Stars So Sweet (13 page)

Normally, Gladys would turn to an adult for counsel, but since Aunt Lydia had a vested interest in Gladys taking the job, she probably couldn't give selfless advice. Mr. Eng might also see the permanent
Standard
job as an excuse to get rid of Aunt Lydia once trade-show season was over, so Gladys wasn't sure she could count on him for impartial guidance, either.

That only left one adult who knew her secret. Gladys thought of the letter she'd received from her former teacher, now hidden in the one place she knew her parents would never snoop: between the pages of a cookbook. Ms. Quincy was wise and well traveled; as a teacher, she clearly believed in a good education, but she also felt strongly about following your passion. Gladys decided she would e-mail her ex-teacher and try to set up a meeting.

The next night, while her parents were out at a movie, Gladys finished her review of Café Havana on the office computer and e-mailed it to Fiona. When that was finished, she started a fresh e-mail.

Dear Ms. Quincy,

Thank you so much for your letter. I would love to meet up and talk. Maybe I can come by East Dumpsford Elementary one day after school this week?

Best,

Gladys

When she logged into DumpMail the following afternoon, she found two new messages in her inbox: one from Ms. Quincy and one from Fiona.

Dear Gladys,

How lovely to hear from you. I have some free time after school tomorrow (Tuesday) if you'd like to stop by. I'm still in Room 116, just like last year.

V. Quincy

Tuesday—that was when Gladys had been hoping to
finally
attend her first meeting of French Club!
I'll just have to put that off for one more week,
she thought.
This is more important.
Gladys fired off a quick response to Ms. Quincy, then clicked over to read her message from Fiona.

Gladys,

Another excellent review from my most dependable critic! Thank you so much for the thoroughness, enthusiasm, and style that you've brought to this series so far.

I really hope that you're still considering the offer I made when we met last month—the
Standard
could use a unique voice like yours on its permanent staff. Let me
know which way you're leaning if you get a chance . . . and how I can persuade you to change your mind if you're thinking of turning down the offer.

Cheers,

Fiona

Gladys sighed. It was great to have her talents appreciated, especially since it was a feeling she didn't always get at home. But it didn't feel so great to know that Fiona's admiration was still based on a big deception. If Fiona knew how
truly
unique Gladys's voice was, would she still be so interested in having her at the paper full-time?

GREEN PEN, GREEN TEA

W
HEN THE LAST BELL RANG THE NEXT
afternoon, Gladys was out of the building like a shot. Pedaling the familiar old roads to East Dumpsford Elementary made her feel almost like she was moving backward in time, and when she reached the bike rack in front of the school, it was smaller than she'd remembered. The steps leading up to the front door felt slightly less steep, too. Had the school shrunk? No, she supposed she had grown since the year before.

Gladys's sneakered feet moved silently down the hallway, and she was steps from Room 116 when a sudden feeling of shyness washed over her.

Ms. Quincy was a teacher Gladys admired above any other, and she was glad that she'd offered to advise her. But when
she found out how many lies Gladys had told for her job, would she still feel a “rush of pride” for her former student? Maybe coming here hadn't been such a hot idea.

Gladys stopped in her tracks, but when she did, her sneakers let out a loud
squeak!
that echoed around the deserted hallway.

“Gladys?” Ms. Quincy's voice called. “Is that you?”

Fudge.
Gladys forced her feet to move into the classroom.

“Gladys! It's wonderful to see you!” The teacher rose from her desk. Her hair was different from how Gladys remembered it—she had gotten rid of her tight curls, opting instead for a super-short buzz cut. But her kooky fashion sense was the same as ever; today she wore pajama-like polka-dotted slacks, strappy brown platform sandals, a bright yellow shirt, and a flowered scarf that fluttered in the breeze from the open window.

“Hi, Ms. Quincy,” Gladys said. “Thanks for your letter. It's great to see you, too.”

“Have a seat,” Ms. Quincy said. “Take any desk you like.”

Gladys's feet automatically took her to her old desk, but when she pulled out the chair and sat down, it felt all wrong. The seat was lower to the ground than the seats in middle school. Also, her old desk was stuffed full of a stranger's things, like a sparkly purple pencil case and a folder covered with monster truck stickers.
That combination made it hard to tell whether the desk now belonged to a boy or a girl, but Gladys supposed it didn't really matter—it no longer belonged to her.

