Time Frame: Fall 2013
“Ow! hot, hot, hot, hot, hot!”
It was a rookie mistake. One that an
experienced person would never make. I knew the second the mistake would be
made, but we had a saying around those parts –and when I say “those parts” I
mean the kitchen at the college cafeteria my friends and I worked at –and it’s
that you’re not a kitchen worker until you’ve burn your arm on the oven door.
It’s a mistake everyone makes at least once, no matter
how hard they try to avoid it.
Unfortunately the girl that had just
made the mistake had done more than just bump her arm against the angry door.
She had also made the mistake of grabbing the pan of cookies that were in the
oven without first wrapping her hand in a towel. Rookie mistake number two…and
maybe a sign that she lacked a bit of common sense. I mean, really, who grabs a
hot pan without first finding some sort of protection for their hands?
“That’s why you don’t grab a hot pan
without a potholder!” Our boss, James, chided over the growl of our chief, who
was staring down at the now unusable cookies that lay scattered around the
girl’s gold converse shoes.
James, for all his quirkiness, was a decent guy. And no, I’m
not just saying that because he, at one time, had a part in issuing my
paycheck. He was an odd dude, for sure. He had a tendency of doing or saying
things that made us workers uncomfortable and he was the kind of guy you either
liked or didn’t. The thing about him that was the most annoying was that he
could be super cool one minute and crazy uncaring the next. Let me put it this
way, he wasn’t the first guy you’d want to pour your soul out to but he did
offer to listen should you ever find yourself in a situation where you wished
to do so.
James was a guy of average height.
He had dark hair the exact color of a raven’s wing and eyes like coffee. He
appeared to have a bit Italian in his blood, but I never asked so I can’t tell
you if he really was part Italian or not.
“I’m sorry!” the girl cried. She was
clutching her hands close to her chest, cradling their burnt flesh. “I didn’t
mean to!”
“There’s a heat resistant glove on
the shelf above the oven for a reason,” our head chief, Joe, chimed in.
Unlike James, who had the muscle mass of spaghetti, Joe was
buff. He was middle aged with close-cut blond hair and the shoulders of a
quarterback. He was fun loving and relaxed. He was a cool guy. A quite guy. He rarely ever talked
and spent an unsettling amount of time in the coolers. Most newbies thought he
was mute, because communication with him involved a lot of gesturing and eye
rolls. He didn’t like having to explain things and kept conversations between
himself, his cook assistants, and those he’d known for a minimum of a semester.
“Could have grabbed a towel too,” James continued.
“Or an apron,” Joe added.
“Okay, I get it,” the new cook assistant, whose name I had
yet to catch, ground out. “Sue me for being nervous my first week here.”
Joe scoffed. “What use would that be? You’re a college
student. You don’t have any money.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be working here,” the girl muttered and
I had to fight back a snicker. I totally got what she was saying. Everyone
started working at the cafeteria because they had to pay the school. Money was
good motivation.
“Go treat your hands, then grab a broom and sweep up this
mess,” James purposely stepped on one of the cookies, mashing dough and
chocolate chips into the rough red flooring of the kitchen.
I wanted to speak out. To say, “Why do you have to be that
way?” to him, but I had a feeling he didn’t particularly like me and I needed
to keep my job. So, instead, I said, “I’ll show her where the burn spray is,”
and laid down the large knife I had been using to chop onions.
James merely nodded and Joe went back to his bowls of herbs.
I lead the new girl back to the
offices and opened the top drawer on our head boss’ desk. Thankfully for us,
James wasn’t the big guy. Though he could fire us, and he did control our
schedules, he wasn’t the guy that made most of the rules. Said big guy’s top
desk drawer was full of medical stuff. A first aid kit, bottles of pain
reliever, and a couple epi-pens laid inside the drawer. I reached behind the
white first-aid box to grab a bottle of burn spray and said, “Hold out your
hands.”
The girl and I didn’t say anything
as I sprayed her hands, or after I put the spray away. Nor did we say anything
once we rejoined James and Joe in the kitchen. We continued to work in silence,
until both of the men ventured off to make sure we had enough bags of fries and
that all the tables in the cafeteria had been cleaned for dinner.
“Are they always like that?” the
girl spoke up once the men left the room.
“Pretty much. Joe gets better,” I
promised.
“And James?”
“James gets worse.”
“Great,” she drew out the word and I
cracked a smirk. “I’m Nikki, by the way.”
“I’m
Andy,” I responded.
Nikki was a sweet girl. African
American with kinky curls that she spent hours straightening. She had a whole
lot of sass and a killer fashion sense. From gold converse and varsity jackets,
to Pencil skirts and frilly tops, she could rock it all. She was never without
her music and her phone. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that. I just
thought she was a smooth chick who had an attitude I was jealous of. I didn’t
know she was going to rub off on me or that I’d be bobbing my head at people,
like she would, when I’d get mad at someone in the future. She became one of my
best friends though.
Being best friends wasn’t exactly on
the agenda that first day we met. Really all she wanted to do was survive her
first week of work and all I wanted to do was to make it through the day without
earning myself some snide remark from James. We never would have predicted how
close we’d become.
“So where are you from?” I asked of
Nikki.
