She slung the camera around her neck, and it dipped her head forward with its surprising heft. She threw her shoulders back for counterbalance. "Oh, this game's on."

Gwen's Journal - October 4th, Sunday 1989 Max picked me up at my room last night. I wore that pink sweater I had for the senior class Spring Fling. We saw a movie at the Fox, and it wasn't very good, but I don't know if I could have paid attention anyway even to a good one. Sitting that close to Max for two hours... I mean, at his parents we sat across. In the car, you know, there's stuff in between. But we just had an arm rest we both kind of used, and it was hard to relax.

We walked back to campus and stopped on the bridge, and I just thought, wow, I'm with this guy. I'll never forget it. And then we talked in his room for hours. We talked about everything, parents and school and our majors. He wants to see the world. He's a photo-journalism major. It just sounds good, like architecture, except that sounds terrible when you look at the classes you have to take. He's already doing really well. I saw some of his pictures. The one of me in the cafeteria didn't even look like me it was so good. We're going out next week. He's a really good kisser.

Gwen's life - earlier that morning...

If she stayed any longer the sun would be up, and she'd have to scoot across campus to her own room in broad daylight. Not that anyone cared or would see her, and it was hard to leave Max. She felt his warmth, his heartbeat, just like she'd always imagined. Well, she'd hoped the thump of the guy's heart with her head on his chest worked that way. She was glad that even with clothes on she could have that.

She studied the underside of the top bunk. Max was right. It was great to have a roommate who was gone on the weekends. She stretched a little just to feel the length of her body intertwined with his, the rub of jeans and twist of the blanket he'd thrown over them. He'd fallen asleep, and maybe she had too. They'd kissed and talked until the whispering made her voice hoarse and the kissing made her lips sore, and still she just wanted to kiss him some more.

Breathing in the warm scent of him, she felt his body hard against the give of her own. He didn't know it yet, but she was definitely going all the way with him. And maybe, although she didn't want to think past dawn, maybe even further.

Back to U...

He'd urged her to start small when the sheer volume of people overwhelmed her, and they hadn't even hit the stadium yet. Where to capture a single image that said something good about everything around her?

The ground level cement corridors were packed and movement was slowed even more by the concessions. There were lines for pizza and lines for popcorn and lines for Hawaiian noodle bowls. Island cuisine didn't seem like football fodder to her, but it smelled so good she wished she'd passed on the hot dog.

Max paused beside her and checked out the noodle bowl menu. "I think this image says melting pot. It says fiftieth state in the union. You should definitely get it."

She pretended to frame a shot of the guy stuck with the very hot job of stirring the oversized wok then she spun and got a picture of Max. She lowered the camera. "I think this image says smart ass. It says number one loser of the bet."

Max shook his head. "That's just the kind of gum-under-the-seat shot I expected from you. I don't think you can capture, what was it? Nice, lovely humanity that bites ass?"

A family walked by, the little boy wearing a Belmar sweatshirt, his hat on backwards. Gwen got down to his level and captured his dash away. His slightly older sister, decked out in a mini cheerleader outfit, turned as if on cue, smiled, and tossed her beribboned ponytail.

Gwen felt Max crouch beside her and scan the cement tunnel as if framing his own photos. "You missed the shot of the girl."

She rolled her eyes at him. "Her costume was disturbing on so many levels."

"So, you'll leave the cheerleader shots for me?"

"You can bet on it. You always were a leg man." She cringed, embarrassed to have let herself get so comfortable it was like it had been between them. She stood, kept the camera to her face and pretended to work when she felt him rise slowly beside her. He visually made his way up her mercifully jean clad leg. Had she been standing in a skirt the experience would have been far more intimate. Plus, the Max she'd known would have definitely looked up it.

She spotted a group of younger teens, three guys who were probably football playing stars of their middle school if their swagger was any indication. It was like seeing the boys at the start of becoming the boys. She set off after them, hoping to get a photo before she lost them in the stands. She didn't worry that Max would follow. He would or he wouldn't. She had his camera.

