Kitchens of the Great Midwest (7 page)

Eva nodded, not setting down her book. “Yep,” she said.

“You don’t seem very excited about your birthday tomorrow, is all. Are things still better at school?”

A month ago, after some girls dumped a thirty-two-ounce Pepsi on her head during recess, she had made the mistake of telling her dad, who called the school, who talked to the girls, and this made things even worse, because now she was a “narc” and a “snitch bitch” in addition to being Sasquatch.

“Yeah,” Eva said.

“You can tell me. You can tell me anything. You come to me first, not Randy.”

Ah, that’s what this was about. It was as much an anti-Randy message as a pro-Dad message, even if her dad did somehow believe he could actually protect her from that horrible world that started where their driveway stopped.

“I will,” Eva said.

“OK,” Jarl said. He suddenly looked sad and bewildered, like an elephant that had been fired from the circus and was wandering down the side of the highway with nowhere to go. The thought occurred to Eva that if her dad confronted those boys face-to-face, they’d make fun of her weak, fat, kindhearted father as brutally as they made fun of her, and she needed to protect her dad from that; his ego was already so fragile.

“Everything’s better, Dad. I promise.”

“Happy day before your birthday,” he said, and smiled at her as he closed her bedroom door. “I love ya, you know. We love you.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Eva said in reply.

They did, she knew that. Eva knew that Jarl’s big brother Lars had died of a heart attack a few months after she was born, and it probably made them both paranoid about losing another family member. Eva didn’t remember Lars, because obviously she wouldn’t, but apparently he was a super nice guy who really helped out Fiona and Jarl a ton when they were just starting out. And he’d been a chef, which was awesome. It was incredible knowing she’d actually been related to one. Her other uncle on that side also used to run a bakery way up in Duluth, but he sold it about six years ago, and they never saw him anyway. But Lars Thorvald, everyone said, was a legend in the kitchen.

Her parents, on the other hand, worked about as far away from a kitchen as you could get. Until a couple years ago, Fiona was an independent sales consultant for Madison May Cosmetics, but lately had been temping because she said she wanted to work in an office environment, and it seemed like a good way to try out different ones. Jarl, meanwhile, had been at the same mailroom job at Pioneer Seeds for three years
now, a record. They each worked hard and barely seemed to spend any money on stuff just for themselves, and noticing the kind of stuff that the parents of other kids bought, and hers didn’t—snowmobiles, camping trips, cruise ship vacations—Eva wondered if they ever would. What happened to all of the money her parents earned, Eva wasn’t sure. Maybe it was true; maybe it was, as her mom said, all just going to the house and car payments and barely keeping them afloat, and that was why the dryer was loud and the deck wasn’t going to be repainted anytime soon and why there was no handle on the toilet and you had to reach inside the back part to flush it. Fiona said they were one emergency from everything falling apart. But it didn’t feel like it to Eva. Their home felt safe. She could have a pepper garden in her closet and take buses around the city alone and sneak time with Randy if she was careful. And when things did go bad, like they often did at school, she could decide for herself how to respond. Sure, maybe the churro bites were Randy’s idea, but it was up to her to execute it. And she would.

 • • • 

After she was sure that her parents were asleep, Eva got up and sat at the vanity in her room with the box of churro bites and the pint jar of crushed peppers. She remembered Aracely saying that half a teaspoon spread over an entire meal was still too much for 80 percent of full-grown Iowan adults who ordered the chimole dish; it sent them coughing and gasping to the bathroom or downing whole glasses of milk after two bites. Half a teaspoon over maybe two pounds of food. She thought about Chadd Grebeck and Dylan Sternwall and Brant Manus and Bethany Messerschmidt as she carefully injected a full teaspoon of chile powder into the sugary guts of each one-ounce churro bite, again and again. She stopped once to consider whether a straight full teaspoon was excessive; although she had no friends in the class, perhaps not everyone deserved to have the sensation of their taste buds seared off, let alone burning diarrhea. All she knew was that there was no way that Chadd or Brant or
any of those assholes should accidentally end up with one that had no chocolate hab in it, so therefore she had to severely doctor them all.

 • • • 

When she was done, a little before midnight, she licked the cinnamon and sugar and her chocolate habanero pepper powder off of her fingers all at once, feeling the severe, pleasant burning on her lips and mouth.

