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Eliza Park’s Recipe for Senior Year Ingredients: 1 try-hard salutatorian 1 annoying and (annoyingly) cute boy A handful of Korean recipes (measure with your heart) The spice of competition, to taste
she thinks that in an ideal world, I would speak only Korean at home. But there’s a feeling of suffocation that comes with needing to simplify my thoughts into the limited vocabulary I know, a dull pang of shame when I can’t arrive at the correct formal conjugation. So I continue to use English and she’ll continue to ask me not to.
“Number five is a mandoline.” I look down at what I’ve written. Grater. Like what he’s doing to my nerves. I narrow my eyes at him. “A mandolin is an instrument. Like a musical one, not a kitchen one.” He laughs like I’m making a joke. His round eyes crinkle when he does, making him look so youthful. Then his smile drops as he realizes I’m serious
Cursed tall boys with their cursed long legs and equally cursed long stride.
“Cooking isn’t something you can just study for and be good at,” he continues. “It’s a bit of intuition and a hell of a lot of practice.”
“I can’t believe my senior year is being ruined by some regular kid whose only definition of AP is all-purpose flour.”
“He talks to me like he’s smarter than me. It’s so infuriating.”
“You’re not in chemistry class with us, and yet, could this be . . . chemistry?”
“So she wasn’t grateful?” “She was. But that was her way. She never really said things explicitly, but you could tell what she really meant.”
“It’s not the child’s job to take care of her parents. Not yet,” she says. I shrug. “I think it could still be a little more equitable.” Then, because I don’t know that she would know the word equitable in English, I clarify, “More even.” How many moments over the past few months did I see an opportunity to help care for my mother, and then proceed to ignore it?
“We’re going to make shakshuka.” I blink at him. “Am I supposed to know what that is?” He sighs. Whatever softness he had earlier is completely erased. “I forget that you’re—” “Just skip to the part where you explain what it is.” “It’s a North African dish. Basically like eggs in a tomato-based sauce.”
Asking my mom to stop packing me gimbap for school seemed like the obvious choice at the time. But now, I wonder how my mother felt when I asked. I can’t imagine giving part of your culture and childhood to your child and having them come back ashamed, full of rejection, and petulantly annoyed by what you’ve given them. I’m reminded of all the times I left my mother alone on the kitchen floor on kimjang days, plugging my nose and complaining about the smell instead of sitting down to help her. There’s a newfound guilt, an uncomfortable prickly feeling.
“Don’t be upset,” my mom says, using her fingers to manually iron out my wrinkled brow. “You can’t expect to be good at everything from the start.”
“You act like you’ve never been bad at something before.” “First time for everything,” I say. “Be serious.” “I am.”
“So you didn’t even give it a shot.” I raise my eyebrow. “Did you not hear the part about two months?” “As a first grader. You don’t think you were being unreasonable?” “Is there a way for a first grader to be reasonable? Plus, Mozart was composing by age five.” “So you’ve always just given up the second you found out you weren’t going to be the next Mozart,”
“Don’t pretend like you’re any different.” “We couldn’t be more different,” Wesley argues. “We want the same thing. Why skirt around that?” “No, I want to win the cook-off because I love cooking. It’s something I’m passionate about.” He draws out the syllables like he’s trying to introduce a new word to a toddler. “You don’t have things you’re passionate about, only things that you’re good at.” “What’s the difference?”
It’s one thing to know your friends are smart, but it’s another to consider them so competent that it inspires you to be better.
“I’m serious. I just think . . . what are the odds that I find friends like y’all again in this lifetime?”
“I know what an emulsion is. It’s like us.” “What?” “Oil and water. They shouldn’t mix, but if you shake it up enough, they will. Or you can add an emulsifier, which is the egg. And then you save the water from the pasta and the fat from the bacon, and egg makes the water-plus-fat happy.”
When Wesley talks about cooking, he sounds so intelligent. He knows so much, can explain things better than the articles I’m reading online to prepare for these Friday sessions, and talks about cooking like it’s not just science, but art. He’s so competent. And I realize, belatedly, horrifically, that I find that competence . . . attractive.
“How is it that you’re unable to spend a moment not working?” Wesley asks. I think of the tag on the sweater. “If you do your work in any free moment you have, you can actually enjoy the free moments you have later,” I say.
“Cooking is just a reflection of personality, I guess,”
“So what does it mean that my dumplings are ugly and Wesley’s look fine?” Wesley chuckles. “Let’s not say out loud what we already know.” I push his shoulder, leaving a stain of egg-and-water wash and a dust of flour on his sleeve.
I narrow at my eyes at him. “You are strangely insightful for a man.” He shoots me a smirk and corrects, “For anyone.”
Being between cultures is like being a bead on a string, trying to balance between two ends. But no matter which end of the string I slide to, Wesley doesn’t seem to care.
“What’s funny?” “You are.” “Yes, but usually, the funny part happens intentionally.” He laughs so hard, I start to get annoyed. I’m about to get up from my seat when he finally wheezes in a breath. “Wait, stop,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.” I halt and turn to face him, still annoyed. “Then why did you?” “Because you’re cute.” I say, “What?” but it comes out like my throat was replaced by a malfunctioning incinerator. “Like, your actions,” he amends. “Your thought processes. All very cute.” “Right.” His eyes study my expression, and he quickly adds, “I mean, physically cute as
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I think I can get caught up in my own worst assumptions.”
