Chapter 5

 First Day 

“Blister!”

An explosive bang rattled the window above my cot early the next morning. I gasped, rolling off the cot and taking my sleeping bag and pillow with me.

“Mark!” I yelled, grabbing my head when it slammed into the floor. “Why are you screaming?”

“Get up! It’s eight o’clock. All the staff members are already here.”

I forced my dry eyes open. What? The staff was here? Had I overslept? I’d been exhausted from scrubbing the lodge, alphabetizing the spice cupboard, and mouse-proofing the food in the pantry, but I didn’t think I’d been that exhausted.

“Seriously?”

“We promised them breakfast, Meg. Remember? Eight o’clock?” He tapped on the screen. “Ringabell, sleeping beauty?”

“Crap!” I scrambled to my feet, nearly tripping over the slick sleeping bag. “On my way!”

Within a minute, I donned a pair of jeans, pulled on my official navy-blue Adventura polo, tossed my hair into a messy bun, and headed to the kitchen wearing socks with my Birkenstocks. The sun hid behind the mountains, sending rays of yellow and light pink into the sky. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry, I would have stopped to appreciate the early morning grandeur and the sweet scent of dew.

A roar of chattering voices echoed through the lodge and into the kitchen when I rushed inside. The sound of JJ yelling above the collective madness smoothed the noise into a lull, but the chaos resumed with a chorus of laughter.

“Oh man.” I threw open the biggest cooler and yanked food out, chucking it onto the counter. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.”

My fingers flew, tying a knot in my apron strings as I mentally wrote a to-do list.

“Okay, Megan,” I said, closing my eyes. “Think. What do I need to do?”

Slice strawberries. Brown three packages of bacon. Crack, whip, and prep two-dozen eggs for cinnamon French toast. Find cinnamon. Warm syrup without burning it. Did I use butter on the grill? Did I use the whole grill? I could save a fifty-year-old with a blood clot in his lungs, but fixing breakfast for twenty hungry males had me half-paralyzed.

“Curse you, Mark.”

We’d argued for thirty minutes the night before about his banned foods list. I’d voted for spinach omelets. They happened to be my forte. He said that we’d insult the gods of eggs with such a dish, and he didn’t want to take any chances. With a prayer under my breath, I plunged into preparing his favorite: French toast.

Ten minutes later, I cracked my tenth egg while simultaneously attempting—with little success—to turn on the grill. A strange clicking sound came from it every now and then, but nothing happened. When I reached for another egg, my fingertips slid into something gooey. Glancing down, I recoiled. Nestled among the whole eggs in the carton lay four gleaming egg yolks. I must have accidentally cracked them open over the carton while I fiddled with the grill.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

I plucked the yolks out of the carton, lobbing them into the bowl. They slid down the side, breaking in a lemony mudslide.

Except for a shuffling noise coming from beneath the grill, further attempts to light it met with failure. In desperation, I flipped the ovens on, praying that French toast could be baked. Preferably in less than ten minutes.

Mark called my name as I hacked strawberries into uneven chunks. He popped into the room through the swinging door, forehead creased. Strawberry juice stained my fingers.

“Yeah?”

“Something is smelling a bit funky. Is that on fire?”

I whirled around to find smoke curling off the grill. The scent of char lingered in the air.

“Ha! You do work, you rotten monster!”

“So, nothing is on fire?”

“Not yet.”

He disappeared a little too eagerly. I grabbed the package of bacon and unloaded the whole thing. Bacon would be a great place to start. The high-pitched chattering began again, but with more intensity. I opened the oven to make sure it had started to warm. A brown streak leaped out of the darkness, heading right for my face. I screamed and fell to the ground. The fluffy tail and beady eyes of a squirrel stared back at me before the creature darted underneath the island.

No. Way.

“Hey!” I screamed, throwing a metal spoon at it. “Get out of here!”

I scrambled to my feet, grabbing a broom propped against the wall. Two metal bowls clattered off the shelf. Startled by the resounding bang of metal on the tile floor, the squirrel bolted to the fridge and shimmied behind it.

“Out!” I screeched. “Out of my kitchen!”

I shoved the broomstick behind the fridge, swinging it wildly. A picture fell off the wall and hit the floor with a crack, sending glass shards across the tile. Seconds later, the frantic clicking abated. When I looked up, the squirrel stood on top of the fridge, frozen, all four legs splayed out.

“Get outta here!”

With the end of the broom, I shoved the screen door open. The squirrel leaped onto the ground, rushed out the door, and hurtled up a nearby tree.

“Meg?”

“Is everything all right?”

“Has a meteor hit?”

Mark and JJ stood in the doorway. Mark’s mouth hung open. JJ rolled his lips together.

“There was a damn squirrel in the oven!”

“No way!” Mark said, laughing. “I thought I heard something.”