She was pretty sure that in her three-plus years of handling and eating extremely hot peppers, she had exhausted most of the substance P from the soft tissues in her mouth and hands, which didn’t replenish, even as she got older; the main reason she began growing increasingly hot exotic peppers was to find something with enough capsaicin to release the endorphins that became more and more inaccessible with increased heat tolerance. She wanted to feel lava blossoming in her eyes and nose and mouth again, like the first time she ate a regular habanero with Cousin Randy, back when he was still allowed to babysit her. She cleaned out her last teaspoon of chile powder in the jar with a wet finger, put it on her tongue, and let the graceless heat savage her soft tissues as she lay on her bed, closed her eyes, felt the angels in her blood begin to sing, and officially turned eleven.

 • • • 

Her mom offered her a ride to school the next morning, which was rare, and normally Eva would’ve jumped at it, but that would mean revealing the churro bites and not being able to accidentally forget the ice cream, so she took the dreaded bus instead. She sat two seats behind the driver, which she hated doing because it was dorky and fearful, and only the little kids sat way up front.

That day, there was no escaping the awful boys either way.

“Hey, scrotum-breath,” Dylan Sternwall, seated four seats behind Eva, said to Chadd. “Ten bucks if you kiss Sasquatch again.”

“Give me the money first, gerbil-dick.”

Dylan took a crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket. “I’ll pay you for this time
and
the last time. After services rendered.”

“You hear that, Sasquatch?” Chadd said. “I’m gonna get you again today. Outside. If you go running into the school I’m going to de-pants you.”

Eva could only nod in response and look at the bus floor. De-pantsing was the highest of the high-level threats. Even if they succeeded, Eva knew that punishment would be elusive for these boys, especially when their dads were high school coaches and managed car dealerships and were far richer and more popular around town than her own little family. Once or twice, she had overheard people calling her parents “white trash,” and she had quickly figured out that no one protects or stands up for white trash, and no one on the outside ever would. To be called white trash is to be told that you’re on your own.

“Meet us at the end of the fence around the corner.”

That was off school property. Eva nodded again. She saw him stare at her box of churro bites.

“Is that Mexican crap for school?” he asked. “That shit sucks.”

Chadd grabbed the box from her in one move with his greasy boy hands and held it over her head.

Eva leaped to her feet. “Give it back!”

“What was that?” the bus driver yelled.

Chadd slid to a seat across the aisle, crushing a couple of third graders with his chunky body, and slid the box out an open window. “Whoops,” he said.

“No!”

Eva pulled down her window and looked out to see just the faintest glimpse of a lavender box tumbling on the road.

The bus driver stopped the bus and turned around, looking right at Chadd. “You. After I drop you off today, you are suspended from this bus.”

“You can’t do that.” Chad smiled. “How am I gonna get to school?”

“Come up here,” the driver said, pointing to a seat right behind her.

Chadd’s friends made hubba-hubba noises as Chadd took his time
getting to the front of the bus. He paused only to flick his tongue at Eva, who had her head in her hands and saw hardly any of it.

 • • • 

After a minute, a block before the bus arrived at school, Eva removed the little bottle of concentrated chile oil from her backpack. She first smeared some on her fingertips and then poured the rest in her mouth, holding it there like mouthwash. Even with her heat-ravaged mouth and hands, this stuff was special; it felt like the skin on her fingers and the inside walls of her mouth were searing off. She even glanced down once to see whether the skin on her fingers was actually peeling. She held a placid expression as she stepped out of the bus and made a right when every other student was making a left. She walked to the end of the block and turned at the fence, hearing Dylan, Chadd, and Brant laughing behind her, closing the gap. Then, by the fence at the official edge of school property, she waited.

 • • • 

As the boys surrounded her, she stood as still as a pot of dry soil, holding the fire in her cheeks. Maybe things would’ve gone according to plan if Chadd hadn’t come up to her from behind and whipped her around, the shock of which made her spit the entire mouthful of searing pepper oil onto his face before he even kissed her.

As Chadd fell on the grass screaming, Eva stared at him for a second. It was really working. She reached over and grabbed Dylan’s head and wiped her chile-oil-dripping fingers across his eyes, actually feeling his eyeballs under her fingertips. Screaming, he shoved her off and fell against the pole on the edge of the chain-link fence, shouting, crying, and grasping Oedipally at his face.