Max followed her all the way to the end zone. She didn't know if the end bleachers had names like the Blue End Zone or Visitor Zone versus the Home Zone, or directions like South End Zone, but she'd made her way to the top row of one of them. For the first time she could see the whole scene spread out before her, and it was beautiful, an odd thing to feel about a football game. The sun was out and shone down on all the color and motion of a couple thousand people enjoying a Saturday. The rectangle of grass glowed emerald, made more striking by the sharp white border, numbers, and grid that ran across it. There was a comfort to the orderliness of it all with its bear logo in the center and Belmar spelled out in a swirl of silver and blue.

The marching band took the field with the piccolo player Max had teased her about having a soft spot for. She forgot all about the camera and watched the director mount a white ladder to lead them. Once he made the first slash down with his arm, they took off without seeming to need direction at all. The fight song, words still escaping her, moved her anyway and so did the flash of bright uniforms and brass fanning out in a variety of shapes and patterns to the applause of the crowd.

It was the crowd that made everything great, the spectators blurring in team colors and vibrating with energy. She'd photographed some of them one at a time, but from the end zone, they were one.

Years before, she'd read something about coral reefs. They'd always seemed like a structure to her, one continuous thing, like a rocky mountain ridge that just happened to occur under the water and not above it. She should have known they were living things, living individuals that formed a community of one. Standing there, seeing that kind of community, she wished she could take that picture, but it was too much to get in one frame, too much for one image to capture, and there was no need to try. She'd just enjoy being there.

She handed the camera to Max, and he held it in his palm as if testing the weight of it. "Think you got it?"

She smiled. "I did." She watched him head down the bleachers. "I just can't seem to keep it."

Staying to witness the exit of the marching band, she waved at the piccolo player, and smiled at her own weaknesses, some large enough to take her down. She should just leave, leave the stadium, leave Belmar probably. Leave Max certainly. She saw him clear the last row of bleachers and look up at her. She certainly didn't need to follow him. She'd taken her shots, and he didn't need her, but he smiled and she found herself making her way down the aisle. It was a pleasure to see him work. She wasn't following him because he'd smiled at her in invitation.

He turned when he realized she was behind him, and she caught the burst of football players beginning their second half. She had a second half too. If she was lucky, she did. Maybe she'd hit forty and keel over from the sheer fright of it, but she doubted she'd be that lucky. She was born to be a plodder and to just keep going until she wore down enough to plod herself right into her own grave. Well, hell. She took a deep breath. That was depressing as hell.

What she needed was to concentrate on the difficulty of the moment not the difficulty of a long and grinding life. And the difficulty of the moment was rationalizing why she was closing the distance between her and Max. It wasn't because walking behind him she could see he still had a great, great butt. She hadn't even noticed that. She might be willing to admit that when she'd handed him the camera and the wind ruffled his hair, she'd felt something like longing. But that's what a plodder felt in the presence of a sprinter. And that was the real reason she followed him. Sprinters had passion, the obvious kind, but the other kind too.

She cleared the bleachers and saw him make his way around the side of the stadium where he spotted a pair of brothers playing catch with their young dad. The camera and Max were indistinguishable. He just seemed to see the photo and capture it. The angles he took of the boys seemed so odd to her. She wanted to know what the picture looked like from there because it wasn't where she would have stood or the way she would have leaned. It was pure Max.

She'd always loved seeing people do what they were meant to do. Max lost Max with a camera. He seemed to connect with something greater and just flowed so unselfconsciously. She felt a stab of envy then realized she felt some of that when she cooked. She'd not thought of it that way, but there were times when the task at hand took on a life of its own, compelling the next thing and the next without thought. It was something she did without doubt, maybe the only thing.

Max straightened, dropped the camera around his neck, and, just like that, he was back. He walked toward her, and she thought he seemed on the verge of asking her something, but then he headed toward the nearest exit, and she fell in beside him.

On the way out they had a view of the underside of one stadium section, and Max waved to the photography student she recognized as the one who'd interrupted their clinch on the bridge. "Dalton!"

The boy grinned and ran over, and the very location he was shooting made Gwen laugh. "Gum under the bleachers shot." She put her palms together and bowed to Max. "He learns from the master."