One thing about college, there are four questions you ask
everyone the first time you meet them:
1) What’s your name?
2) Where are you from?
3) What class level are you?
4) What’s your major?
“Florida,” Nikki answered.
“Really?” I laughed. “Why the heck did you come here?”
“I needed to get away from home. Thought this would be as
good a place as any. You?”
“I’m from Nebraska, but I came here for the same reason, actually.”
I always dreamed of having a life like Sabrina
Fairchild. Of traveling to some far away country to learn something exciting. I
didn’t want to be Sleeping Beauty or have a prince swoop in and save me from
some dragon. I had merely wanted to leave home, learn an exciting career, find
myself, and perhaps one day return home to find out the love of my life had
been the brooding, misunderstood boy from next door.
The original plan had been to
graduate high school, pack up, and move myself to the sunny state of
California. I was tired of the drama of my home state. I was tired of cattle
and corn. I wanted to break away and find a place where I could be comfortable
being me; where I could find out who I was.
I thought California would be the
perfect place for me. As far as I was concerned, my plan to get as far away as
possible, without leaving the country, was set in stone…that was until the end
of my junior year of high school. As life normally goes, I was slung down a
path I had never intended to take. The freefall called life had gotten her ugly
talons into me.
At seventeen, I wanted nothing
besides to be invisible until I could get out of Nebraska. Unfortunately for
me, that was impossible. You see, my dad was my children’s pastor…then my youth
pastor…then eventually my pastor, pastor. That may not mean anything to some of
you, but all you PKs (That’s Preacher Kids for anyone who doesn’t know) out
there know what I’m getting at. At seventeen my dad was the head of my church’s
teen department. So, my siblings and I tended to be held to a higher standard
than most kids our ages.
Deny it as pastors may, but their children are always held to
a higher standard. I was expected to get along with everyone in youth group, to
smile and participate in meaningless small talk, and to love every youth event
we went to. I had always felt a bit like a bug under a microscope because of
it. I always felt like people were watching me, just waiting for the moment I
screwed up. That was another reason for California. I wanted to be somewhere
where no one knew me.
That all changed though towards the end of my junior year in
high school, when the juniors and seniors in my youth group went to visit a college
associated with our religious denomination. There were only three of us, plus
my parents (who were chaperoning), and we had been friends for as long as we
could remember. We couldn’t even really recall how we had met.
Jacklyn and Connie were both planning on attending the school
we were visiting. I, on the other hand, was still dead set against it. Both of
my parents had attended the school and I was afraid that I would end up living
in their shadows. So, California sounded like a better option. Plus, I kind of
liked the idea of going to a university that had palm trees on campus and was
only a short drive from the beach. Which is kind of odd, since I can’t swim…but
my fear of water was beat over by the promise of sunshine and freedom.
Anyway, at the college visit, my friends and I were placed in
a room with two of the university’s students. Such was done with every highschooler
visiting. We were required to sit through meetings and attend a couple on going
classes. Jacklyn had no problem branching out and chose to attend some advanced
science classes or something super boring like that. Connie and I, however,
compromised. Neither of us wanted to go alone, so we each chose one class to
attend together. I’ll never forget the class I chose for us to attend.
In room 208, of the humanities and religion building, Connie
and I attended a class on Shakespeare…and I felt my passion for English and
writing explode. There, among six college students and a professor who was
excitedly explaining Romeo and Juliet, I felt like I belonged.
That night, when I crawled into my sleeping bag on the hard
dorm room floor, I knew that I wouldn’t be going to California. For some reason,
the Kansas University felt like home and I just had a feeling that I belonged
there.
Olathe, Kansas was no Paris and it was definitely closer to
home than I thought I wanted to be. And English wasn’t exactly the culinary
arts or modeling, but I still had that Sabrina Fairchild concept going on.
Though I was studying English, I was still sort of like
Sabrina in the way that I found myself with a job at the college cafeteria. I
also found myself alone, for Connie and Jacklyn both decided that they didn’t
feel like the college was for them. It’s funny how things work out. Olathe was
promising me Sabrina’s life…and I took it up on its offer.
There’s always been one thing about Sabrina’s story that I
sort of disliked and that’s that we who are told her story know some of what
occurs during her time in Paris and that it’s because of Paris that she grows
into herself, but we don’t really
know what she discovered when she was there.
How did she discover herself? What happened that shaped her?
What made her go from the awkward girl who watched her crush from a tree to a strong,
confident and sophisticated woman?
I’m not Sabrina Fairchild and I don’t know exactly what
happened to her in Paris, but I know that it’s a story worth telling. How do I
know this? Because at eighteen I left home a shy awkward girl to attend a
university in Olathe, Kansas and I grew into a completely different person.
What happened between taught me some of the most important lessons in life, but
that’s getting ahead of myself. So, allow me to begin again and to tell you about
my human experience and how a cafeteria can sometimes be the best place to
learn of life’s secrets and just what it means to be human.
Once upon a time, in a city called Olathe, not far from
Kansas City, there was a college campus where there lived a variety of
students. And on that campus there sat a
little cafeteria where people dreamed of being Fairchildren found out that
sometimes to be a Fairchild you first have to be a Cinderella. And what those
students found there, after leaving the safety of their homes, was the world…
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