Ms. Quincy perched herself on the desk in front of Gladys and brought her sandaled feet up to rest on the short chair. “So, Gladys—or should I call you G?” Ms. Quincy winked. “I read your latest review last week, of Pupuseria El Gran Sabor. It was just wonderful how you described the casamiento as—”

“Ms. Quincy!” Gladys interrupted. If she had to sit there and listen to her teacher heap praise on her writing, she wasn't sure she would be able to admit to her deceptions. “Thanks,” she said, “but I don't feel comfortable accepting your compliments. The truth is, I'm a giant fraud.”

“A fraud?” Ms. Quincy asked. “What do you mean?”

Gladys plunged in. She told her teacher the whole story of her restaurant-reviewing career: how she had received her first e-mail from Fiona Inglethorpe in the spring; how she had maneuvered her way into the city for her earliest reviews; how she had been afraid to tell her parents about the job and afraid to tell her editor about her age; how her aunt had agreed to help her. “And now,” she concluded, “I'm afraid that Fiona will be disappointed if I don't accept the full-time job—and that my aunt will, also, because it's kind of her job now, too.” Gladys dug her elbows into her old
desk and dropped her forehead into her hands. “I just wanted to be a published food writer, but everything got so complicated.” She looked up into Ms. Quincy's kind, dark eyes. “What should I do?”

Ms. Quincy didn't say anything right away. Instead, she rose and walked back over to her' desk to retrieve her insulated mug. Gladys wondered if it was still full of gunpowder green tea, which was her teacher's drink of choice. Ms. Quincy took a sip, then brought the mug back with her as she retook her seat in front of Gladys.

“I can't answer that question for you,” she said finally. “But I can present you with another one, perhaps a more important one. You seem very concerned about letting other people in your life down. But if you didn't have to worry about what they thought of you, what decisions would you make?”

“I . . .” Gladys was at a loss for how to respond. She had spent so much energy stressing about all the people in her life who seemed impossible to please that she hadn't taken a moment to think about what she actually wanted for herself.

“Spend some time thinking about it,” Ms. Quincy said. “In fact . . .” She rose again, looped back to her desk, and returned with a sheet of lined paper and a green gel pen. “I often find that, when faced with difficult decisions, it's best to write out my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I don't even know how I truly feel
until I've written it down. As a writer yourself, I imagine this might help you as well.”

Gladys accepted the pen and paper. “I'll give you some time,” Ms. Quincy said. “My tea could use a hot-water infusion anyway.” She smiled down at Gladys, then stepped out into the hallway with her mug.

Alone in her old classroom, Gladys stared at the blank sheet. She clicked the pen's button and tried to ignore the voice in her head that said,
This is stupid. Writing is what got you into this mess in the first place—it can't help you now.

“Hush,” she said out loud, and touched the pen's point to the paper. She had no idea what she was going to write and thought maybe she'd just doodle for a minute. But the gel ink glided over the paper in such a satisfying way that Gladys soon found herself scribbling line after line.

HONEST THOUGHTS

Middle school—it's tough. Even though I've joined a bunch of clubs, I know I don't fit in. I mean, I didn't fit in in elementary school, either, but middle school is so much bigger that somehow, when I'm not with my friends there, I feel more alone. Plus, there's Elaine de la Vega. Why does she hate me so much? I wish I could figure that out.

The Standard
—I love getting assignments. I love going to restaurants, and really thinking about the food I eat. And I love it when my friends come along to help. I don't want to give up my job, but I'm also not ready for it to become the center of my whole life. I wish I could come up with some sort of compromise that would work for me and for the paper.

Parents—they still drive me crazy with their bad taste and stupid cooking rules! But if I keep lying to them, I might explode.

Fiona—I'm annoyed that she has such low expectations of kids and what they're willing to eat. I want to find a way to show her that kids can have good taste, too.

Aunt Lydia—I love her, but I can't be responsible for keeping her employed anymore. She needs to find her own path.

And even though I'm still mad at him, I miss Hamilton.

There, she had done it: written out an entire page of completely honest thoughts. She felt a little embarrassed as she read back over some of them (seriously, who in their right mind would turn down a full-time job at the country's most important newspaper to stay in middle school?). But it also felt good to finally be truthful with
someone.
Gladys had been so hung up on her dishonesty to her parents and her editor that
she hadn't realized that she wasn't being honest with herself.

