Page 37 of You Chive Me Crazy
“Amen!” Kay said, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Just admit you cheated and I’ll leave it alone,” Damian said.
I felt my face flame with heat, and it wasn’t from the hot sauce. “I didn’t cheat, not on purpose, anyway. Yes, I was in the wrong, but it wasn’t my fault.”
“I’m a fan of your work, Lucas,” Jeremy said out of nowhere, surprising just about everyone at the table since it was the first time he had spoken. Not to mention I honestly did not know he knew who I was.
“Oh . . .” I glanced in his direction. “Thank you.”
Jeremy set down his phone and nodded. “I’ve read your reviews, and you certainly have a way with words. I’d like to know what happened at the culinary school, if you don’t mind. I prefer to hear what happened from the person who experienced it, not from some rumor mill.” He gave Damian a look of disdain, and obvious displeasure about his accusations.
I glanced at Zoe, looking for her approval to say something, but I couldn’t get a good read on her. She was silently begging me not to say anything or was having an aneurysm the way her eye was twitching.
Either way, I couldn't let Damian’s accusations stand, plus I didn’t want to look like a loser in front of Jeremy.
At least he’d asked respectfully.
Normally, I wouldn’t care what people think, but Rolando’s words about me getting my own TV show really had me thinking about the possibility. It seemed like a thousand times more exciting than being a food critic forDevour America. Maybe this was a way to show Jeremy I wasn’t the bad guy that Damian painted me to be. I certainly wouldn’t say anything to make Zoe look bad, so what could it hurt? Maybe this was also the time to clear the air with her, since she had never given me an opportunity in the past.
“My mom gave me a moussaka recipe for a project we were working on at the culinary institute,” I said. “I promised her I would prepare it for our big project, to honor my grandfather, who I was named after. He had been ill. She told me it was an old family recipe and it would make him and our entire family proud. Unbeknownst to both Zoe and me, it turned out to be a recipe from Nikolaos Tselementes, one of the most famous chefs in Greece. My family is Greek, and we are steeped in Greek cooking traditions, so naturally, I believed my mother when she had said it was a family recipe. She had been making that dish to perfection for years, ever since I was a little boy. Zoe had been adamantly against using the recipe because of the prep time with the potatoes, beef, and eggplant. In fact, I had to beg her to use it, even though she made a very good point. We had barely finished preparing it within the timeframe. Little did I know that dish would ruin us both.”
“Are you kidding?” Hank asked. “You got kicked out for that?”
“But you didn’t know,” Betsy said. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s crazy—that’s what it is,” Kay said. “You got kicked out of the culinary institute for something that wasn’t your fault. I agree, not fair at all.”
“They should have let you redo the project,” Betsy said.
If only the school board had been so understanding.
I nodded. “Those had been my thoughts as well. I argued for it, but the academy wouldn’t budge because we signed contracts that included a code of ethics. If they had let us slide, others might have taken advantage of the situation. We both ended up getting kicked out of the institute, losing all the tuition we had paid, which wasa lotof money.”
“But the debt and embarrassment caused by the expulsion had been only part of the problem,” Zoe added. “Every application for other culinary institutions after that asked us if we had ever been expelled in the past. Failure to answer honestly would be the cause for revocation of an acceptance or loss of the culinary degree if the applicant falsified the application and graduated later under false pretenses. As much as I wanted to be a chef, I didn’t want to lie.”
“You were screwed because you were both honorable people caught up in an unfortunate misunderstanding,” Hank said, looking as devastated as I felt at the moment. “That must have been horrible.”
“I hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks,” I said. “I had done everything I could think of to make things better.” Unfortunately, the emotions of that dreadful time in our lives were coming right back at just the thought of it. “Zoe wouldn’t speak to me. She blocked my calls and text messages. I was a wreck. And after all that, I had found out from a mutual friend that two of her other applications had been denied at prestigious culinary academies. I even traveled to those schools to convince the deans in person to let her in, since she’d had nothing to do with that debacle. They had denied my applications, but it wasn’t fair they denied hers.”
“What?” Zoe’s head whipped up and craned in my direction. “You did that?”
I shrugged. “I was devastated, not because of what happened to me, but because of what happened to you. You lost your dream. I lost someone I truly admired and respected.”
My cheeks were so hot, it felt like I had a sunburn.
I didn’t intend for my confession to be public, but it didn’t matter now. Zoe deserved to know the truth.
“Yeah, whatever,” Damian interrupted. “She gets half the blame. I’m sure she knew the origin of the recipe.”
I clenched my fists under the table. “No. She didn’t. It was all on me.” I glanced at Zoe, who was looking down at her plate, moving her last bite of her pancake around. “They expelled us as a team for school misconduct, but I was one hundred percent responsible.”
“I see . . .” Damian wrinkled his nose. “So you dragged poor Zoe down with you. How kind of you.”
I felt a surge of anger at his words, since they were the truth. “Unfortunately, you are correct there. Zoe is a talented chef. A brilliant chef, actually.” I felt her gaze on me again, but I continued.“She doesn’t need a degree to prove that, but she lost the opportunity to become a world-renowned chef because of me. Nobody would give her a chance after that because she was caught in the crossfire.”
“More like collateral damage,” Damian said. He shook his head in disgust, then glanced across at Zoe, who had been quiet the entire conversation. “And why are you still friends with this loser? He betrayed you. He ruined you. Now, you run a food truck and sell potatoes. How glamorous.”
His cruelty left me speechless because I had been the reason for all the drama at the breakfast table. It was all I could do not to knock his head off his shoulders. I worked to calm myself. My mind raced with thoughts of how Zoe would react to all this. It wasn’t fair she had to deal with the onslaught of nasty insinuations.
