The Secret Recipe for Moving On Karen Bischer (read my book .txt) 📖

like most guys do when they see a girl crying. But what he just said is the emotional equivalent of a pat on the back. I mean, Jodie can tell me that, but since she’s my friend, she’s automatically on my side. I think back to Luke telling me they’re not worth it last week, and now Isaiah. They don’t owe me anything and yet they’re seeing this from my point of view.

I give him a wobbly smile. “Thank you.”

Luke pokes his head into the pantry then. “Everything okay in here?”

I take a deep breath, thinking of Hunter and Brynn’s self-righteous faces. “I will be. But we need to beat Hunter’s team.”

Luke raises an eyebrow, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “In today’s task or all year?”

I blink hard, and feel my pulse start to quicken at the thought of being better at something than the both of them, the hypercompetitive overachievers. At the thought of taking them down and putting their smug asses in place. To show them that they’re not better than me.

“All. Freaking. Year,” I say.

A.J. wanders into the pantry then. “Is this a team meeting?”

“Yes,” Luke says. “Agresti wants to annihilate Synergy.”

“I’m down with that, yo,” A.J. says, rubbing his hands together. “As long as we beat jackass Jared’s team, too. That guy’s such a dick.”

Luke, Isaiah, and I all mutter our own distaste for Jared while nodding vigorously.

I pull myself up from the floor, an exhilarating feeling of determination surging through me. “Okay, well, we need to get back out there and get a jump on our meal.”

We head back into the classroom and set to work, washing, chopping, and frying. Luke tosses the snow peas and carrots in the frying pan. He caught on to the technique of sautéing before the rest of the class (for example, Jared is sautéing across the room and doesn’t seem to notice that a snow pea has landed on his beret) and I wonder if his circus training has helped him with hand-eye coordination or something.

Brynn and Hunter start giggling over something then, and I reflexively inhale deeply and clutch my knife’s handle super hard.

Luke leans over toward me. “We’ve got this, Agresti.”

I gaze up at him and nod. “We sure as hell better, Burke.”

This makes him burst out laughing, loudly, and the entire Synergy team turns to shoot us a disapproving look.

I chop my onions as methodically as possible and ignore them.

They don’t know they’re going down and it’s going to be so, so epic.

CHAPTER 10

Deciding to obliterate Hunter and Brynn’s group has become my new fuel, to the point that I wonder what other aspects of my life I can apply this to. It’s invigorating.

The problem is, I don’t have enough of a social life to be out there one-upping them in much of anything else. It’s completely evident all weekend, when, after Jodie catches a cold and can’t hang out, I’m stuck in the house with my parents, who are all hover-y and “how are you doing, honey?” I appreciate the support, but this only drives the point home that I’ve wasted the last eight months of my life not making any friends outside of Hunter’s group.

So I spend most of Sunday reading The Buzz archives in the hopes of spotting some old gossip about Hunter and Brynn, but instead learn maybe too much about my other classmates: The high-achieving junior who, as of last March, was probably getting shipped off to rehab for an Adderall addiction (I know that this actually happened a few weeks later to Madison Sawyer, a quiet girl in my gym class. She has yet to come back to RHHS); the lovers’ spat that broke out in the cafeteria and revealed one party cheating with at least two other people; a sophomore boy who feared coming out to his family so he was “man-whoring it up with as many girls in his class as possible.”

And then I feel gross for reading every word.

So a few days later, when I see a poster declaring that the RHHS TV station is looking for camera people and editors, I figure this is a sign, both literally and figuratively. Hunter hates the TV station—what better way to be like, “I don’t care what you think,” than by doing something he despises?

And it’s two birds with one stone, because the next time I meet with Mrs. Gillroy, I can be truthful when I tell her I took her advice and joined the TV station—and editing keeps me from being on camera, which is key.

After school, I poke my head into the newsroom, where there’s one of those news-anchor desks with a green wall behind it. Chris Phan, one of the anchorpeople who was also in my French class last year, is sitting behind the desk with a pen tucked behind his ear, reading a bunch of papers and shaking his head.

Hunter used to make fun of him for being so intense about the TV station—“He acts like it’s freaking CNN and not some stupid homeroom time-killer,” he said. Meanwhile, Hunter once flipped out because all the guys in the Ringtones didn’t have their hair parted on the same side. For a performance at a peewee hockey game.

“Hey, Chris,” I say, and he jumps, knocking his knee on the anchor desk.

“Oh, hey,” he says, rubbing his knee. “What’s up?”

“Mrs. Gillroy told me to come down here because I’m interested in being a meteorologist and—”

“Do you know football?” His eyes are full of hope, like my answer is the key to our existence or something.

“Uh, yeah, kind of,” I say. I learned about it from Mariana, the bartender at my dad’s old restaurant. She was from western Pennsylvania and obsessed with the Pittsburgh Steelers. I don’t understand football completely, but thanks to her, I do have a basic grasp.

“Thank you, god!” he says, clasping his hands together. “Have you ever been on camera before? Wait, never mind, we’re stuck so we need you no matter what.”

“Stuck?”