Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Kieran

What the hell was I doing, looking at my emails in the locker room? I could hear the soft hum of Qui's kitchen coming to life behind the gray swinging doors across from me. I should have been in there, laying out my knives and gathering my mise en place for the day. But instead of putting my phone in my backpack, I turned away and sat down on the bench in front of my locker, thumbed the screen one more time.

Looking at two messages in particular was like poking my tongue against an aching tooth. It didn't feel good, but I couldn't resist nudging it again and again.

The newer one was a save-the-date for my parents' thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. The green-and-pink image didn't work with my text-to-voice software, so I mouthed my way through it again. June third, at five thirty, at their house in Ojai. Cocktail attire, whatever the fuck that meant. No gifts except my presence.

Since when was my presence a gift to them?

I shook my head. Other people's parents invited them to their wedding anniversary parties, no big deal. Though other people's parents communicated with them besides sending a birthday card with nothing written in it, the way Mom and Dad had for the past decade.

I scrolled down to the email from Ellie Wasserman studded with the red exclamation point for Important Messages.

The robot reading the email aloud would make Shakespeare sound flat, but Ellie's words asking about my plans for the book had been blander than unseasoned oatmeal. Bland but bitchy. I snorted thinking about bitchy oatmeal.

"Please reply at your earliest convenience to arrange a time to meet." The words repeated in my head in her low, bone-dry voice. So smart and so cool, and hot embarrassment shot up my neck again.

It wasn't that I didn't have conveniences. I could find the time, if I really needed to. What was inconvenient was coming up with an idea for a cookbook. And by inconvenient I meant that I had no ideas. Zero.

"Not good enough, Kieran," I heard my dad say, heavy with dismissal. "We expected better," my mom added.

The back of my head tapped against my locker as a surge of uncertainty bubbled in my chest. I took a deep breath to push it down, to shove back the past so I wouldn't spin out. I knew I hadn't been a disaster for years. I was sober, I kept myself fed and clothed, I had good friends, and I was really fucking good at my job. I just had to go and do it.

Phone in backpack, backpack in locker. Chucks and jeans shucked off, checked chef pants and steel-toed boots yanked on. White jacket buttoned over Joy Division T-shirt, navy apron tied over jacket. Black bandanna folded and tied to keep my hair out of my eyes.

Now, deep breaths. Cool and calm, like the leader I needed to be. I pushed smoothly into the kitchen.

"Morning, Chef!" everyone called.

"Morning." My shoulders came down, and my hands unclenched. My basement studio in the Mission with dirty mustard walls and a mattress on the floor was where I slept. This place was home.

It was like a cross between the engine room and the hospital on a twenty-fourth-century spaceship. Shiny and clean didn't even begin to describe it. Ranges ran along one wall, pots and pans already sizzling on a dozen gas flames. My colleagues lined up along the central steel island, heads down over chopping boards. One commis chef, Jesus, minced a huge pile of mushrooms, while his best friend, Manny, stripped leaves from thyme branches. At the far end of the room, Sasha the pastry chef stretched buttery dough over a marble table while her assistant Valentin dipped strips of candied grapefruit peel in chocolate.

Things would speed up later during service, when every second counted. But the quiet right now still buzzed with purpose.

"Chef, why are you still here?" Jesus called, the same way he'd done every Wednesday since I'd won Fire on High .

"Yeah, man, why don't you have your own place already?" Manny chimed in. "You got that sweet-ass prize money."

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That money could be rent, salaries, ingredients. It could be a softly lit dining room, handmade plates, glowing reviews and handfuls of stars. An open door to what most chefs would only ever dream of. But I couldn't see where I would go once I walked through it. I knew Qui, I knew my life now. I liked my life now, and so many restaurants crashed and burned in their first year.

I shook my head, blushing. "Yeah, yeah. I can't open my restaurant until I find a team as hilarious as all you smartasses."

They were smartasses, but they were the fucking best, too. The day after the final episode aired, I came in to find all the walls covered with printed-out pictures of my goofy face when the judges had told me I'd won, and bottles of sparkling cider popping open all over the place. Sasha had made me a glossy strawberry tart decorated with little pastry crowns, and the whole team had gone in together on a beautiful handmade santoku knife, with ripples in the Damascus steel like waves in the ocean. But Mrs. Hutton had sent me the best present: the name of her investment advisor, with an address and a meeting time. Instead of shoving the prize under a virtual mattress, I had my own little money machine churning away for whenever I was ready to build my own place.