“No one said your problems have to be the worst in the world in order for them to exist.”
“You say more than you think, and the rest of it is written on your face.”
“Why are you so hard on yourself?” I scowl. “You’re making yourself out to be some—I don’t know. Someone so much lesser than who you really are.”
“School is a specific kind of game, you know? And you play it so well—you, specifically. And it feels like sometimes, I barely even know the rules. I think I’m smart. I know a lot of things. I know how to entertain myself, how to feed myself, how to find new ways to do things. But it’s like that kind of knowledge doesn’t matter to them. There’s no way to prove it.” “‘Like only a certain sort of knowledge is valuable.’”
Seriously, Wesley. You’d be doing me a huge favor by going. But you don’t have to if you’d rather not. I know spending an evening in a mansion full of people you don’t know isn’t the most enticing way to spend your Friday night.” “Eliza, don’t you know the most enticing way to spend my Friday nights is to hang out with you?”
Eliza has also taught me about authenticity to self. She is someone whose skills and successes are uniquely her own, who creates her own definitions and goals, and who inspires me to nurture ambition like it’s a friend.
If cooking with others is an exchange, what I have given Eliza is time and what she has given me is revelation. She reminds me that things are more than a sum of their parts, and it’s only with Eliza’s guidance that, for the first time, I’ve been able to see the sum of myself and others properly.
He looks at me, his eyes dark and glittering, and I have to swallow. I wonder if he can tell that I’m holding my breath. Then he presses his mouth onto my open palm, so softly, it feels like a whisper. It feels like he’s asking permission. “Wesley,” I say, but there’s no sound. “Eliza,” he murmurs against my hand. When he looks up at me, his expression is tortured. “Are we friends?” “I think so,”
“I don’t think about you the way I think about my friends.”
He takes a deep breath. It sounds desperate. “Eliza, please kiss me.”
“Maybe he didn’t see anything.” Wesley shakes his head, amused. “Even if he didn’t, I’m sure he can figure it out. I’m sure it was written all over my face.” “Yeah? What do you think was written there?” I know I’m pushing it, and I normally wouldn’t be this brave, but I feel reckless and full of adrenaline in a way that feels so unfamiliar to me. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably something along the lines of, ‘I just kissed possibly the smartest, cutest girl I know and am trying my hardest to act cool about it.’” He pretends to ponder for a moment and then adds, “Or maybe it said, ‘Thank God this
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good friends are very important in your life, okay? You don’t need to have a million of them, but the ones you do have, you need to keep.”
“Eliza,” Wesley says. “I like you so much.” I meet his eyes. The color of roasted chestnuts, yet they somehow feel even warmer than that. I want to tell him that being around him is like having a balloon inflate in my chest or like a hummingbird in my throat, but it comes out as, “I like you, too.”
It’s a foreign feeling, to have someone be so openly caring. To have someone let you know their secrets, but more than that, to have someone want you to know their secrets. It comes with an inexpressible feeling of gratitude.
I think of how every time I’ve messed up in the kitchen, my mom or Wesley were always there to fix it. How making that mistake then meant that I tried harder not to repeat it next time. How some mistakes were small enough that when you tasted the end product, it was like it never happened. Maybe there was something to be said about letting go of the reins and knowing you would end up okay anyway.
“You ever see someone so good at what they do, that it’s like you’re discovering beauty where you didn’t see it before?”
“It’s what people say when you’re not around to hear—or I guess, when they think you’re not around to hear—that shows who they are. So I’ve heard enough.”
The way you cook is like time travel, or magic. You go somewhere else, and food means something different, and you can fix any problem with the ingredients you already have.”
“I’m sorry, Wesley,” I say. “I hate it when you ignore me. You’re . . .” He tilts his head forward to listen better, and I worry for a moment he’s going to tip off the couch. “I’m what?” I sigh and lean forward to organize his hair. It’s slick and warm. “I don’t know. You’re, like, my favorite part of the day. It sucks when you don’t talk to me.” This time I see it plainly. His mouth breaks into a smile. His eyes crinkle. “Don’t tease me,” I warn. “It took a lot for me to say that.” “I appreciate that,” he says. His eyes are practically sparkling. I hope it’s not the fever. I nod. “Sure.”
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“I make a lot of bad assumptions. Have I said that before? I assume people think the worst of me, so I assume the worst of them.
I won’t push him somewhere he doesn’t feel comfortable going with me.
Kissing Wesley feels like flying through a free fall, knowing that he has me safely tucked in his arms. Is this the kind of special feeling that Kareena felt the need to protect from others, including me? This fragile bliss, newly brought into existence, but with the immediate recognition that something this alive could flicker out just as suddenly. In this moment, I understand her more than I have before. I would protect this flame with Wesley from anyone. It doesn’t even register as an option not to.
“Is it bad to say that compliments feel different when they come from you?” he asks, barely above a whisper. “Like they might actually be worth something.” “Don’t let it go to your head,” I warn.