She looked up and noticed Ms. Quincy lounging in the classroom doorway. “Well?” the teacher asked. “Did that help at all?”

“It did,” Gladys admitted. “The problem is, I don't know how to make it all happen.”

“Ah, yes,” Ms. Quincy said. “That's the rub. Seeing your goals is the first step. But reaching them often requires taking many more.” She approached Gladys's desk again. “The good news is that you don't need to see the entire path clearly to set out on it; you just need to see a few feet ahead of you. Look back over what you wrote. Is there a first step that you can take?”

Gladys stared back down at her list. It looked like she needed to have honest talks with a few people—her parents, her editor, her aunt. But maybe she could warm up by frying a slightly smaller fish: Elaine de la Vega.

“Yeah,” Gladys said. “I think I know where to start.”

“Just remember, one step at a time,” Ms. Quincy said. “If you think about everything that you need to accomplish, it's easy to get overwhelmed. But if you approach your goals bit by bit, you have a good chance of succeeding.”

“Thanks, Ms. Quincy,” Gladys said. She folded her scribbled-on sheet of paper. “This has been really helpful.”

“Anytime,” Ms. Quincy said, “and do let me know how it all turns out with your parents and your editor. Because, as your former teacher, I would certainly love to be able to brag openly about your restaurant reviewing if you
do
decide to let your name and age become public information.” She smiled, then noticed that Gladys was offering her back her pen. “Oh, you keep that. I can already tell you have an affinity for it.”

“Thanks,” Gladys said again, and reached for her blue backpack. It didn't have a special pocket for pens and pencils, which was pretty inconvenient; Gladys was often groping through the main compartment at the start of class. For the first time in weeks, she thought of her lobster backpack, and how each of its zippered claws was the perfect size to store writing utensils.

When she got home that afternoon, Gladys dumped the contents of the blue backpack onto her bed and retrieved her lobster from the closet. “You're coming back to school with me tomorrow,” Gladys said. “And together, we're going to figure out what to do about Elaine.”

IRRATIONAL DOUGHNUTS

F
INDING AN OPPORTUNITY TO CONFRONT
Elaine, though, was easier said than done. No sooner had Gladys and her lobster marched into the cafeteria the next day at lunchtime than Shayla from Mathletes waylaid her.

“Gladys!” she cried. “Great news—a slot opened up at the last minute for us to do our bake sale tomorrow. It's either that or wait until December, which will be too late if we want funding to go to that competition on the North Shore.”

“Oh . . . right,” Gladys said. This was the first she remembered hearing of a competition, but she supposed the Mathletes must have had some good reason for wanting to raise money.

“Great, so we can spend lunch planning!” Shayla grabbed Gladys's elbow
and steered her toward an open table. Gladys glanced around the room, but saw no sign of Elaine yet. She sighed, and followed Shayla's lead. Over lunch they discussed different deep-frying oils, and Gladys added notes to her recipe for buñuelo dough after Shayla quintupled each measurement in her head.

• • •

That afternoon, Gladys and the Mathletes spent hours mixing, shaping, and frying doughnuts shaped like every digit from one to nine. Plus they rolled some scraps into balls to act as decimals.

Then, the next day at lunchtime, Shayla grabbed Gladys
again,
this time to review the setup for that afternoon's sale.

“So, I thought it would be fun to lay out a whole series of irrational doughnut numbers—like pi, Euler's number, and the square root of two . . .” Shayla started.

Gladys listened for a few moments, but when her eyes started wandering around the cafeteria, her attention quickly followed. Who did Elaine sit with each day? Eighth-graders, surely, but Gladys realized that she had never paid attention to who the
Telegraph
editor hung out with. All the times Elaine had ever accosted her, she had been on her own.

“What do you think?” Shayla asked nervously. “Did we make enough different doughnuts to display each irrational number to twenty decimal places?”

“What? Oh, uh . . .” Gladys looked down at the sheet of notebook paper Shayla had been scribbling on. “Wow,” she said. “That's a lot of random numbers! Do they follow any sort of pattern?”

Shayla groaned. “You haven't been listening to me at all. Do you even know what an irrational number is?”

Gladys didn't, and did her best to pay attention to what Shayla was saying for the rest of the lunch period. She still wasn't sure she totally got it in the end, but she at least absorbed enough to understand how Shayla wanted the doughnuts set up at the sale. Gladys warned her that once doughnuts started selling, the number strings would be ruined, but Shayla said she was okay with that as long as they got a picture first.

