“Yes, yes. I love the road-tripping.”

No way. Had Chef JJ actually said “Petersville” on camera?

Get Chef JJ to say “Petersville.” Check. And it was only day one. Plus, she and Dieter were going to visit. How many people would come to Petersville just because Chef JJ said she was planning to go even if she never actually did?

“The whole town would flip for that,” I said. “I mean, the whole town isn’t that many people, but still.”

“So it is a very small place?” Dieter said.

“Oh, yeah. But we’re working on growing, you know, getting more people to visit, maybe even move there. I don’t know if you know about this, I mean, I didn’t, but some upstate New York towns are in big trouble. People are moving away, and the towns are just disappearing.”

“I have actually heard about this, Tris,” Chef JJ said. “And here’s what I have to say about it: survival of the fittest.”

“You mean, like, what’s it called, natural selection?” We’d learned about that in fifth-grade science. What did animals adapting to their environment over millions of years have to do with Petersville?

“Exactly.” Chef JJ snapped her fingers. “I think what’s happening with these towns can be explained by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Now he was talking about animals, right? But it works here too. Places that don’t have the traits that allow them to survive get smaller and smaller until they die out altogether. That’s how evolution works. But I guess keeping a few around like museums makes sense. Kind of like the way we breed animals on the verge of extinction in zoos.” Chef JJ stroked her bare skull. “Anyway, moving on…”

Had Chef JJ just said that Petersville deserved to die out like the dinosaurs?

Was that what she actually thought or was she just trying to wind me up too?

The next thing I knew, someone was shouting: “CUT!”

• • •

The show was deadly serious about giving us breaks, standardized-test-put-your-pencils-down-now serious. Between you and me, I don’t think anybody actually cared whether we had to go to the bathroom or were hungry, but it turns out there are laws about the care and feeding of kids when you’re making money off us. So we were hustled to the greenroom for exactly fifteen minutes—they set an alarm—and then hustled back to the set where Chef JJ, Dieter, and Marco were waiting for us.

Marco pumped us up for a few minutes (Who here has mad cooking skills? Let me hear you say, “Yayuh!”) and then snap, the cameras were rolling.

“This is it. The first challenge. Do you think they’re ready, Dieter?” Chef JJ said.

Dieter pulled his 3-D glasses down his nose and looked around the room. “They look ready.”

“Okay, then. Here it is. Your first challenge is,” Chef JJ paused. “Knife Skills Showdown!”

Of course. Because why not get eliminated in the very first round. They couldn’t have started with a bake-off?