I would be ready. Someday.

"How're those sunchokes?" I asked Amitai as I made my way to my station.

The Kiwi intern flicked a glance toward the endless pile he had to peel. "Good, Chef."

"Sweet. Keep it up." More power to the nineteen-year-old for not rolling his eyes or sighing. He'd learned fast that whining wouldn't get him out of the most boring tasks, the same way I'd learned five years ago.

I got to my station and laid out my knives and sketchbook. Maybe Steve was upstairs talking to Austin and the other front-of-house people. Maybe I'd gotten away with my lateness and could join the workflow.

" O'Neill, " he said behind me.

Wow, he hadn't used my last name in four years. I only got called O'Neill when I was completely spacing out.

I tried to smile my way out of it. "Morning, Chef."

But he was already walking away. "My office, now."

I squeezed in the door and leaned back to close it as Steve slid behind his desk, his face stern. The wedding picture on the metal shelf behind him showed the smiley version I was more familiar with, and I asked, "How's Katrine?"

"My wife is happily plotting new ways to make the world a better place with robots, thank you for asking," he said, tapping together a stack of papers on the tiny desk's greenish metal surface.

"Could she make a robot do my laundry?"

"I'm sure she could."

Shuffle. Tap. Shuffle.

"You guys going to see her folks in Copenhagen for Christmas this year?" I asked, my tone a little higher than I wanted it to be.

His eyebrows went up. "We haven't decided yet, because in case you didn't notice, O'Neill, it's still January."

"That's a good point," I said faintly.

"Are you done trying to distract me? Because I can't do a long pep talk today. The boss's accountant's coming, and I'm getting the terrible, terrible reminder of how much I suck at this stuff." He held up one of the stacks. "Because this is what running a restaurant really is. Supplier invoices and payroll and fucking spreadsheets."

I tried to keep my shudder on the inside. "But you said Mrs. Hutton hires people to take care of that."

"Yeah, but her people can't do their job if I just hand them a bunch of receipts. I have to be organized, too."

The o -word. I'd heard it yelled at me so many times by my parents and my teachers. The question "Why can't you be…" also ended with "focused" and "still" and my dad's all-time favorite, " quiet, for fuck's sake?"

I could be all of those things now. The meds helped, and so did little things like alerts on my phone and deep breaths and long runs. My mise en place was always on point, and I kept my knives sharp. But there wasn't a little thing that could keep my family's words out of my head. That required a big act of will every single day.

"Kieran?"

I pushed my dad's voice away. "What?"

"I can tell something's bothering you. You usually bounce around like you're on springs, but you've had a gray cloud over your head for a while."

I shifted on my feet. I didn't know how to tell him about the sticky, muddy feeling that there were so many things I should be doing, the emails that I hadn't answered and the notifications piling up on social media, now that everyone knew who I was. The anxiety paralyzed me, and I was getting annoyed with myself for being stuck, which made the paralysis worse. "We haven't had any complaints, have we?" I said instead. "I didn't choke or poison anybody?"

"No, the customers are happy. But you're just keeping your head down at your station, not checking in so much with what the rest of the team is doing." He paused. "Do you need to go to a meeting?" he asked quietly.

I shook my head hard. "No way. I know booze doesn't solve anything."

When I was twenty-two, Steve had sat me down at the end of my two-week internship. He'd said he wanted to make me a commis chef and thought I could be much more than that. But he'd only hire me full-time if I agreed to meet once with his psychiatrist, Dr. Meyer.

"I have to go to a shrink for this job?" I'd asked.

"I think you have ADHD, like me. And I think you're self-medicating, like I used to," he'd said.

"Doesn't everyone self-medicate?" Every chef looked for ways to decompress after hours of service, and the booze was right there.

He'd leaned back and said, "Dr. Meyer told me once that neurotypical people use because they want to escape reality. Neurodivergent people use so they can tolerate it."

"Neurotypical? Neurodivergent? What textbook did you swallow?" I'd said loudly, trying to get away from the sore spot his words touched.

"Do you drink to escape? Or do you drink so that you feel like you can function?"

"Is that a trick question?"

He'd sighed. "Just give him an hour."

Three days later, when I'd been downing way too many shots of tequila with the dishwashers after another judgy phone call with Mom, I'd realized that he might be right.