That afternoon in the lobby, Gladys recruited Charissa to snap some pictures of the doughnut display before the sale officially started. Gladys would have preferred to serve the buñuelos fresh and warm, but there was no way the middle school was going to let them set up a deep fryer full of hot oil in the hallway. The fritters still tasted pretty good, though, considering they had been fried the day before. Gladys had sampled one of the spare doughnut holes to make sure, and she enjoyed the sweet, anise-hinted glaze that had had time to cool and harden on the outside.

As students started to line up to buy doughnuts, Gladys kept a careful eye out for Elaine. The moment
she showed up to “cover” this bake sale for the paper, Gladys would pull her aside for a conversation. If there was one thing she knew the Mathletes could handle in her absence, it was totaling up bills and making correct change.

But Elaine never showed, and the next day in the cafeteria, when Gladys was finally free of Shayla, she couldn't spot her, either. Where was she? By the time the period ended, Gladys was resigned to the fact that she wouldn't be able to talk to the girl until next week. In the meantime, she had a Peruvian restaurant to review.

Gladys had had less time this week than the previous ones to do research about the restaurant they'd be visiting, so the next day Sandy suggested that she bring her tablet along on their outing. That way, while Aunt Lydia was sampling wares at her dried-fruit trade show, he and Gladys could peruse the Peruvian restaurant's specialties online.

“Are you sure you won't mind missing the fruits?” Gladys asked him as they made their way from Penn Station to the hotel where the show was being held.

“Nah,” Sandy said. “Between the dragon fruit and the durian, fruit hasn't done much for me this year. I'm basically boycotting it now.”

“Way to stick it to the fruit,” she said.

Still, Sandy was in a good mood. As he'd explained on the train, the dried meats she had brought him
had gone a long way to reestablishing his “gross cred” that week at school. Jonah's entry for that round of their competition had been chocolate-covered bacon, a combination he had vastly underestimated. “Everyone actually thought it was good,” Sandy explained. “Even Jonah kind of liked it, I could tell. So he's still beating me two rounds to one, but I've got the momentum now. If I can just find one more really awesomely disgusting thing to bring in to school, I might be able to win the title for good!”

“We'll come up with something,” Gladys assured him.

Aunt Lydia made sure that they were set up comfortably in some plush chairs in the hotel lobby before she entered the ballroom where the dried-fruit vendors were displaying their wares.

“Okay, here we go!” Sandy spent a few minutes hacking into the hotel's Wi-Fi, and then they navigated straight to the website for Pisco Pisco, their destination for that evening. Luckily, the menu on the website had a lot of pictures.

“Cool. What's that one?” Sandy asked. “It looks like a big plateful of raw fish.”

“It's not exactly raw, but it's not cooked,” Gladys said, recalling the bit of research she'd been able to squeeze in on Monday. “Ceviche is a popular dish along Peru's coast. The fish is marinated in an acidic solution, which cures it but doesn't cook it.”

“Excellent,” Sandy murmured. “Okay, that one's definitely a possible candidate for a gross food. Do you think they'd pack it in a doggy bag for me?” He scrolled down. “Whoa—that drink is purple!”

The drink was labeled
CHICHA MORADA,
so Gladys opened a new tab to do some research about it. It turned out to be a sweet beverage made from purple corn, plus some fruits and spices.

“It's sweet?” Sandy asked. “Then I bet I'll like it. Gross points, zero, but a growing boy does need his sugar.” He tapped on the screen to return to the restaurant's menu, but when the next picture filled the screen, he let out a yelp. “What is
that
??”

Gladys looked at the tablet. The picture looked like a roasted rodent on a plate; its head was still on, and you could see its crispy little ears and everything. There was just one word on the screen beneath it:
CUY
.

Quickly, Gladys did another search, which resulted in several even more horrifying pictures popping up on the screen.

Sandy's eyes were wide with shock, and Gladys suddenly thought of her friend's beloved Edward and Dennis Hopper. Sandy did have some limits when it came to eating meat that might be a close relative of one of his pets. Would cuy be too rabbit-like for him to swallow?

