit!” and “Oh crap!” are heard all over the kitchen, followed by a mad scramble to salvage the dish.
By the final thirty minutes of the scheduled prep time, there has been such a huge accumulation of adrenaline in there that walking into the kitchen is like walking into a lion’s den. Nobody is happy and everyone is in full stress mode, rushing about and crashing into one another. After about five minutes of this, Mebel is this close to screaming at them all and telling them to calm down, but somehow, through some miracle, she is able to stop herself from doing that.Good job, me, she thinks.
She manages to force herself to concentrate on her dish. The duck legs are out of the oven, and she has sliced into one and found it to her satisfaction. The crunchy duck skin is nicely crumbled, and she has managed to keep it from absorbing too much grease during the frying. Her first attempt at the ducksauce results in a broken emulsion, but it isn’t the end of the world.
And the whole time, as Mebel is rushing about putting her dish together, she is constantly having to fight distractions that her mind conjures up. Now and again, it spits out a sudden image of Henk, then of Sammy, then of Hannah, and so on. Each time, Mebel gives herself a small shake of the head, as though literally trying to shake the thoughts off, and forces herself to focus on the task at hand. She is also painfully aware of Alain’s presence. He’s taken a few phone calls outside the kitchen, but the rest of the time, he’s stood there lurking, his eagle eyes taking in every workstation. Mebel keeps her eyes glued on her stuff, but her body, so attuned to Alain’s presence, is practically vibrating with tension.
“Ten minutes to service,” Chef Clarke calls out.