Getting sober had felt like climbing up a fraying rope, but I'd learned from Dr. Meyer that living with ADHD was hard enough without adding other chemicals to my dopamine-starved brain. I hadn't had a drink since.

"And your meds are up to date?" Steve asked me now.

"Whoever set up subscription delivery was a genius," I said.

He hmm ed. "You don't have relationship trouble, as far as I know."

I shrugged easily. "Nope." I was too focused on cooking to be anyone's boyfriend. "You told me to simplify my life. Besides, do you really want me mooning over someone when I'm at the stove?"

He shook his head. "No, but the last time I checked, I'm running a restaurant, not a monastery."

I snorted. "You think I'm a monk?"

He grinned. "We both know you'd make a lousy monk."

He wasn't wrong. If what you wanted were laughs and orgasms, I was your guy. Everybody came, everybody went home and slept in their own beds.

Now he looked genuinely concerned. "Seriously, man. What's going on?"

I sighed. "You know that meeting I had at the publisher?"

He snapped his fingers, "Oh yeah. You were going to meet my friend Nicole Salazar, and Ellie Wasserman."

"You were right about Nicole—she seems cool."

"Yeah, she's a riot. Never play Ping-Pong with her, though. What about Ellie? She keeps to herself over in Berkeley, but I know Khaled and Laila loved working with her on the Herat book. They said she was really sweet, and a good listener."

"Sweet? Seriously? She's ridiculously uptight. It's like her hobbies are straightening picture frames and ironing." She must iron that black dress of hers to drive the wrinkles out. It had looked impossibly smooth.

An evil smile spread across Steve's face. "I think you met a woman who isn't going to let you get away with anything. This is going to be great. "

I shook my head. "Everything's fine. I'm not worried about her at all. Stop rubbing your hands together like you're Mr. Burns taking over Springfield."

Steve stood up and scooted around the desk. "That was totally convincing. I hope you've got more conviction when Anh's here later."

Another woman with nice clothes and sharp eyes who made me feel two inches tall. "She's just dropping by?" I wished out loud as I got out of the chair.

He slapped my shoulder. "She said specifically that she wants to see you."

"In the middle of service? Seriously?"

His shrug was a little helpless, a lot resigned. "I know, I know. But what she wants…"

I exhaled, giving in to the inevitable. "She gets."

Once I was back at my station, the world went quiet. I could lose myself in the flow of the kitchen, lean into making beautiful and delicious things. I'd racked up days off over the years, and I could be sitting on a beach or on top of a mountain somewhere, but why would I want to go anywhere else?

Amitai went by with a crate of Belgian endives. Right, I needed to pay more attention to what was happening around me. "What's for family meal?" I asked.

"José made a bunch of baked pasta with the vegetables and cheese we didn't use yesterday. There's salad and bread, too."

"Carbs for everyone!" I said, and it was good to see him laugh.

Thirty seconds after I grabbed my plate, a bunch of front-of-house people came downstairs from the dining room, my best friend, Jay, leading the pack. Once she had her food, she raised her eyebrows, and I grinned and scooted over so she could push her chair in next to mine. I nudged her shoulder, scooped up the cauliflower I'd separated out of the pasta, and put it on her plate. She put her finger up to tell me to wait a second, then gave me her Kalamata olives.

"You two are doing your freaky twin telepathy thing again," her boss, Austin, said as he sat down. "Kieran, maybe you should come be a floor manager with Jay. The tips would be ginormous."

Jay shook her head, smiling, and I said, "Nah, man, I'd just distract everybody with my hot bod."

Austin laughed. "It's been five years and I still don't understand how you two are so different and yet so close."

I mean, he was right. I was a straight, short-ass ginger man who'd needed two tries to graduate from community college, and Jay was a model-tall queer Black woman who'd studied for her MBA from USF while she worked at Qui. But we'd started on the same day, me as an intern and she as a host, and that coincidence had turned into awkward small talk about restaurants we liked, and the awkward small talk had turned into remembering each other's coffee orders, and cappuccinos had turned into long runs in Golden Gate Park when our days off lined up, and running had turned into having each other's backs no matter what.

"Heads-up," Steve said, and all the chefs and servers piped down. "We've got a big day ahead. First, something about VIPs tonight, Austin?"