Max acknowledged her accuracy by ignoring it. "Hey, Dalton," he opened up a flap at the bottom of his camera and pulled out a memory card. "I want you to take this and print the best photo on it."

Gwen stepped closer, "No way!"

Max tried for innocent. "Every contest needs a judge."

"But the bet isn't the best photo. It's the..." she considered how to sum up the flavor of the winning shot.

Max raised an eyebrow. "Good. He'll be able to do that."

"Okay." She stood in front of Dalton, looked intently at him to make sure she had his attention. "Pick the photo that captures everything the Beatles sang about." She held up her hand before Max could interrupt. "I know they weren't American, but who captured humanity like the Beatles?"

Max snorted. "The kid doesn't know anything about--"

"Man, everybody knows the Beatles. My mom's favorite is Yellow Submarine."

Gwen knew she was in trouble with that one. It couldn't be the song with the octopus in the garden. Were they having tea? That wouldn't do, not one of the weird Beatle's song. "No Yellow Submarine but any of the others."

Max leaned closer as if to help her explain. "She wants that kookokachoo song. Those are the kind of lyrics she'd like you to have in mind when you choose." He patted Dalton on the back. "Good luck with that."

Damn. Max was going to confuse the kid so much that he'd just pick the best photo, and she was not going to win that bet. And if she lost the bet, god knows what he'd ask her to do, and she might want to and that would be extra bad. How could she... She started to sing The Long and Winding Road, and Dalton was smiling back at her when she got to the part where she'd seen the road before because it leads to your door. She had the contest in the bag. "That kind of Beatles song."

Dalton put the card in his pocket. "Got it."

She turned to Max. "You're so gonna lose." But he just stood there with an expression she hadn't seen before. "What?"

He didn't answer, just shook his head, and led them out from under the bleachers.

Chapter Eight.

Steam is an underused heat source.

Moses-comes-down-from-the-mountain Monday. That's what Deb had been calling the day the director of the program journeyed to the kitchen and addressed the students, rallied the troops, or made them cry like little girls. Deb had suggested all three may occur.

Just when the kitchen had started to feel homey, they had to make it institutional for the director. Gwen couldn't help but compare it to the restaurant kitchen they'd toured on a culinary field trip. The stainless shone there as well, but there was life. Cilantro, dropped in a chopping frenzy gave off its distinct muskiness with so many soles pressing it into the tile. Lined up along the grill were steaks, their dark lines promising they'd completed one turn, and next to them giant pots of water bubbled, salted to the nature of seawater and ready for a sheaf of pasta.

She'd imagined the seasons made their way readily into a lively kitchen like that. The late summer soups would give way to thick and creamy chowders, hearty beans, and beefy stews. Spring would mean something too. There'd be asparagus, narrow and tender, and lots of lovely egg dishes people would order not even aware they were craving them because it was Easter.

And the sounds. It was nearly impossible to talk over the din of a working kitchen. In her own kitchen she'd often listened to music because sometimes too much quiet made her feel lonely. She'd had no idea how noisy a kitchen could be, how much sound could be generated by meats and vegetables and sauces. Steam whistled out of the tops of pots, knives sliced through cucumbers and onions and knocked against the cutting boards so quickly, the place had an almost continuous back beat. And in the center of it all, the head chef held the chaos together, directing the younger chefs back to their stations where piles of carrots and heads of cabbage waited as if for the arrival of a horde of rabbits.

It had been like another country to her, but she could see that Ty had been right at home. He seemed to know so much about cooking, she felt lucky to be in class beside him. In preparation for the day's visitation, they'd had the task of tidying the freezer and inventorying the frozen meats. It had been a cold and thankless morning made entertaining by Ty's general flirtiness and his amazing knowledge of cuts. She wasn't sure what it said about her, but she was pretty excited she'd finally learned the difference between a brisket first cut and a brisket front cut.

And when everything was ready and they stood around waiting, her stomach started to hurt. She couldn't decide if it was because a real, honest-to-god French chef, who probably only spoke French, was coming to check their progress or because she hadn't yet glanced down the hallway to see if Max had posted a winning photo outside his door. Since she was only auditing cooking classes, and wasn't a culinary arts major, it had to be the bet that had her wound-up.

