Skinny Bitch in Love (30 page)

“He wanted me to be sure to mention that he’s not even sure you could
lift
an eggplant,” the producer said. “ ‘No meat makes Clementine a wimpy girl,’ he said.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. What the hell?

“You know Joe ‘Steak’ Johannsen!” she said, as if I did. “He’s raring to go on this challenge. No matter who wins the cook-off, the charity of his choice gets $25,000. You win, you get the $25,000.”

Was I interested, she wanted to know.

Fuck, yeah.

For the next ten minutes she gave me the lowdown and said she’d email all kinds of forms I had to print out and sign and send back. The deal was this: I would randomly select ten names from the audience and the producer would select nine
names. Those nineteen would vote on which Eggplant Parmesan they thought was better.

If I could make twenty slobs who ate nothing but red meat think my Eggplant Parmesan was better than Johannsen’s, the money was mine. All the money I’d need to get Clementine’s No Crap Café on its way next week.

Ha. I’d been making Eggplant Parmesan since I was eight. I’d perfected my vegan cheese. No one made better tomato sauce than I did. And I knew how to select the best eggplant for the job. How to infuse it with flavor that would blow Joe’s cheese-slathered, overcooked slab away.

“You can bring an assistant to help you,” the producer went on. “Only one person, eighteen or older. Oh, and make sure your assistant is kind of mouthy.”

“Mouthy?” I repeated.

“Have you ever seen the show?”

“Um, no.”

“Watch one today,” she said. “You can see full episodes online. Make sure you can handle it. Then call me back no later than 1 p.m.”

Handle it? What was to handle? I could take on some gross slob any day.

Mouthy. Sara was mouthy. And she’d been my assistant during the entire cooking class and knew her way around chopping and slicing and watching timers. But she wasn’t trained, not like, say, Alexander was. Then again, Alexander wasn’t talking to me. And no one would call him mouthy. But I needed a trained chef to assist me. Someone who wouldn’t
miss a step, a beat, mistake oregano for dried thyme. I needed Alexander. I could teach him how to be “mouthy.” I could load him up with all kinds of American expressions that he wouldn’t know were snarky.

I grabbed my phone and punched in his number. Come on, answer. I let it ring and ring and ring, which meant he saw it was me and was letting it go to voice mail. For like the tenth time.

“Sara, come watch
Eat Me
with me,” I called out. I told her about the call. “The producer wants me to make sure I can handle it.”

“Ha.”

“I know.”

“Okay, making popcorn,” she said, then came in a few minutes later with a big bowl and sat down next to me. “And handle what? Carrying all the money out the door at the end?”

Two seconds later, we both understood what the producer had meant. Neither of us had ever actually seen the show; we just knew Johannsen’s schtick from his commercials and what we read about him online. He was always trending on Twitter for some very un-PC thing he said or did.

From the moment Joe “Steak” Johannsen appeared onscreen, he was as obnoxious as we’d heard he could be. He made dirty jokes about spaghetti. He made fun of his female challenger’s body, which was on the ample side. And not ten minutes into the challenge for Spaghetti Carbonara, Johannsen had reduced the challenger to tears because her pasta maker
had gotten jammed. He slapped a hand against his forehead and laughed for a good minute, then shouted, “Damn fool can’t even work the pasta maker!”

The audience went wild, jumping to their feet and chanting “Damn fool!” at the poor woman who flung down her sheet of pasta and continued crying.

“Awwww, she’s crying!” Johannsen shouted. “Poor baby!”

“Poor baby!” the audience chanted.

The challenger’s assistant, a skinny guy in kitchen whites, walked over to Johannsen and decked him.

“Oh!” the audience shouted. “Pow!”

“I’ve been bitch-slapped by slices of bacon tougher than you,” Johannsen shouted, laughing in the guy’s face.

The audience went wild, standing up and clapping and cheering. I pointed the remote at the TV and clicked OFF. I’d seen way too much as it was.

“Sara, how’d you like to tell Johannsen to suck it on national TV? I need a mouthy assistant.”

“Oh my God,” she shouted. “I am so going to be on TV and we are so going to kick this ass’s ass!”

I did what I always did when faced with cooking challenges. I drove up to Bluff Valley on Wednesday and made my Eggplant Parmesan—which I’d been working on for the past two days—for my dad. He shook his head at the first attempt. The sauce wasn’t right.

The second try got the nod.

Now that I could actually relax, I went outside and walked around the fields, trying to get Zach off my mind. But the fence where I’d carved “Justin Cole sucks” in seventh grade because he’d asked me to some dorky dance and then took another girl at the last second reminded me of how Zach Jeffries sucked, too. And the spot on the big rock that overlooked the bluffs, where my high school boyfriend had said, “Clementine, despite everything, I kind of love you,” and I’d said it right back, reminded me of Zach even more.

I used to be able to come up here and forget everything, because being up at the farm reminded me only of my family. But now being here made me think of Zach and that amazing night we’d had at his ranch house. The incredible sex. The way he looked at me. Everything between us.

