red beans and rice waiting for me.” Miss Mary punched the dough, her face relaxed. Maybe I needed some dough to punch.
“Lucky. I guess you’ll be having red beans and rice for dinner too, Jerome?”
“You know it,” he said, grinning at me as he filled the mop bucket.
The back door to the kitchen opened, and Chloe walked in, sniffing the air. “Omelet?”
“Yeah,” Miss Mary said. “Whip one up for Chloe too.”
“Yes, ma’am. Grab two more eggs,” I told Chloe, and she slipped into the cold storage to obey.
She handed them to me and grabbed another mop to help Jerome. “Everybody had a good day?”
“Can’t complain,” Miss Mary said. “Good lunch rush. Even ran out of chicken salad.”
Jerome nodded, a man of few words as usual.
When I didn’t say anything, Chloe paused her mopping. “Ellie?”
This was such an old routine for all of us that I wouldn’t get away with silence. But I didn’t want to talk about the day from hell. “It was fine.”
“Uh oh,” said Jerome, pausing with his own mop.
“What? It was fine.” I cracked another egg.
“Uh huh,” Miss Mary said. “That’s the kind of ‘fine’ I give Mr. Douglas when he doesn’t get the yard cut.”
“Bad client,” Chloe guessed.
“Stupid tenant?” Miss Mary guessed, giving her dough another whack.
“Too much work?” Jerome guessed.
There was no use in trying to avoid it. They’d get it out of me now or five minutes from now. I minced my onion the way Miss Mary had taught me but with extra hard thwacks. “Miles Crowe,” I muttered. I thunked a cast iron skillet onto the cooktop hard enough to make Jerome wince.
“You’re kidding,” said Miss Mary.
“Dang,” said Chloe.
“Who?” asked Jerome.
“That dude who won Starstruck a while back?” Chloe said. “You would have been young. It was a big deal when we were in high school.”
“Can’t be that big of a deal if I never heard of him.” Jerome went back to mopping.
“You see that?” Miss Mary said. “Jerome doesn’t know. It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t know what?” he asked, stopping again.
Chloe and Miss Mary exchanged looks.
“One of y’all going to tell me?” He’d lost interest in mopping.
I sighed. “You know that meme that goes around with a guy on one side saying, ‘So not my thing,’ and the other side says ‘Rejected’ over a crying girl?”
“Yeah...?”
“That’s me.”
He blinked. “Nah.”
“Believe it,” Miss Mary said.
“Y’all messing with me?”
Chloe shook her head. I murdered some peppers, seeds flying.
Jerome dug his phone out of his pocket and tapped it a few times, looking from the screen to me. “This is you?” He turned the screen toward me, as if that picture hadn’t been burned into my brain for twelve years.
Chloe swatted his hand down. “It’s her.”
“Bruh.” He looked at me with wide eyes.
It was such a perfect way to sum up the situation that I had to laugh. “Yeah. Bruh.”
“I don’t think I ever met a walking meme.” He studied me like he’d never seen me before. “How did that even happen?”
“How did I have a childhood crush turned against me and ruin my life for years?” I hated that I still felt a flicker of the shame that had drowned me the day Miles had gone on Live with Laura.
“Well, yeah.” He ducked his head like he realized how much deeper his question went than he meant it to go. “You don’t have to answer that.” He went back to scrubbing the floor like he was trying to dig through it with the mop.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said it so snotty.”
“Want me to tell the story?” Chloe asked.
“Might as well.” I moved on to slicing up a mushroom and tried to make my brain go somewhere besides the kitchen while Chloe served up the worst disaster of my life for Jerome’s consumption.
“I met Elle halfway through college, and by then, she’d already done her Cinderella makeover, so people didn’t realize who she was the minute they saw her. But one night when I texted her the meme because I didn’t know it was her, she busted out crying and told me the story.”
“Thanks,” I said, my tone as dry as a pork rub. “That makes me sound way less pathetic.”
“To be fair, I probably would have too,” Chloe said. “So Elle here was born Gabrielle Jones and used to go by Gabi.”
“Yeah, that’s what Dylan still calls her sometimes,” Jerome said.
“Right. So you’ve heard our Ellie singing when she’s cleaning up back here and she thinks no one’s listening?”