Fed up Read Free

again. When I stepped aside to let them work, I bumped into Nelson, the cameraman, and nearly toppled over.
    “Um, hi, Nelson.” I stared into the big black lens of his camera, which was pointed directly at me. The light shining from the camera made me squint.
    Nelson briefly leaned out from behind the camera to beam at me. “Hi, Chloe.”
    Nelson, who was in his early thirties, had a prematurely bald head so shiny that I longed to pat his scalp with blotting paper or dust it with talc. His eyes formed two perfect circles, as though they’d been drawn on his face by a first-grader. He was close to six feet tall, and his bulky build must have made it easy for him to carry the heavy camera.
    After tucking himself back behind the safety of the camera, he asked, “How are you today? Has school started back up yet?”
    “No, I have a few more weeks.” My second and final year of graduate school was looming, but I was nowhere near ready to give up on summer. “Oh, I see Digger and Marlee are here. I’m going to say hello.”
    Josh and his chef friend Digger had enjoyed a friendly rivalry during the past month of taping. The other two chefs were along not just to watch how their competition performed but to serve as sous-chefs if Josh needed them.
    “Hey, Chloe!” Digger called out in his husky voice. “What’s up, kid?” His curly brown hair was pulled back in an elastic, and his dark skin was even more deeply tanned than the last time I’d seen him. Digger had strong, angular facial features that I found somewhat intoxicating; although he wasn’t traditionally handsome, he was masculine and striking. “Has Josh got anyone, yet? We’ve been here for twenty minutes, and Robin has already rejected four people Josh picked out.” Digger cupped his hands to his mouth and called across a bin of red peppers, “Seriously, come on Robin!”
    Robin ignored Digger, but I saw that Josh was trying not to smile.
    “You know Marlee, right?” Digger gestured to the woman next to him.
    “Yes, we met at one of the planning meetings.” I held out my hand to the slightly plump woman. “Good to see you.”
    Marlee let my hand sit in the air. “You, too,” she said distractedly. “I wonder who Josh’ll end up with this time.”
    For reasons I didn’t understand, Marlee seemed oddly nervous. Today was Josh’s show and not hers. Since the last time I’d seen her, Marlee had cut her thin hair into an ear-length bob that did nothing to flatter her round face. Actually, Marlee had a distinct roundness to her entire being; without actually being overweight, she was blah and shapeless, not to mention pasty and bland. She wasn’t particularly feminine, but since she worked in a male-dominated industry, maybe she deliberately downplayed her feminine side? I stared at her and prayed that she’d put on makeup before the taping began. She seriously needed color in her cheeks, and I had to peer rather rudely at her to see whether she had any eyelashes at all. Oh, yes! There they were. Would she mind, or even notice, if I pulled out a mascara wand and started coating her lashes? “Oh, look. He’s pointing at someone now.” She and Digger craned their heads to get a look, and then Marlee sighed, “Nope. Robin nixed that guy, too. They really better get moving.”
    Even though it was only a little after four in the afternoon, Marlee was right. Shooting an entire episode would take until at least seven tonight. According to Josh, Robin was particular about nearly everything and liked to reshoot some scenes three or four times, maybe for good reason. After all, she had only one cameraman, and the lighting available in markets and home kitchens had to be less than ideal.
    Marlee, I suspected, was hoping that Josh would get another dud shopper, thus improving her own chances of winning the show. Even though Chefly Yours was relatively small and underfunded, not to mention imitative, it was still television, and I knew that all three