From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,
posted by conTessaofthecastle:
Daphne moved steadily through the forest, not letting herself think about anything but getting closer to the Portal of Arden. She wouldn’t think about what had happened to Astoria. She wouldn’t think about Lord Quintana, his dark eyes furious as he forbade Astoria from ever attempting the shape-shifting spell again. She wouldn’t think of the coachman and his passenger, Lord Quintana’s sister, frozen on the trail where she had bound them with the strongest spell she knew. She had used the unpredictable restraining spell her mother had warned her against. Even now she wasn’t sure it would hold. She needed to hurry.
Soph.
Tess wakes me up the next morning, telling me, “Soph, we have to make breakfast.”
It takes me a minute to figure out where I am. The room is still dark, and my head hurts. I remember last night and realize the power must still be out. My mouth is fuzzy, and I taste Hennessy, which makes me want to gag. “What time is it? God, how did you wake up?”
“Six-thirty. No one sleeps late on a dairy farm, Soph.”
“It’s freezing in here. Where’s Chris?”
“I’m here,” Chris groans from the floor, where she’d wrapped herself in our extra blankets and used Tess’s pillow. She sits up groggily and asks, “What are we supposed to do now?”
“You can stay here, Chris, but Soph and I are supposed to go down and start breakfast for everyone.”
“I’m taking a hot shower,” Chris declares, and I hear Tess snort.
“Chris—no electricity, no pump, no water. Stay under your blanket.”
Chris groans again and lies back down on the floor. I sit up and reach for a sweatshirt. Tess and I walk out into the dark hallway. “How are we supposed to make breakfast, then?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what’s in the kitchen. The stoves are gas, so they might work, but not the ovens.” How can Tess be so awake?
“Let me put on something warm.” My head is killing me.
Daylight is starting to creep through the window. Tess and I make our way downstairs to the kitchen. By now we can see what we’re doing.
Tess’s face is pale, and she’s a little unsteady on her feet. She winces and groans as she pulls open the heavy door to the giant refrigerator.
“Are you okay?” I put out my hand to steady her. She looks down at my hand, and I take it back.
She looks at me and shrugs. “Headache.”
“Do you want to go back to bed?” I ask. Screw breakfast. She looks as awful as I feel.
“Nope.” She sticks her head in the dark refrigerator, and says, “I don’t see anything in here except cold cuts and eggs.”
“Those are from lunch yesterday. You said the roads would be bad. Do you think they couldn’t make deliveries?”
“Probably. The fridge is still cold, so I guess the food’s safe to eat. We could put out ham and cheese. There’s eggs. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the cooktop’s gas.”
I search the pantry and call out, “There are leftover hard rolls.”
Tess comes over. “What’s a hard roll?” I notice her accent when she says “hard.” It’s softer than what you hear on TV.
“You know, a hard roll.” I hold the bag up for her to see.
Tess laughs and says, “Oh, you mean a bulkie.”
“A what?”
“A bulkie roll. It’s not hard.”
I laugh. “We call it a hard roll, even though it’s not hard. It’s not as soft as a hamburger bun.”
Tess smiles. “Who would want to eat bread called ‘hard’? It sounds stale.”
“No, it’s good. We have them all the time in the morning. Hey! That’s what we should do.”
“What? Eat hard rolls?”
“No, make breakfast sandwiches.”
“You mean like an Egg McMuffin?”
“No. Well, I guess. In the City, we buy them off food carts on the sidewalk. Hard rolls with eggs, cheese, ham, sausage, or bacon. They’re all warm and melty. Everyone loves them! On the street, they come in aluminum foil.”
“How are the eggs cooked?”
“I don’t know. Scrambled I guess, or fried. You’re the cook. We need to be able to pile the eggs onto the hard rolls with cheese and that leftover ham.”
I can see that she’s thinking. “I think I know how. Let’s get everything going.” She closes her eyes and takes a breath. I’m about to ask her if she’s okay again, when she opens her eyes slowly and moves toward the drawers next to the ovens. “I’ll find matches.”
We hear people moving around outside the kitchen. Yin pokes her head in from the swinging door to the dining room. She’s wrapped a blanket around her body. “What happened to you guys last night?” She yawns. “We didn’t see you after you went on your rescue mission.”
