“How dicey should this onion be?” I whisper to him, trying to sound casual. I think he can hear me shouting “HELP!” in my mind.

“Just cut them small like this.” He holds his fingers just a centimeter apart.

“That’s...what I thought. Just confirming.”

He gives me a thumbs-up.

And I’m back to staring the onion down. Onions are notorious for making people cry. But if I cry this afternoon, I hope the reason won’t have anything to do with my impish thumb. Please.

“You probably should give that knife a try,” he says.

“Ah, yes,” I grab a big knife and try chopping the onion in half, but the blade gets stuck in the middle.

Victor laughs quietly. “You have the most intense expression I’ve ever seen of anyone cutting onions,” he says. “And that knife is probably blunt.”

He grabs another knife and hands it to me with an encouraging smile. “Thank you,” I say.

“Why?”

“Just thank you.”

Victor’s eyes light up. How can a person be so breathtakingly cute?

“Lari, I was wondering if—” he begins to say, but Pedro suddenly sticks his head between us like a giraffe.

“What’s with the chitchatting in my kitchen? We got work to do!” Pedro scolds, his face flushed from all the burners going on at the same time. “Where are my diced onions? What is this?” he picks up one of the halves of the onion I struggled to chop. “Who taught you these knife skills?”

I guess the honeymoon phase of our alliance is officially over. If it ever even began.

“There’s nothing wrong with my knife skills.” I hold my chin up.

“Take it easy,” Victor says to him, but despite the nonconfrontational tone, I feel the tension building in the air.

“I’m responsible for everything that goes on in this kitchen,” Pedro says matter-of-factly. “The school trusts me to keep you guys safe, correct?”

“Correct,” Victor says, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“So I’ll call anyone out if it looks like they’re about to chop one of their fingers off.” His eyes flicker back to me. “If you’re dicing onions, tuck your fingers in like this.” He balls his hand into a fist. “Peel off the skin. Like that. And then you can cut it in half now. Section these, too. And holding the sections together like this, begin dicing them together.”

We stare at each other, like a challenge.

The pressure cooker whistles loudly, startling us both.

“I know how to dice onions,” I say, coughing to clear the knots in my throat. “This knife was just blunt.”