"Yup." The manager grinned at us. "The newest James Bond is shooting in SoMa, so we've got some really big names coming for dinner…"

Once we finished obsessing about the new star, Steve talked us through what was new on the menu, then said, "Kieran, you're expediting."

For the first hour and a half that night, I stood by the pass and checked every plate before it went upstairs to the dining room, making sure each one matched the sketches I'd drawn from Steve's verbal descriptions. I took the incoming orders, calling them out so that the kitchen knew the pace of the meals playing out in the dining room, speeding things up or slowing them down.

On a podcast I'd heard a poker player talk about how he could play multiple hands of Texas Hold 'Em at once, making fast decision after fast decision, for hours at a time. Expediting was the same kind of high.

"Two scallops, one lamb, one quail," I said as loud as I could without yelling.

"Yes, Chef!" the kitchen responded.

"Fire two venison."

"Yes, Chef!"

"Two sole, no mushrooms for both." I felt terrible for people who'd had bad experiences with soggy, rubbery mushrooms. The wild ones we used were like eating a forest, in the best kind of way.

"Kieran?" Steve appeared right next to me. "It's time."

I waved to Manny to take over. When I reached to untie my bandanna so I could tidy my hair, Steve said, "Leave it. They'll want you to be like you were on TV."

Oh, OK. As long as they didn't make me click my heels, it'd be fine.

The kitchen wasn't noisy, but the dining room made it look like a rave. Mrs. Hutton's designers had created a hideaway from the outside world, servers gliding around the oyster-gray room like silent swans as they took care of our guests' every desire.

"Here they are," Mrs. Hutton said as we walked up to her table. "Brooke, Dorie, this is Steve Yuan, Qui's executive chef, and our young champion, Kieran O'Neill."

I was five foot seven on a good day, but I towered over Anh Hutton when she stood up so I could kiss both her powdery cheeks. She had black hair in a neat bun and wore a light-gray wool suit and pearls. She may have looked like a tiny harmless grandma, but she ran six high-end restaurants, three with Michelin stars, and knew every little thing that happened inside them.

"Is there a Mrs. O'Neill?" Dorie asked me, fluttering eyelashes that looked like spiders.

"That's my mom. She'll be thrilled you asked after her," I lied.

"Oh, aren't you just the cutest thing," Brooke said. "I want to put you in my pocket and take you home with me."

This was why I'd spent a year as a kid praying I'd grow another six inches. At least she hadn't pinched my cheek. "Thank you very much," I said instead, and they cooed again.

They asked me what it was like to be in front of cameras during Fire on High, what the host Mark Delacroix was like in person, whether anyone had actually eaten the whole suckling pig I'd roasted for the medieval challenge in episode 7. While I answered them, my brain tapped its foot and checked its watch.

Steve nudged me and mouthed, Chill .

My fingers were rubbing my forearm tattoo, my anxiety tell. I put my hands behind my back instead.

"Kieran," Mrs. Hutton finally said.

"Yes?" I tried not to say too loudly.

Her eyes may as well have been lasers. "You're going to write a book."

"Yes." I swore I knew other words.

She laced her fingers together, like we were in a business meeting. "That's a big project for you to take on. A lot of moving parts. Will you be able to focus? Take it seriously?"

Forearm again, shit. She'd had this effect on me the few times we'd met before, but I guessed that's why she was the big boss. "Yes?"

Her voice was calm as she appraised me. "I'd like you to plan a ticketed dinner here for two weeks from Monday. Given your victory, I think we'd get a lot of interest, and it would be something different from the usual Valentine's Day dinners in town."

All of a sudden, I was buzzing like I'd just eaten a whole bag of Skittles in five seconds. "That's awesome. I'd love that."

"I'm intrigued to see what kind of menu you'd create on your own," she continued.

She raised her eyebrows, and I gulped. This wasn't just a dinner. This was an audition. "Wow, sure. Thank you, Mrs. Hutton."

Finally, she smiled. "If you do this well, and give your book the attention it deserves, perhaps we'll be on a first-name basis soon."

I'm sure I was doing a good impression of the cod on the menu, because Steve nudged me again. "Awesome," I yelped. I barely heard Steve say we needed to get back to the kitchen, I was so excited.

T HAT NIGHT I couldn't sleep, even though I hadn't gotten home until after midnight. I woke up already feeling a little hyped, my excitement getting an edge of anxiety, and after I showered and made a trip to Mr. Gonzalez's bodega to get breakfast, I tried to remember the adulting I had to do.