“Let me put it this way—my head is killing me, and I’m not sure I remember everything.”
Yin laughs. “It sounds like more fun than the poetry slam! What are you doing with that bag of wecks?”
Tess looks up from the drawer and asks, “What’s a weck?”
“You know, those things.” Yin points at the bags of hard rolls. “Beef-on-weck is the official sandwich of Buffalo. It’s delicious. Weck is short for kimmelweck.”
I tell her, “Well, it’s going to be breakfast-on-weck if we can figure out how.” Yin smiles and withdraws to the dining room.
I follow Tess to the walk-in refrigerator. We take out the eggs, cheese, and all the leftover ham. Tess tells me to break three dozen eggs into a large mixing bowl. I start, but stop when I hear her let out a little shriek.
“Soph, you don’t smash the eggs in the bowl. You’ll drop shells in them.” She laughs.
Sure enough, there are little bits of shell in the two eggs I broke into the bowl. I dump them down the drain and turn back to her. “You do it, then!” I snap. I’m cold, my head hurts, I can still taste Hennessy in the back of my mouth, and she should be able to tell I don’t know how to cook.
“Let me show you how.” Tess doesn’t notice that I just lost my temper with her. And then she surprises me. She takes another egg and hands it to me, puts both of her hands over mine, and guides them over the bowl. She shows me how to crack the egg sharply on the side, and then uses her hands to help my hands pull the egg apart gently. Her hands are cold. “Tap, hold, and pull,” she explains, and we do another one that way. Her hands warm as they cocoon mine. “Now you try.” She steps back, and I almost protest, but I pick up a third egg and show her I can do it.
It takes a couple of tries, but I figure it out. By the time I’m through with three dozen eggs, I can do it without getting sticky. Between my headache and my earlier ineptitude, I don’t want to give Tess any satisfaction, but I can’t help being proud of myself. “Look—no shells.” She grins at me.
While I’ve been cracking eggs, Tess has been cutting open hard rolls. Bulkie rolls. Whatever.
Janaye walks in, with a blanket still around her. “What’s up with the Kaiser rolls, you guys? Are we ordering off the street cart this morning?”
“We’re calling it a Power Outage Breakfast, Janaye,” I say. “I’m cracking eggs like there’s a big crowd coming to the diner!”
Tess comes over holding a large wiry thing with a handle. “Wait a minute,” she says to Janaye. “I thought these were called hard rolls in New York. What’s a Kaiser?”
Janaye and I grin at each other and shrug, and we both say “Brooklyn,” at the same time.
Tess shakes her head when we start laughing. She hands the kitchen tool to me.
“Use this whisk to beat the eggs.”
Janaye goes into the dining room to find Clover. Mixing the eggs is harder than it looks. The mixing tool is awkward and the eggs want to slip out of the bowl. But I finish and turn back to her. “Now what?”
She shows me a giant frying pan that is all shiny inside. “I greased this. We’re going to pour the eggs in and scramble them. I got the pilot light on the stove top lit.” She sees me staring. “Girl Scout. Gold Award. Remember?” She rolls her eyes at me, but smiles. “Go on, Soph. Pour the eggs in.” After I do so, she puts the pan on the stove and asks me to find her a spatula. Once she’s cooked the eggs, we assemble the sandwiches, with egg, ham, and cheese in each hard roll.
“Bulkie,” she says stubbornly, but I see her grinning and can’t help smiling back.
“Fine, you can say ‘bulkie.’ Unless you’re going ‘weck’ or ‘Kaiser.’” We both laugh. It’s fun working together. Once we have three long rows of sandwiches, I ask, “Now what?”
“Are they done? Do they look right?”
She’s asking me? I think for a minute. “I don’t know. Let’s try one.”
I pick one up and take a bite. The bread is a little hard, almost stale. The cheese and ham are cold. “Something’s not right. It’s supposed to be soft and warm.”
“What do you think is missing?”
Again, she’s asking me? I try to picture the perfect breakfast sandwich, the one from the corner of Third Avenue and East 88th Street. I should be able to do this. I’m a poet! “Let me see. When we buy them, they do it all quickly, in this little metal cart and then when we unwrap them—oh, of course, we need to wrap them in foil and warm them up!”
