“Oh my God, quit it!” I smirked. “Fine, let’s go celebrate, but no frat parties please.”
“Great! I’ll text Beth. Should I invite . . . Jake? I bet your mom would want to come.”
Hell no. “I want this celebration to be easy. Like French fries, nachos, and sangria at home easy. Not ex-boyfriend-turned-teaching-assistant, turned-friend-with-benefits, turned-back-to-TA messy. I’m discovering this thing Jake and I have is the opposite of no strings attached. It’s littered with booby traps, landmines, tripwires, hand grenades, and even those hidden snares that string people up by the ankle and hang them upside down from tall trees.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic,” Mia said.
I shot back, “No, dramatic would be including an elaborate trapping pit, the kind that’s camouflaged with branches and leaves.”
She muttered, “Okay, so no Jake. And obviously no parents. How about your other friends, the ones from the frat party?”
I took the Hill Avenue exit, the main drag leading to Carlthorpe. After four hours of driving, we would be back to our idyllic campus life in a matter of minutes. “I like them, but let’s just keep it simple and low-key, I don’t want to celebrate if my friends didn’t get good grades on their exams.”
She nodded, agreeing with me for once. “I have some downtime, just wrapped up two big projects and am ramping up on another one soon. I’ll go grocery shopping and we can make a feast.”
“As long as there’s wine, I’m in.”
She reclined her chair. “With me, there will always be wine, you know that.”
I smiled. “And that’s why I love you.”
* * *
BECAUSE IT WAS my celebration night, Mia and Beth kept me out of the kitchen while they prepared dinner. It was a good thing too, because when I peeked in, every single pot and pan was either being used or in the sink. They refused any help when I offered to cook or clean, so I took a seat in front of the TV and asked Siri on my phone to flip a coin. Heads was baking shows. Tails was true crime.
“It’s tails,” Siri confirmed.
I picked a new-release, small-town serial-killer documentary and yelled, “I’m pressing play on the latest murder show!” but then hit the pause button when the title Slaughtertown, USA appeared and my friends still hadn’t made an appearance. But whatever they were doing in there, it was making our cozy apartment smell like heaven, with savory aromas of onion, garlic, and sesame oil, accompanied by notes of confectionary sweetness from vanilla, brown butter, and chocolate. Feeling guilty when I heard all the banging and clanking of metal, I patiently waited for them while sipping Syrah and researching the internship program offered by Solv Technologies. I discovered that the cofounder, an anthro major, graduated from Carlthorpe a few years behind me. Well, I guess technically I was a few years behind him now.
Was it depressing that my very best job prospect at the moment was for an internship at a company where the CEO was three years younger? Maybe more than a little. And the fact that it was currently my only job prospect made me chug my remaining half glass of wine. I examined the bottle. Two-thirds left. I’d need to pace myself.
Before I returned to Carlthorpe, Solv Technologies was a company I never had on my radar, because it was rumored that they allowed only a certain caliber of candidates to interview. Ones who had all the checkboxes ticked and the right pedigree. Without any tech industry experience, my candidacy would have been an immediate “no” without so much as a phone screen. The CS course I was taking wasn’t a weeder class for hard-core engineering students, but with a professor on their board who was well known for working with large tech companies and teaching coding curricula designed for real-world experiences, it was a great way to find graduates who shared the same programming philosophy to place in roles throughout the company. It was revolutionary really, and pretty cool that I was one of the students vying for a position.
I looked at my glass and swirled the burgundy elixir. When did I pour more wine?
“Whoooooo’s ready for a feast?” Mia popped her head into the room and waved for me to come into the kitchen.
Carrying the wineglass in one hand and the bottle in the other, I migrated over to my friends, where a multicourse banquet awaited me. On the center island was a wide array of my favorite Korean foods, including my favorite banchan. Mia always laughed at how simple my tastes were when it came to the side dishes: most of them needed only sesame oil, garlic, and salt. So what if I was a proud Basic Banchan Bitch?
“I went shopping this morning and bought a bunch of ingredients and marinated meat from the new Asian market an hour away. I made only the bean sprouts, spinach, anchovies, and sesame leaves. Oh, and the rice. I made that too.” With potholder mittens, Mia pulled a pot off the stove and placed it on a trivet next to the sink. Steam spilled out as she lifted the heavy top. It was galbi-jjim! “I bought it from the Galleria Market, the marinade was a little too sweet so I added soy sauce, sesame oil, and a dash of garlic powder to balance it more.”
It smelled like heaven. Everything did.
Beth pointed to the oven. “The chocolate gooey cake is almost done. I still need to wait a few minutes before I frost it.”
Mia handed me a paper plate. “Let’s pretend we’re at Old Country Buffet, but Asian style, with homemade Korean food and fewer senior citizens.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with older folks.” Beth put her hands on her hips. “Especially ones like my nana, who still sends me twenty-dollar bills inside a birthday card every year.”
“Bless the nanas who give us crisp bills from the bank,” I said, holding up my wineglass.
The timer dinged and Beth rushed to the oven. Even when she made something simple, like sugar cookies or a vanilla sheet cake, there was artistry and finesse in the final execution, so you knew she had a culinary gift. It wasn’t just someone reading recipes off the side of a box. Beth made everything her own, whereas I, on the other hand, made lumpy, nonuniform desserts that looked like a toddler using brown Play-Doh had decided to create something ambitious. I admired Beth. She had developed and refined her culinary skills by the tender age of twenty-two.
“I made a ganache that will pair nicely with chocolate hazelnut mousse,” Beth said.
My jaw hung open. “So you’re telling me that you took everything good about Nutella and put it into a cake? Thank you!”
Mia smacked her lips. “I can’t wait!”
We started with the savory part of the Korean bacchanalian feast. I walked alongside the kitchen counter and island, taking heaping spoonfuls of beef, glass noodles, and marinated vegetables, leaving some space for the stir-fried anchovies. One thing I missed about living in NYC was easy access to ethnic food. One noticeable shortcoming about the Carlthorpe neighborhood was that, even though the population had become more diverse over ten years, there was only one Korean restaurant. It was open for lunch but closed for dinner and was currently shuttered for minor renovation. But honestly, the food wasn’t even that good, so I hardly ever went there, even when I was desperate for a comfort meal.