Brant got one look at Eva, her mouth and fingers red and swollen from the oil. Between that and hearing the cries of his friends, his flight instinct kicked in, and he ran toward the school as fast as Eva had ever seen a boy run.

Chadd was kneeling in the open lawn, fists uprooting handfuls of grass and dirt to wipe against the fire consuming his face, and was screaming—as was Dylan, who was still clawing at his eyes and weeping, long since having dropped his twenty-dollar bill, which Eva picked up, folded, and shoved in Chadd’s fat back pocket. She then collected herself and walked toward the school.

 • • • 

Eva didn’t even make it more than two feet into her classroom before she was once again approached from behind, this time by stern adults, and whisked to the principal’s office. The look on sweet old Mr. Ramazzotti’s face seemed to say,
Why her? She’s one of my good ones
.

 • • • 

As she was escorted past the secretarial pool area of the front-desk administrators, she heard an ambulance being called. The principal opened a heavy wooden door to what Eva judged to be the second-fanciest office she’d ever seen after her dad’s boss’s office that one time, and followed the principal’s stern orders to sit down in a chair facing the desk.

Just when the principal asked,
What did you do to those boys,
Eva could hear Dylan Sternwall, crying—wailing, really (she’d never heard a boy her age cry so loud)—as he was brought to the nurse’s office. What a fantastic noise. She curled her hot, swollen lips over her teeth to fight back the smile and look contrite. There was no going back from this—she had just pushed her life forward in a particular direction—and as the principal lifted her cordless desk phone to call Eva’s mother, Eva saw that not all of it was going to be as pleasant as this moment. So while the phone rang at her mom’s work, she leaned back in her chair, listened to the astonishing sounds of justice, and no longer pretended to look sorry.

Braque Dragelski’s Schedule for June 2:

5:30
A
.
M
.—Off my ass and out of bed; hot lemon water (~0 calories), morning ablutions

5:50
A
.
M
.—Breakfast (almond butter, avo & banana sandwich, egg whites; ~800 calories)

6:20
A
.
M
.—Shower (water temperature ~110ºF)

6:30
A
.
M
.—Study for 210-2 U.S. History final

8:10
A
.
M
.—Meet Patricia at SPAC; 20 min. of cardio, 70 min. of core & weights

9:40
A
.
M
.
—Shower (water temperature ~80ºF)

9:50
A
.
M
.
—Leave SPAC; drink protein shake (~200 calories)

10:00
A
.
M
.
—Lunch at Whole Foods hot bar (~600 calories)

10:30
A
.
M
.
—310-1 Micro 1 discussion group

11:50
A
.
M
.
—Leave Micro 1 discussion group

12:00
P
.
M
.
—U.S. History discussion group

12:50
P.M.
—Leave U.S. History discussion group

1:00
P.M.
—Second lunch (grilled chicken, brown rice, steamed veggies; ~550 calories)

1:30
P.M.
—Study for 203-0 French oral final presentation

3:00
P.M.
—French oral workshop

3:50
P
.
M
.
—Leave French oral workshop

4:00
P
.
M
.
—Change; short jog around lakefill

4:40
P
.
M
.
—Small dinner (mixed greens, quinoa, protein shake; ~350 calories)

5:00
P
.
M
.
—Study for 215-0 Economy & Society final

7:00
P
.
M
.
—Snack (apple, raw carrot, kombucha; ~200 calories)

7:15
P
.
M
.
—Study for Micro 1 final

9:15
P.M.
—Final snack (⅓ cup avocado on six whole wheat crackers; ~200 calories)

9:30
P.M.
—Return outstanding e-mails, texts, phone calls; write schedule for tomorrow

10:30
P.M.
—Lights out, no exceptions.

8:03
A
.
M
.

People in Evanston moved so goddamn slow. It was one thing when the sidewalks were covered in ice and lake-effect snow. But this was June, the day after Braque’s cousin Eva’s birthday, which used to mean a big family party marking the beginning of summer, at least before her dad left and her brother Randy went into rehab. Back then, when they were all together, Braque’s mom used to say that Iowans knew how to appreciate the two most precious things in life—family and warm weather.

