Still, it’s kind of bogus, you know, using your own knives. And they weren’t just normal knives from home. Her dad made them for her. Plus, she was telling us he’s an engineer. Her knives were, like, specifically designed for her hand. Anyway, I’m over it.

Mom must have said how great I was five times before we even left the parents’ lounge, which was annoying both because I just wanted to get out of there and because she knew as well as I did, it wasn’t true. I’d gotten lucky, just like Chef JJ said.

Mom was still pulling her stuff together when the lounge door swung open.

“Kira!” Chef JJ called from clear across the room.

All conversation immediately stopped.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harper do a double-take. She and the other contestants and their families were still there.

“JJ, what’s it been, like fifteen years?” Mom walked forward, arms open.

“Way too long,” Chef JJ said, blocking Mom’s hug with a two-handed wave. “So, this handsome boy is yours, I hear.”

Something about Chef JJ calling me “h-a-n-d-s-o-m-e” made me feel like there were spiders crawling all over me.

“Guilty as charged.” Mom mussed my hair. “Handsome and talented.”

Melt me, please melt me into a pool of water on the floor.

“But needs some work on those knife skills, am I right? Like mother, like son, I guess. What was it Romero was always saying about the way you held a knife?”

Mom’s face went tight.

“Tris is a phenomenal cook. He’s going to knock your socks off.” Mom thumped me on the back, and I know it was supposed to be a you’ll-get-’em-next-time thump, but it was weirdly hard and stung.

“Can’t. Wait,” Chef JJ said, and for a split second, I could have sworn I saw her ice-blue eyes lasering into my mother like she was a contestant on the show.

• • •

To celebrate my not getting cut on the very first day, Mom, Dad, Jim, Winnie, Josh, Zoe, Jeanine, and I all went out for dim sum.

Good Chinese is hard to come by upstate, so when we’re back in the city, we eat as much of it as we can. I didn’t feel like celebrating, but I’m always up for Nom Wah.

It was dark when we climbed out of the subway station in Chinatown, but even without the sun beating down, it was still hot. The air was heavy and wet, and smelled of the garbage rotting in the bags piled on the sidewalk.

The streets were narrow and crowded so we walked single file with Dad leading the way.

A block from the restaurant, we hit a crowd of shoppers filling plastic bags with fruits from crates stacked in front of a small market.

Josh stopped and pointed at a cardboard box filled with spikey, pink balls the size of walnuts. “Wow, what are those?”

“Rambutan.”

“It looks like a kind of jellyfish.”