“Great idea, Soph!” At first I think she’s being sarcastic, but she means it. Maybe I can cook something after all.
The oven is dead, so we wrap all the sandwiches in foil and pile them into a huge soup pot. Tess puts them on the stove top, and fifteen minutes later we pile hot sandwiches on a tray. We can hear the other girls talking in the dining room.
Tess says, “Time to serve your breakfast bulkies, Soph.” She’s kidding, but I don’t mind. “You take them in; I’ll find paper plates.”
I pick up the tray and as I open the door to the dining room, I hear a click and see the room grow bright. The power’s back! I laugh at the timing. Most of the girls are standing around in the dining room, and someone claps.
Gabriela asks brightly, “What’s for breakfast?”
I hear Tess behind me say, “Straight from the streets of New York City, egg sandwiches on hard rolls.”
“What’s a hard roll?” someone asks.
“Same thing as breakfast-on-weck. Tess, you tell them!” I say happily. I grab one and go upstairs to shower.
I’m on the way from our room to the shower when I see Grace in the hallway.
“Have you seen Chris?”
“No. She spent the night in our room, but she’s not there now.” I wonder what that’s about.
Tess.
Grace is the only instructor at breakfast. She tells us to relax for a couple of hours and come back to the lounge at ten-thirty. Everyone goes back to their rooms to take long, hot showers. Soph finds ibuprofen in her bag and offers it for my headache. I take it with the glass of water she brings me and think about how much better we worked this morning than when we made that first meal. It was fun watching her figure out how to make the breakfast sandwiches taste the way they do in New York City, which she calls “the City,” like it’s the only one. Soph may be very different from me, but she is honestly excited about all kinds of things and she isn’t afraid to show it. She’s always willing to pitch in, even when she doesn’t know how.
In the lounge, Grace tells us that Professor Forsythe and the others couldn’t make it back last night because of the ice storm. Joan and Celestine were supposed to give a seminar, but, since they aren’t around, we should work on our individual writing projects or with our groups. Soph is clearly disappointed. She was supposed to meet with Professor Forsythe alone this morning to go over her poems.
I’m thinking I’ll work on my fan fic in our room, when I hear Soph’s voice behind me on the stairs. “Tess, we’re going stir crazy!”
She’s with Janaye. They’re both smiling. Janaye asks, “Since you’re from around here. I thought you’d know something fun to do. I’m so sick of writing!”
I know what they mean. We’ve been working all week. “Is Grace still in the lounge?”
I go back down the stairs and look out the big window at the hill behind the lodge. It’s still cold, which means the ice hasn’t melted. It may be slippery outside, but that will actually help. I turn back to Soph and Janaye.
“Want to test your new boots and go sledding?”
Soph and Janaye both nod. I haven’t seen any sleds here, but Janaye comes up with another idea.
“We used to take the trays from the school cafeteria over to the Park and use them. The school hated it because they lost them, but it was fun. There’re plenty of trays here.”
Soph is perplexed. “You guys took trains all the way from Brooklyn to Central Park with cafeteria trays?”
Janaye rolls her eyes. “No, princesa, Prospect Park has skating and sledding!”
Of course, I couldn’t tell you where either park is, but the idea of taking sleds of any sort on a subway makes me laugh. Soph laughs too. Janaye goes to the kitchen to scout trays. I go upstairs to tell the other girls.
Soph follows close behind and asks, “Are you going to invite…” I wince. Even though I had too much to drink last night, I remember what I said to Chris. She never came down to breakfast this morning. That’s on me.
I cut Soph off before she mentions Chris’s name. “We’re not excluding anyone. I’ll go let them know.” And so I go tell everyone on our floor, and then I climb up to the third floor where Chris has found another room. But she isn’t there when I stick my head in. On the way back down the stairs, I see her talking with Grace in one of the little rooms off the lounge. Before Grace closes the door, I get a glimpse of Chris. I think she’s crying.
* * *
From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,
February 15, 2018
Our breakfast challenge, “great idea,” she says.
We laugh at hard rolls, bulkies, Kaisers, wecks.
Janaye then teaches us to sled using trays.
I notice Chris, she won’t let us forget.