Given that summer in Iowa was often fleeting, her mom was making one hell of a poignant juxtaposition, especially considering what had happened, and what that batshit crazy woman had done, and still did, to everybody. Still, once in a great damn while Braque did hear those words as her mother intended, and in particular they came to mind today, in this dismally temperate Chicago suburb, as the lumpy assholes on Clark Street refused to move aside for a runner who was out taking full advantage of the first beautiful day of the year.

The slow, sad-faced suburban ass-clowns weren’t even the worst part about the morning so far. Across the street, on the corner of Clark and Orrington Avenue, the greasy egg-fart odor of the Burger King made Braque cover her face. It always smelled like ass, but today it was so
overpowering she wanted to puke. Worse, the damn smell was also somehow alluring; she had to beat back memories of visiting her aunt Fiona and uncle Jarl and getting bags of delicious, slimy fast food for lunch. Shit, she used to love that BK Big Fish sandwich. Thirty-two grams of fat and 1,370 milligrams of sodium—91 percent of your recommended daily intake. Awful, feeding that to a kid. At least now, in the year 2000, those places also had supposedly healthy menu options, but still. That smell.

She could detect fish in the greasy breeze, she swore. Ha, what if she had one, just one time? Or half of one. But fuck that! Fuck that in the face! Bad fat, empty calories, and they put HFCS in everything, even the bun. She’d kill her gut and as a bonus have a goddamn sugar crash. No thanks, Hank. Jogging onto the campus, she washed out her olfactory system with the smells of wet sidewalk, the freshly mown grass of Deering Meadow, and the explosive lavender of the Shakespeare Garden. The lavender was bloomy as fuck and did the trick; all better.

 • • • 

After she swiped her WildCARD student ID at the gym’s front desk, she noticed that everything at SPAC seemed doused in the citrusy alcohol-based cleaner they used to wipe down the equipment. People were so anal about each other’s sweat and germs, especially the weekend warriors and noncompetitive athletes. Braque was a softball player. That’s a life in the dirt, a life touching dirt, a life touching things that touch dirt. Did Dot Richardson sterilize everything she touched until she was handed a gold medal? As if. Braque waited until she knew people were looking at her, then spat in her hands and lifted a 17.5-pound kettlebell from the rack. Patricia Bernal, her workout partner and fellow Academic All-American award-winning softball player, would be here in thirty minutes to spot her, and she’d do k-bell swings and stairs until then.

It was hardly more difficult to do swings with a 17.5-pounder as opposed to her usual 15, but today, ugh. It didn’t feel like abdominal
tightening. It felt like a fist had broken through her intestinal wall and extended its fingers inside her. She felt the bile chuckling in her throat. The kettlebell clanked to the floor.

 • • • 

She stood facing the toilet, tasting the bile she spit into the water. She could hear another woman vomit a few stalls down, and another woman take a dump, and the goddamn smells of shit and bile were just too much. She covered her nose with the back of her left hand and let the vomit burst from her mouth. She puked so much, her eyes started to tear.

 • • • 

Afterward, she wiped off her face and washed her mouth out several times, so the stomach acid wouldn’t chew up her enamel. It sucked having to bail on her weights partner, but it also sucked having probable food poisoning. She wondered if Patricia had the same bug. They had eaten the same thing at least once yesterday—grilled chicken and vegetables, which had never made them sick before, but who knows. As her second baseman—her partner in the middle infield—they often thought and moved in tandem.

8:51
A
.
M
.

Braque had never been at Whole Foods this time of morning before. It was way less slammed with rubes than at lunchtime. It sucked balls having to skip weight training, but after vomiting, she needed two bananas, reverse-osmosis water, and a protein shake to replenish, along with an extra protein shake for Patricia to make it up to her.

While she was reading the ingredients on an N. W. Gratz brand Vegan Protein Smoothie, she saw something weird written amid the Nutritional Facts: the phrase
SWET PEPER JELY
, all caps, large type.

Something about it made her shiver. As she set the protein smoothie back on its shelf, the three strange words leapt out at her; she turned
the bottle around so the front faced out instead. This was some creepy-ass bullshit, for sure. Still, fear is a choice, she reminded herself, and why choose it? She made up her mind that the strange words on the bottle didn’t exist and never existed. It was just her nutrition-starved brain shorting out on her.