JJ sniffed. “Is something burning?”

“The bacon!”

With a mad dash—and the crunch of glass beneath my feet—I hurried over to the grill and attacked the fried pork with a metal spatula. Remnants of black meat stuck to the grill. Some pieces were charred, others barely warm. Obviously, the grill wasn’t the most consistent surface.

“Blister,” Mark said, “do you need any—”

“Fine!” I called over my shoulder. “I’m fine. I’ll get it out in just a second. Just need a … a few more minutes!”

First day, I told myself. All first days at all jobs are tough. I can cook breakfast. This isn’t that hard.

Once I freed the charred bacon and flipped it around the half-heated grill, I cleared space on one side and tossed on slices of French toast in rows. My post-squirrel hysteria calmed enough for me to think straight.

“I got this,” I said to myself, taking deep, cleansing yoga breaths. “I got this.”

While the French toast bubbled on the grill, I reached for a plate. My hand landed on an empty shelf. I fumbled around. Nothing. A horrifying thought occurred to me. I tore through the pantry and the other cupboards.

“I forgot plates!” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Oh, no!”

How could I have forgotten to buy plates? Oh, well. No way to fix it now. They’d have to eat with their hands.

Ten minutes later, I stared at a pile of half-cooked, half-charred French toast. Random hot spots on the grill led to the toast being burned or soggy. No in between existed.

Hoping the staff would either like burnt food or wouldn’t notice the squishy middles, I placed the French toast in a mixing bowl below a rolling window that opened into the dining area. It groaned when I tugged on the rope that pulled it up. Twenty pairs of eyes turned to stare at me.

“And that,” Mark said from where he stood on top of a table, “is Megan, your lovely chef. She doubles as a squirrel hunter, everyone. Let her know if you need help. Give her a round of applause.”

A chorus of mumbled greetings and half-hearted claps came at me. I waved, wondering, based on their strange expressions, what I must have looked like. When I reached down to smooth the apron, my fingers ran over an eggshell.

“Meg,” Mark said with a fixed smile, tapping his thumb against his leg. “Is, uh, breakfast ready?”

“Oh, yeah. Uh … the first round of French toast is done.” I forced a smile. “Help yourself.”

The crowd surged forward as one. Just as the first staff member approached, my heart stopped a second time. I froze. I’d forgotten to fix the plate dilemma. And where was the syrup? Of course there was syrup. There had to be syrup. What kind of a fool would forget syrup? My mind spun back to the grocery store. Surely, I hadn’t forgotten…

Yes. I had.

“Where are the plates?”

“Is there any syrup?”

My tongue turned into a packet of sand. The whole crowd stared while I mentally fumbled for a way out. Was French toast palatable without syrup? Probably not this French toast.

“Ah … no,” I said. “No syrup. Forgive me, I should have explained. This isn’t just regular French toast. This is, ah, special.”

A burly Tongan—Sione, if I remembered correctly from the twins’ adventures in California—lifted up a piece, studying it with sharp brown eyes.

“Sure smells like regular French toast.” He tore into it with a savage bite. “Tastes like it.” He grimaced. “Kinda.”

The thick, smoky scent of bacon wafted past me. At least I’d managed to get that right.

“Haven’t you heard of French toast and bacon sandwiches?” I asked. “No? Oh, well, allow me to enlighten you. It’s … the latest rave in breakfast food. Instead of a sweet, er, breakfast theme, salty’s in.”

I plucked a piece of French toast from the pile and waved it around, ignoring their suspicious stares. A few dots of liquid egg splashed the counter.

“Load it up with bacon, add a bit of butter, and voila!” I shoved two pieces of bacon between slices with a beaming smile. The gooey middles smushed beneath my fingers, and egg ran down the back of my hand. “A delicious breakfast sandwich with lots of protein.”

“What are the strawberries for?” someone asked.

“That’s the sweet variation. You just put powdered sugar and strawberries in the sandwich instead of bacon. There you have it. Breakfast sandwiches without the stickiness of syrup.”

“What do we put them on?”

“There’s no plates.”

“Oh,” I said, waving an airy hand toward a roll of paper towels. “No need for plates with just sandwiches. We’re … going green. Conserving water. Just use a paper towel.”

Mark glared at me from the back, nostrils flaring. Are you kidding? he mouthed. I ignored him.

With a few hesitant shrugs, the staff stepped forward, ramming bacon and strawberries between their pieces of French toast. I waited, breath held, for someone to call me out as a fraud. But they moved through the line with nods of thanks. Only a couple of them seemed overly suspicious.

Grateful for a chance to step away, I returned to the grill and started slinging more French toast on the heated surface. The whir of the overhead fan drowned out the chatter of the staff in the background. I closed my eyes.

One meal down, I thought. One hundred seventy-nine more to go.