Listening to Josh, I wondered if I’d ever be able to tell him that I’d cheated. I didn’t think I could make the words come out of my mouth even if I wanted to.

The day of the Egg-Off, we woke up to the sound of rain thrumming on the roof of the Airstream. So when Mom and I left for the show, instead of heading out with their Petersville signs, everybody stayed inside, Dad and Jeanine working on the newspaper, Josh scribbling ideas to save The Doughnut Stop, and Zoe scrambling around the trailer building an obstacle course for Henry.

The Egg-Off rules were simple. Cook a perfect soft-boiled egg, with a set white and a runny yolk. There was no way to figure this one out. It’s not as if you could watch the egg as it cooked inside its shell. You just had to know how long it took.

And, thanks to Mom’s cooking lessons inspired by the hundred folds in a chef’s hat, I did. One very long winter break, she’d taught me all one hundred ways to cook an egg. I’d gotten hooked on soft-boiled, something about dipping toast fingers into the creamy yolk kept warm inside the shell. I’d even started an eggcup collection. What’s not to love about a breakfast food that has its own dish, particularly if that dish has feet and is wearing moose-head slippers?

A perfect soft-boiled egg takes five minutes—or three hundred “Mississippis” if you don’t have a timer, which we didn’t. The clocks were disabled for the Egg-Off.

Phoenix had never made a soft-boiled egg. Phoenix had never even eaten a soft-boiled egg. And from the nasty green film encasing his yolk, I’m pretty sure he’d never hard-boiled one either.

But instead of admitting he had no idea what he was doing, Phoenix doubled down, claiming he’d cooked his egg to oblivion in protest. His face turned purple as he ranted about how eating runny eggs could give you salmonella. It turned out his Swedish chef fit after the Cloning Contest was just a warm-up for his Perfect Egg-Off tantrum. Definitely GIF-able.

He was still shouting after Randy called, “Cut” and invited his parents to “remove their son” from the set and, ideally, the building.

That left Harper, Keya, and me.

• • •

The next day, Mom’s alarm didn’t go off, and we all overslept. Dad managed to get us from the Upper West Side to The Food Connection building without hitting a single red light, but even with me dressing on the way and skipping breakfast, I was still late.

“Thanks for joining!” Randy made a violent check on her clipboard, then pulled down the mouthpiece on her headset. “Okay. He’s here.”

Keya waved to me from her counter, and I waved back. There was no point in hating the competition anymore.

“Looks like somebody didn’t get his beauty rest? Super juice?” Marco held out a clear plastic cup filled with a thick green…something. Whatever it was blurred the line between liquid and solid.