I was supposed to be mad at him. But all I did was miss him.

Text from me to Zach that night:
Wanna come see me beat Joe Asshole Johannsen in a cook-off on Thursday night?

Zach:
You know I do.

Me:
I’ll drop off a ticket in your mailbox.

Zach:
Better yet, knock.

I did knock.

He opened the door, pulled me inside, and we did very little talking for an hour.

“I’ve missed you,” he said as we lay in his bed facing each other. His hands were in my hair.

“Me, too.”

“We’re not going to agree with each other on every little thing. I think we know this already.”

“Every big thing, either.”

“That, too,” he said. “But no matter what, I think you’re amazing, Clem. Everything about you. And what Jolie said about that ex of mine. It’s long over and has nothing to do with why I don’t want Jolie to get married. And it has nothing to do with us. What’s past is
long
past.”

“Stop making me like you,” I said. “Sometimes I wish you were a total asshole, not just partial, so I could—”

I shut up fast. There was no way I’d say what was just about to come out of my mouth.

Jesus.

“So you could what?” he asked.

I tried to kiss my way out of it, but he pinned me down, his dark blue eyes intense on mine.

“So you could not fall in love with me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I know.” He stared at me for a second, then trailed a finger down the side of my face. “But you were about to. Don’t deny it, Cooper.”

“I will deny it,” I said, smiling at him.

“Well, know this, then. No matter what comes out of my mouth when we’re arguing, I have nothing but respect for you—everything you’re doing, trying to do. Everything.”

I wasn’t going to tell him all I qualified for was a pathetic fifteen hundred bucks business loan. Zach didn’t seem like the “
See?
” type, but still. And I didn’t need a loan anymore. My Eggplant Parmesan was all the net worth I needed.

“It’s the same for me,” I said. “I hate when we’re fighting. Everything feels off.”

“I know. And plus, I need a date for my sister’s wedding.”

I grinned at him. He might have the asshole businessman in him, but he wasn’t a total loss. “She set a date?”

“Labor Day weekend. If you don’t hate my guts by then.”

Before I could say anything he pulled me on top of him and gave me one of those kisses that made it so hard to hate him for longer than a half hour.

Chapter 21

On Thursday, Sara and I drove to Studio City and finally found
Eat Me
’s soundstage inside a huge building. The set was wild. State-of-the-art double kitchens with maybe ten feet between them, no barrier or partition, so that Johannsen had full view of the challenger to heckle. The kitchen was built on long stainless steel counters that stretched across the length of the stage: six-burner stove top, oven, sink, garbage hole. Behind the counter was another stretch of table with pots and pans, dishes, utensils, and silverware.

The producer had us arrive three hours before the show was set to begin. A guy with a clipboard had met us at the door and had tried to take our bags of ingredients and my cases with my trusty sauté pans. Yeah,
no
. I didn’t trust Joe Asshole Johannsen for a second. My ingredients and my pans were not
leaving my sight. We carried them in ourselves and put them on the counter in front of us.

The audience seats were empty, which was probably why Joe Johannsen was nowhere to be seen. No audience, no need to appear. The producer talked our ears off for the next fifteen minutes, explaining timing and that I should keep an eye on the big blinking red digital clock on the wall. Sara would be my time watcher and let me know how much time I had left every fifteen minutes. I’d have ten minutes to prep, twenty minutes to cook, five minutes to plate twenty servings, and then the remaining time would be watching the tasters try both versions and record their favorites. The last five minutes of the show would be declaring the winner.

“You’ve seen the show, so you know what to expect,” she said. “If you let the heckling get to you—from Joe and the audience—he’ll win. And that’s no fun. Give it back to him.”

“Oh, we will,” Sara said.

Then it was off to hair and makeup. Sara and I sat in huge swivel chairs in front of a wall of mirrors. It took more than an hour for our makeup artists to make us look completely natural.

By the time we got back to the stage, the audience began filing in, a bunch of staffers directing them to their seats and explaining cue cards and instructions. I heard one woman tell the audience to scream and shout whatever they wanted, to have fun with Joe and his challenger, not to hold back. But no cursing was allowed; anyone who cursed would be escorted out.

One guy raised his hand and asked if “damn” was a curse. No, it was not, a producer assured him.

There were about two hundred people in the audience, their attention taken at the moment by staffers. The first row of the audience was only ten feet or so away from the long kitchen counter, which faced the audience. I looked around for Zach and spotted him in the third row. He winked at me, and I shot him a smile. I’d been given ten tickets to give away (but those names were disqualified from being taste testers). Ty and Seamus were a few rows behind Zach, and they gave me a wave. Julia from the coffee lounge, who’d become a friend, my sister—who’d let me know yesterday that Eva was cooperating on the Prime issue—and her fiancé rounded out the rest.

“Ten minutes to showtime,” the producer told Sara and me. “Why don’t you get in position and begin setting up? You can’t actually start prepping, but you can put your ingredients and cookware on the counter.”