My grocery situation would be fine later today. I'd ordered enough bread, peanut butter, and protein bars for a week.

But laundry, shit. I needed to do that. No matter how boring it was to sit in Se?or Burbujas's for hours.

I could go to the gym. I could lift enough heavy things that my brain would settle down and I'd be sore and exhausted instead. Then I could do laundry and listen to the Banquet podcast about fermenting vegetables.

My phone found its way into my hand, and I flipped around all my usual apps.

I bit my lip as I stared at the notifications on my Instagram. Tobias had said it would be good to engage with a few fans. But could I be the Happy Pirate Leprechaun right now? It wasn't like he was a separate person. He was just me at my most impulsive, bouncy, motormouthed. But for today, I wished I could just be quiet.

But being myself wouldn't answer all those exclamation-pointed emails from Ellie. What could I tell her, anyway? That cooking made me feel settled? That combining the sound of smashing and peeling garlic, the sappy, sharp smell of rosemary, and the sour sunshine taste of oranges made sense to me in a way that random rules and expectations never did?

I didn't use cookbooks, but even I knew that you couldn't write a book about how cooking made sense. I could just see Ellie's rolling eyes when she got that message.

A flash of feeding her a segment of ripe orange filled my head. Pressing my thumb against her full lower lip until she opened her mouth. Her ocean eyes closing slowly, her stern expression softening just for a second. I'd be quiet, and she'd be quiet.

I blinked the soft-edged image away, leaving me with Ellie's crisp words on my phone screen. I definitely couldn't tell her I wanted to feed her and take a picture of her blissed-out face.

My agent's name flashed up on my phone midthought.

"Hi, Tobias," I answered quickly.

"Kieran! Were you taking a nap or something?" His deep voice boomed across the room.

I rubbed my face to get rid of any more Ellie thoughts. "No, I was just thinking about this dinner I'm making at Qui." I told him about Mrs. Hutton's offer.

"That's fantastic. Do you have someone handling social on the day? Your fans will eat that up."

"Absolutely." Or I would, once I asked someone to do it. If I remembered.

"Awesome, awesome," he drawled. "Listen, I heard from your editor. Tad's not happy with you, man."

"Why?" I asked, even though I could guess the answer.

"Dude, you need to talk to your ghostwriter. She told him you're not cooperating."

First the snotty emails, and then she tattles on me? Fucking great. "We've been slammed at the restaurant. Doesn't she have enough from Fire on High to write something that sounds like me?"

"You don't want her to write random shit. It's not going to help your career if there's a bad book out there with your name on it."

"I guess."

A deep sigh came down the line. "Do you really want this?"

"Yes," I half-lied. I wanted to hold up the published book and show that I could achieve something concrete, something that my parents might even look at someday. But everything that led up to that? I hadn't typed anything longer than a text since I graduated from community college.

"You're only going to be a big deal for so long, dude. A book will keep the Happy Pirate Leprechaun on people's minds long after they've forgotten the other people on the show."

I didn't really want to be remembered as a cartoon character, but it was better than not being remembered at all. "OK. I'll reply to her now."

"And tell me first if there are any more problems. We're supposed to be business partners, man. Kieran O'Neill Incorporated, remember? Ciao for now."

I closed the call and punched open a new voice-to-text message. I couldn't keep the sneer out of my voice as I said, "Dear Mrs. Wasserman: As per your communication of last Tuesday, I have been so busy with my actual career that I have been unable to think of any brilliant revelations…"

No, Kieran, you can't be that big of a dick. Even if she tattled on you. Delete.

Wait. Maybe I was on the right track with wanting to feed her instead of write to her. New draft.

"Dear Ellie, I would like to invite you to my dinner at Qui on February fourteenth," I said more politely. "It'll give you a better idea of how I think about food. The Phoenix Group PR will follow up with more details. See you there."

Short and sweet and sent. Done.

With a sigh of relief, I opened a voice note. I had to put together the most grown-up, classy menu I could think of.

When I'd been on Fire on High, my MO had been SoCal high-end comfort food, because who didn't like all the seafood and avocado everything? But now I really needed to show off.

"Ideas for a big fancy dinner," I told my phone. "I wonder how much caviar I could convince Steve to buy? And can I get truffles?" I smiled to myself. "Ellie Wasserman, I'm going to blow your mind."