Deb had them prepare their best dishes, the ones they'd gotten A's on, or in the case of one of the young slackers, a high C.

Ty impressed them all with pork medallions in a saffron sauce. Just looking at saffron made her nervous. It was nearly as expensive per pound as gold and even a thread of the spice made her feel unworthy. What could she concoct that would withstand that price tag? Ty was so far out of her league, culinarily speaking, and any other way she could categorize, that she knew better than to compete.

She'd chosen a straight-forward roasted chicken, about as expensive per pound as, well, chicken. The only deviation she'd made from every cooking show's rosemary rubbed one was the apple juice. Her appley bird came out of the oven glazed a golden brown and smelling of fall. She named the dish Harvest Chicken, sliced off a thick piece of breast meat encircled in its crispy skin, and plated it for chef approval or abuse in a foreign language, whichever came first. To the platter she added sauteed apple slices, sharp in a whisky butter, and lined them up across from the chicken like a drunken parade of goodness.

Beside her, Ty flecked bits of finely chopped green pepper around the rim of a wide bowl then picked up a squirt bottle that held a thick red sauce. She tried not to compare her family-friendly fare to his artistry while she dished up the old-timey root vegetables she loved, the rutabaga, turnips, scrubbed and unpeeled carrots, and sweet potatoes roasted off in balsamic vinegar. She set the plate on the head table with the rest of the student's offerings, and her humble fare looked like the least attractive virgin sacrificed to the volcano.

She returned to watch Ty dot pureed red peppers between the green bits. Art. Edible art. She had to question Deb's decision to even let her in the same class. "That's spectacular, Ty, really."

He wiped the edge of the bowl for imaginary drips. It was perfect.

"Chef Gaspard will go crazy."

His head snapped up.

"In a good way."

He smiled, seemed to try to relax. "I hope so. I've waited a long time to have this chance. A chef of her caliber..."

She felt a little thrill run through her. This wasn't cable TV. The woman was going to stand right in front of her. "She's really good, huh?"

"She's a Gaspard."

She waited because she didn't really know what that meant. It was the woman's last name but had she written a famous cookbook? Surely Gwen would have picked it up at some point. The woman didn't have her own show on cable, no catch phrase, no cookware with her name on the handle...

"The Gaspards are..." He seemed to consider it as he gently placed his dish in the center of the table. "A restaurant dynasty. Her grandfather started La Blanc Pomme."

She could tell he was watching her, so she tried to appear as if she knew the place. But she was pretty sure that The White Apple? had never come to her attention before. "They're like the culinary Kennedys?"

"Yeah. Her parents are Consequences Repas and Applaudissements, which are, you know..." He held his palms up like there were no words to describe their culinary contributions. "And her brothers' restaurants? All five star Michelin ratings. All the time."

First, she'd thought Consequences might be the mom's name, so it showed how much she knew. And while Ty had probably even eaten in places called the Consequential Table and Applause, she'd not even been aware they existed. It made her feel like he was a chef athlete and she was being shoved into the cooking Olympics with nothing but a crock pot.

She pictured Ty with a javelin and a pound of saffron while she tried to compete with nothing but a pink Kitchen Aid mixer and a bag of frozen tater tots. She needed to withdraw before she shamed herself and her country. Reaching for her chicken, she heard the whoosh of the door and fell into place beside the other students.

A striking woman entered, her face thin but rich with angles. She'd missed being a model by a handful of genes, and instead of the white chef's coat Gwen expected, she wore a silk blouse and trousers that gave evidence to the claim that thin women were like coat hangers. They perfectly displayed the goods. She wore her dark blonde hair pulled back, not tucked under a chef's hat, but in a chic, low knot.

In the complete silence, she stopped at the front of the room, acknowledged Deb with almost a smile then turned to the group. "I am Chef Nicola Gaspard."

Her accent merely flavored her speech, and Gwen had to admit her English was nearly as good as her ability to showcase clothing. And who was named Nicola Gaspard? Gwen Frame wasn't. Gwen Ciarrochi definitely wasn't. Neither was anybody she knew, had ever known, or would ever know.

