Bored.
I remember the day Paulie came to me, all smiles, and told me that he had decided once and for all what he was going to become in the future.
‘Oh, are you going to become movie critic?’
‘No,’ he responded with a shake of his head.
I offered another guess, ‘An actor?’
Paulie shook his head again and I just shrugged, I couldn’t imagine what he would want to do other than those two things.
Paulie beamed, his smile ever-widening, ‘I want to be a chef.’
I stared at him, my mouth threatening to fall open, and all the horrible obscenities that had risen like bile to my mouth were scratching to get out. Fighting against everything that was currently attempting to escape from me I asked, ‘A chef?’
Paulie nodded, ‘Yeah, isn’t it a great idea!’
I didn’t know how to respond. Cooking was my passion and every single one of my friends knew it. I’m not the best cook in the world, but I’m young, so it’s okay. I know as much about cooking and the kitchen as Paulie does about movies, which is quite a bit and the reason I assumed he’d want to do something in that instead of coming in and crowding my dream.
‘Uh, why do you…I mean, what gave you this idea?’
‘Oh, you know, I’ve just been watching a bunch of cooking shows and reading lots of cookbooks and it seems like something I could do, it seems really easy.’
I couldn’t stop my hands from balling themselves into fists, ‘You think it’s ‘really easy?’’
‘Yeah, I do. The other day, I had some of my friends over - remember that day you went to the movie theater with your girlfriend - and I cooked, and they liked it. I mean, they really liked it. You should’ve heard some of the things they said about it, said about me!’
Ah-ha, I thought, that’s why.
‘Do you want to try some brownies?’
I thought that plate of brownies had been suspicious, ‘Sure.’
I wanted to like the brownie, I really did. I wanted to tell Paulie that they were delicious, but they weren’t, so I couldn’t. I’d made brownies that tasted better in the seventh grade. The seventh grade! Paulie was cooking at a seventh (being gracious) grade level and thinking that he was going to be a chef? People were congratulating him for this? This couldn’t happen, I could not stand by and watch Paulie be tricked into thinking he was good at cooking, when he was only decent.
It may be considered mean, I suppose, to crush a friend’s feelings like that, but I knew that he would one day thank me. Yeah, I took another bite of his sub-par brownie, he’d definitely thank me.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Well, honestly…’
I’d always had a problem with telling people how I honestly felt, I always wanted to sugar-coat and tip-toe around until they just came to the conclusion themselves and all I had to do was nod. Shit, I thought, I need an escape plan. I stood there, munching more of that brownie just to buy myself time. I mentally gasped as my tongue felt a peanut butter chip.
‘Hey, didn’t you say before that people who put peanut butter chips in their brownies were ridiculous?’
Paulie stared at me, ‘Uh, uh, no, when did I ever say that?’
‘You said it multiple times, every time Christa made brownies with them. You’d secretly laugh behind her back and say it was ‘overkill’, I remember…’
‘Well, maybe I…was just going with public demand. Everyone liked Christa’s brownies.’
That’s because they were actually good. ‘Or maybe you’re being a hypocrite?’
‘…Whatever, you were going to tell me what you thought.’
I mentally smiled; I’d caught him, red-freaking-handed. It wasn’t anything to do with passion or inspiration or enjoyment or any of the reasons I cooked for: it was for attention.
‘Well, honestly, I don’t much care for it. You used far too many eggs and your peanut butter chips are all crowded to one side, they’re supposed to be evenly used so that the person you’re feeding doesn’t get halfway through before realizing they’re even in there.’ I inhaled, ‘I think you should probably just stick to what you know: movies.’
For a week after that, I didn’t really hear anything from Paulie. The recipes he’d been posting on his blog - if you can call ‘chop up some apples and throw them on top of the lettuce and then cover with Italian dressing’ a recipe - stopped as well. He was mad at me, but it was worth it. I knew that once he got a job working with film, I as I said, he knows movies, he’d thank me. It might take years, but he would thank me.