After a moment, she picked up the bottle and looked at it again. The bold text was gone, replaced by the usual crap about soy protein isolate and organic cane sugar. Sure as shit, she was going hypoglycemic from the food poisoning and not having eaten. Her temples began to ache; she needed to get something in her system, stat.

Then Braque saw someone down the aisle who she hated, and it gave her a huge sense of relief. There were Lolo McCaffrey’s thick braids and patchouli-oil smell, crouched down by the nutritional bars, her moon face staring at the label of a Clif Bar like someone who can’t read. Lolo was the strength and conditioning coach for the team who made everyone do hot yoga and meditation and was covertly seeing senior shortstop Tarah Sarrazin, the player who incoming first-year Braque Dragelski had beaten for a starting job. Seeing Lolo, right here, in the same store at the same time, Braque considered the possibility that either she or Tarah had somehow poisoned her dinner yesterday. She wouldn’t put it past that pair of jealous skanks, that’s for sure.

“Lolo,” Braque said, looking down at Lolo. She was easy for Braque to intimidate, and Braque felt it was good for her soul to intimidate coaches who preached loving kindness and mindfulness; her headache and confusion instantly disappeared as she approached the shorter woman. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Hello, Dragelski.” Lolo nodded, not looking up from the Clif Bar.

“So,” Braque said. “What do you and Tarah think you’re doing?”

Lolo looked at the ground; she could never look Braque in the face. “I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t see how our wedding affects the team in the slightest,” she said, looking Braque in the face for the first time.

“Wedding? Wow.” First Braque had heard of this. She’d only just heard a few weeks back that they were dating, not that she cared. “Don’t you have to go to Vermont or something?”

“Well, that’s the plan,” said Lolo, who seemed to realize that she had just volunteered more information than she intended.

“If you kids are planning to elope, why is Tarah on my dick all of a sudden?”

“Tarah is in Wyoming right now, having a very important conversation with her family. I seriously doubt she has given one thought to anything you’re doing.”

“Then why are you here, you stalking me?”

“I didn’t even notice you there until you came over and initiated your unbalanced discourse about dicks—which has totally uncentered me, so thank you.”

“Christ,” Braque said. These hippie yoga chicks were the goddamn worst, no matter who they fucked.

“You should think on what you’re saying and doing,” Lolo said. “You’re putting negative energy into the world that’s cycling back. That’s what happens, it cycles back.”

Yawn. Now that she was close to 100 percent sure that Lolo and probably Tarah had nothing to do with this, she wanted to wrap this shit up and get on with her day.

“You would know,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to replenish my GI tract.”

“Morning sickness?”

“Ha. Fuck you.”

Lolo looked at Braque and smiled a little bit. “I’ve been a doula for five years. You seem pregnant to me. I’d guess five or six weeks.”

“Bullshit,” Braque said, and walked to the checkout. Crunchy little moon-face bitch actually got under her skin. Braque almost admired her for it; it was the first time since she’d met Lolo that she’d felt in her gut that the woman had any authority. And now it scared her a little.

9:39
A
.
M
.

Braque was in the ground-floor women’s bathroom at Chapin Hall with her pants to her knees, but her whole day wasn’t fucked yet. Yes, this was a substantial detour, but she still had an hour to make it to her last Micro 1 discussion group before the final. According to her schedule, it had been thirty-three days and sixteen hours since her last period, so a worst-case scenario was possible, and she needed to figure that out, stat.

The bathroom was one of those white-on-white jobs with white tile on the floor and a frosted window that had been painted shut. The toilet paper was so cheap, you could read a magazine through it, and the place smelled like mildew because of the self-conscious dipshits who took a shower in there every day and trapped all the humidity inside a room where the window couldn’t open. But it was just the place for an operation as stupid as a secret pregnancy test.

Patricia, of course, freaked out when Braque texted her about what was happening and insisted on skipping her own weight training just to help Braque with the lame-ass pee stick. This was unnecessary but fine. In the road games against Michigan and Purdue, Patricia had seen Braque do far more embarrassing things, like overthrow the catcher on a play at the plate and call off the left fielder on a fly ball that ended up going halfway to the warning track.

“Wow, Tarah and Lolo are getting married,” Patricia said, watching Braque take the pregnancy test from Osco out of its box. “Sure didn’t see that coming.”