Read Online Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer - Free Book Online

looking for the recipe, but I was distracted.
    I was sweating. I shouldn’t have walked so quickly. My mother liked to say that I scurried like a pigeon. I took off my backpack and sweater. The bandage on my leg was thin, and, I noticed, the blood had leaked through. A dot of purple stained the pants on my thigh. Stupid Kanetha Jackson. She’d startled me. Made the knife go straight in. I went to the nurse. They made me. I was fine. The nurse was mousy. She never looked me in the eye and must have thought that I was some kind of vamp nut. But when the goose bumps came, she put her hand flat out on my thigh and kept it there, as if blessing me. I wanted to put my fingers between her clean, unfancy mother hands. I wondered about her own children, about whether she sat with them in the mornings and watched them eat breakfast. I bet she did. I bet she made them eat oatmeal—or pancakes, if they must, but blueberry buckwheat.
Something with a little heft,
she’d say, opening the fridge and reaching for the milk.
    My mother was always sleeping in the mornings; I’d become a professional tiptoe. A professional silent French-toast maker too. You couldn’t blame her for being tired. She had a staff of thirty-five but some of them were so unprofessional. Sometimes a prep chef would just not show up. I wanted to tell them what they did to her. How they wore on her nerves.
     
    I put my jacket over my legs, put on my sweater, and made sure Blot hadn’t seen the blood, which he hadn’t. I didn’t even know where he’d gone.
    I took out my notebook and opened the book about Middle Eastern cuisine. It was divided up by region. Iraq took up only six pages, and three of them were recipes for desserts. I was about to get up when Blot’s shoe appeared on the gray carpet beside my leg. My heart did that sighing thing again, and out of nowhere I felt like I had to pee. I glanced up and held my jaw tight so I didn’t look like a smiling dimwit. I narrowed my eyes, pretending something was bright. It kept the grinning at bay.
    “What are you doing?” he asked. “You always look so busy.”
    “What am I doing?” I repeated, no better than an intelligent parrot. “I’m researching,” I said. I gestured to my notebook and hoped that he couldn’t see my notes. I’d drawn his shoe one day, next to a recipe for Ina Garten’s savory coeur à la crème. I thought,
It wouldn’t take much to recognize your own shoe.
I got lightheaded. I covered the pages with my hands.
    “Researching what?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. Stuff,” I said too harshly. I hoped he wouldn’t go away.
    He sat down next to me and rested his arms on his knees. His legs were so long and thin that he could have tied them into knots. He moved his hair out of his face. He smelled of detergent and deli, which meant bacon. I took this as a very good sign. I was into bacon. My mother had said, one day when she loved me, “I want to wrap you up in bacon and put you on a silver tray.”
    “Stuff,” he repeated. He rubbed his chin, pretending to be old, though he was probably only nineteen, five long years older than me.
    “You know,” I said. “Like, stuff.” It felt like there was cheesecloth between my brain and me.
    “I’m a stuff specialist,” he said. “So if you need any help, I’m Blot.”
    “I know,” I said, and in a moment of rare clarity, I pointed to his nametag so I didn’t seem like a stalker who might also know his birthday, address, and mother’s maiden name. He smiled. He didn’t ask me my name. He just sat there, not really waiting for anything, just sort of being there, with or without me. Quiet. I’d never been good at that. Aunt Lou said that a lady should refrain from blurting but I couldn’t help it: I’d become someone who snuffed out silence.
    I blurted, “I’m Lorca.” Blot’s dimples flashed but didn’t make him look young. I had nowhere to look, so I looked at his fingers. Black lines were under his nails as if