“Look,” she said, “this website says that cuy is basically the national dish of Peru . . . but you don't have
to eat it. I mean, I probably have to at least try it for my review, but if it freaks you out too much—”

“Freaks me out? Are you kidding?” Sandy turned to her, his wide eyes now sparkling with mischief. “Gatsby, this is the best thing
ever
! Who's even gonna remember the durian when they see me eat a
rat
?”

“Guinea pig,” Gladys corrected him. “It looks like cuy is guinea pig.”

That information seemed to give Sandy a moment of pause, but soon enough, he shook it off. “Even better,” he declared. “So hey, do you think it'll come out looking like this on the plate? All . . . whole and everything?!”

“Um, I guess so,” Gladys said. Actually, she didn't think she would mind if it looked a tiny bit
less
like a guinea pig when it arrived on her plate, but she supposed if you were going to be a meat-eater, it was only fair that you should at least occasionally have to look your dinner in its face.

For the rest of the time they spent waiting for Aunt Lydia, the cuy was all Sandy could talk about.

Finally, a subway ride later, they were seated at the restaurant and being served their appetizers. In addition to the ceviche, Gladys had wanted to try a couple of traditional potato dishes: papas rellenas, which were stuffed with meat and deep-fried, and papas a la huancaina, which were cooked in a creamy, cheesy sauce. Taking care to save room in her stomach for
all that was to come, Gladys only took a few bites, as did Aunt Lydia, who was already “so stuffed with fruit I feel like a Christmas pie.” Sandy, though, was more than happy to vacuum up the rest, “to clear space for the main event.”

More dishes came out, and Gladys began to take notes on how Peruvian cuisine was different from Salvadoran and Cuban—which was the whole point of her multi-restaurant series. Finally, the dish they had been waiting for arrived at their table, the whole cuy on it split and splayed out like a much tinier version of a roasted pig.

Aunt Lydia sat up straighter. “Now
that
looks interesting!”

Gladys reached into her lobster for her tablet. “You want me to take a video?” she asked Sandy. “You know, that you can show your classmates?”

To her surprise, he shook his head. In fact, he was looking a little hesitant now. “Uh . . .” he said. “Why don't you go first, Gatsby? I mean, you should get to taste it while it's . . . you know . . . hot and everything.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Gladys turned to Aunt Lydia, who nodded encouragingly. It looked like it was all on her to get this cuy-eating party started.

“Okay,” she said, “anyone who doesn't want to see this, avert your eyes.” Then, with a deep breath, Gladys grabbed her sharp knife and sawed off one of the cuy's legs.
It's just like eating a chicken drumstick,
she told
herself as she raised the small joint to her lips.
Like a tiny little chicken drumstick.
She took a bite.

She chewed—then chewed some more. The meat was tougher than she'd expected.
You just have to get one bite down,
she told herself.
Just this one bite.
Finally, with a small shudder, she swallowed.

“Whoa,” Sandy said softly. “So
that's
how a professional does it. Gatsby, I'm inspired!” Reaching forward, he cut off another leg for himself, and Aunt Lydia followed.

“Excuse me,” Gladys said. “I . . . um . . . have to go make some notes.” Then she ran off to the bathroom with her journal before she had to watch the others bite into their meat.

When she got back to the table, Sandy was tossing a bare bone down onto his plate and accepting a take-out box from the waiter. “I assume you're done with this, right?” he asked Gladys, pointing to the rest of the cuy. She nodded, and then, in one fell swoop, Sandy lifted the guinea pig up off its platter and dumped it into the Styrofoam clamshell. “Then you don't mind if I take it in with me for lunch on Monday, do you? Jonah's gonna
freak out
when he sees me take a bite out of this thing . . . especially if I start with the face!”

Gladys could only imagine what Parm would say in this situation. She was happy when Sandy snapped the lid into place so that she didn't have to look at the cuy anymore. Soon enough, her appetite returned
and she was able to sample some of the lomo saltado, whose plain old beef thankfully had no skin, bones, or claws, and was stir-fried to tender perfection.

The next day, as part of her review for the
New York Standard
Dining section, G. Gatsby e-mailed her editor the following words:

Cuy is a favorite traditional food of many Peruvians. With its thick-skinned, rubbery texture and gamey flavor, it seems unlikely to win a lot of American fans, though it is certainly a novelty. If you order it, you may find yourself in a game of chicken with your dining companions over who is brave enough to taste it first . . . and those who do partake may find themselves wishing that they had actually ordered the chicken instead.