Nicola took in the main kitchen, handed Deb an overstuffed file folder, and disappeared into the adjacent baking area. Deb kept herself occupied leafing through the assortment of papers, some yellowed and curled, some recipe cards with what looked like faded ink. Everyone else waited in silence until Chef Gaspard reappeared, not smiling, but Gwen might need to concede that smiling was possibly not one of the expressions the woman made. She had to be in her early thirties, but even then Gwen remembered having a few lines on her face. Chef Gaspard wore her French skin flawlessly.

Chef Gaspard sighed, even that not creating any movement of her face. "Yes. I am satisfied with the state of the kitchen. Nothing is to be prepared here without mise en place. No soigne without the proper set up. I see everything in its place."

Gwen thought of the spectacular mess during the middle of a class, the tables loaded with vegetables that three or four people chopped at a time until the bits of green, red, yellow were flicked onto the half wall and floor like that painting with colored dots. She could almost picture it, the island painting where the ladies had umbrellas and dresses with bustles. God, it was French too, wasn't it? She'd have to keep her eyes open for Sunday picnic pictures in the veggies when they could trash the kitchen again. Sometimes the burners had whole chicken breasts wedged in them from over-zealous sauteing. Would she be able to find the image of the Virgin Mary or Elvis in a cutlet?

"Attention to detail is everything."

The French voice, soft, but with the edge beautiful and powerful women had, made Gwen pay attention again. Who was she kidding even being there with a real live chef? She'd never be more than a pretty good home cook with a mind that drifted to things like poultry's capacity for religious imagery. And by religious imagery she meant Elvis. Ellen had raised her that way.

"Excellence in cuisine takes the best ingredients and time."

Gwen considered the science of cooking. It was a big part of it, but when Deb ran the kitchen she also instructed with full-out passion. She'd be elbow deep in a turkey carcass one minute and pulling scraps out of the garbage can the next to shake a turnip end at someone who wasted what could be used for stock. But Chef Gaspard was right, of course. The best ingredients and time made for the kind of cooking they were learning. This was no cafeteria food Gwen hoped she could save with cinnamon.

"Most of you will aspire to no more than, you would say, fry cook. This is as it should be. The kitchen needs many workers. One cuisinier with talent will have great rewards. You shall see."

She moved as if she were leaving the kitchen, barely glancing at the plates on the table, but Gwen knew she couldn't ignore Ty's. It was practically glowing. And sure enough Chef Gaspard pointed at it. "Yes."

Then, unexpectedly, she leaned closer and sniffed Gwen's chicken. Sniffed her chicken, and Gwen thought she'd have a heart attack in the silence after that inhale.

"Perhaps."

Perhaps was good. It was plenty good enough for her. She'd happily take perhaps to her grave. In her head she was pleading, please don't let the famous French chef say any more in any language about anything on that plate.

Chef Gaspard tapped on the file Deb held and gestured at the only two plates she'd given any attention to. "These two will work on the recipes. The best ones I'll see."

Gwen fought the impulse to point at herself in question, like the girl at the dance who thinks the boy is asking her when he's really coming for the prom queen standing next to her. She tried to not even blink. She didn't want to be guilty of the wide-eyed thrilled look that said me?!

Deb glanced her way then shrugged a pre-apology. "Actually, Gwen's just auditing the class."

Chef Gaspard lifted her head as if something smelled unpleasant to her Gallic sensibilities, and Gwen waited for her to say something, but she addressed Deb instead. "Indecision does not make for excellence. These recipes will be made with excellence. She is in the program, or she is out."

Nicola Gaspard left with the same understated flair that she'd come in with, and Gwen felt a little robbed. She'd not only been kicked out of the kitchen, but she hadn't even seen the woman do any cheffing.

"Alright, everybody," Deb motioned for their attention. "First years, I'll see you at one for the grains seminar." She flipped open the file folder and pulled out a handwritten sheet. "Ty, I'm gonna copy this, and we're making..." She studied the sheet. "Lamb."