Tastes as Good as it Spells

“Welcome to Kong’s Castle,” Faye said, forcing cheer into her now raspy voice, resisting the urge to collapse unto the restaurant’s hardwood floor and empty herself of a well-deserved sigh. “May I take your orders?”

“Really?” The woman on one end of the square table whipped her head up from the menu she was scanning, then slapped the leather-bound book shut, with enough ferocity that a draft must have fanned her face. She trained furious eyes on Faye. “That’s it? May I take your orders? No apologies?” She ran her fingers over the fringes on her clutch, lips parted as she shook her head. “We’ve sat here for over fifteen—”

“Amy it’s…fine,” the man across from her said, one hand sliding across the burgundy tablecloth to brush the knuckles on her left hand. “This is a busy place—”

“Uh-uh, Cyrus,” Amy said, sending her red hair extensions flying as she shook her head, one hand raised in Cyrus’s face. “If no one tells them, they’ll just keep giving us mediocre service like the cheap things that they are.” She narrowed her eyes at the startled waitress, in what must have been her impression of a withering look. “Best believe I’ll be reviewing your service. You won’t want to read what I write.”

Her initial shock ebbing, Faye’s left brow made a slow ascent, her eyes on the little woman in the flowy red dress. She would have gotten to them quicker if she could have; the restaurant seemed to be taking in more people than it was letting out today, and they were understaffed. Still, what was an apology? Ignoring the familiar fire that was stirring awake inside her chest, she smiled. It took a lot of work too, summoning the muscle power to push those cheeks up in a semblance of niceness. “My apologies, ma’am,” she said, linking her fingers behind her. “We do our best—”

The hand was up again, this time in Faye’s face. “Save your little excuses for someone who believes them, girl,” Amy said, her nose in the menu again, the fingers of her right hand waving in the air before Faye’s nose for four full seconds before returning to her table. “Let’s see if your grub is worth it at all.”

Faye blinked, speechless. Here she was, doing her daily service to mankind when all she wanted to do was disappear into a bed, and her reward was a biting tongue and a right hand that shushed her. She nibbled on her lower lip. Oh, for a chance to sink her teeth into that disrespectful right hand.

She looked at the quieter half of the table. A gray shirt stretched over Cyrus’s lean frame, a black jacket slung over the back of his chair. The eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses rose to meet Faye’s, and he mouthed a quick “Sorry.”

His date rattled off an option on the menu and clapped the book shut again. “And make it quick,” she said, running a hand through her shoulder-length bob. 

“Of course,” Faye said, tight-lipped smile on. She pulled a notepad from her pocket and scribbled both their orders. She returned the notepad to her pocket and patted it, the beginnings of a plan forming in her mind. Biting had never been her style anyway. There were other ways to take the girl down a few notches.

And Faye could think of some.

Sneaking one hand under her thick dark hair, she massaged her right earlobe, feeling her fingers tingle with excited heat. She reached for both their menus, letting her fingers discreetly slide along the tablecloth, till she heard the sizzle that would be missed by ordinary ears.

Faye walked off, a spring returning to her step as a new sense of purpose grabbed her. The atmosphere churned with the heady musk of the strong spices that characterized Asian cuisine, and the odd harmony of cutlery hitting plates, of clinking glass, and conversation. But as she wove through tables and neared the kitchen, the voices of the couple at Table Five did not leave her prickling ear.

“One kung pao chicken and one fried rice,” she called, pushing through the kitchen doors, just as another waiter breezed past her bearing bowls of steaming broth. She peeled the order from her book and stuck it on the order wheel, then picked up the order for Table Sixteen, only too happy to be going back out, away from the fiery heat and the cacophony of banging pots and swishing knives, to where she could observe Amy and Cyrus.

“My family’s pretty large,” Faye heard Amy say.

“How many?”

“Besides my parents, there’s four of us.”

“Six? In total?” Cyrus laughed. “Babe, just the males in my family are elev—”

“One second love,” Amy said. Between placing a bowl of chow mein before the single woman at Table Sixteen, and encouraging her to “Enjoy your meal,” Faye looked over her shoulder at Table Five. Amy’s right hand drifted down—from where it had no doubt gone to silence Cyrus again—to join her other hand on her phone. “Grace just tweeted me.”

The sudden slump in Cyrus’s shoulders, and the carefree laughter from the girl who had caused it, shot tiny sparks up Faye’s arm like an unchecked electric charge. Show time. While pink, zigzagging lines of static electricity, only visible to her, sizzled between two fingers, a command tumbled out her mouth like a breath. “Munzadelfieri.”

*

“Aah!”

Amy let go of her phone, her panicked eyes watching as it bounced off her thigh and crashed into the floor, the sound covered by the music floating from unseen speakers around the restaurant. Her chest heaved with every ragged breath.

“Uh, sorry?” Cyrus’s unsure voice carried over to her, but she was too worked up by the sudden feeling in her fingers—and the painful possibility that her phone was as good as dead now—to concentrate on him. “Hopefully there’s no damage—”

“It burned me,” she said, the words leaving her in a shocked whisper.

“What?”

She looked up, eyes shining in fear and unshed tears. “The phone. It burned me.”

Cyrus, right elbow on the table, pinched his lower lip, eyes flicking between her and the phone on the floor. “Happens,” he said, shrugging. “You know it gets hot from overuse, right?”

“I know,” she said, mad that he could imply she was dumb, and because she didn’t miss his emphasis on the word “overuse.” “It just—” She shut her mouth. How could she explain that the phone she’d been tapping a minute ago had shot a current of blazing heat through her fingers, so potent she’d vividly remembered that time when she was six and had accidentally seared herself with an iron? “Never mind.”

Cyrus sighed. “Just…pick it up.”

She frowned. Was that a note of tiredness she picked up in his voice? What was his problem? “Well excuse me for being a little stressed because you couldn’t take me someplace better for our first date.”

He chuckled. “Keep it up, and it’ll be our last.”

*

Faye grinned into the bottle of water she had stopped long enough to grab. Table Five was stewing nicely in the little pot of mischief she’d stirred.

“Order for Table Eleven ready!”

She binned her bottle and filled her hands with a tray, the aromas pricking her nostrils, her stomach gurgling to remind her that she hadn’t consumed solid food in three hours, a frighteningly long time for someone who was surrounded by it. She went through the doors and strode to the table and its waiting patrons, her lips curving as more conversation hit her ears.

“Really, Cyrus? Are you calling me a bit much?” Amy asked.

“No, how could I?” Faye placed a ramekin before a customer, smiling at the heavy sarcasm in Cyrus’s voice. “What I am saying, my dear Amy, is you’re a little different from the person I was texting.”

“Oh? What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t look exactly like my profile picture? Boobs not big enough for you?”

“On the contrary, Amy, you’re easily one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever met!” Faye nodded. Amy was beautiful, even with the mouth on her. “I’m just saying. Your behavior. It’s…not cool. You didn’t have to talk to the waitress like—”

Her piercing laugh interrupted him. “Of course. I knew it. You’d take her side. All of you do it, people of your class. You stick together.”

“Excuse me?”

Faye caught a section of her lower lip between her teeth. She didn’t mind being slighted; she was a waitress, and the larger number of people who walked in through Kong’s Castle’s doors thought they were better than her. Amy talking to her date like that, though. What could justify that?

Moving a napkin so she could put a plate in its place, Faye turned to blow lightly through rounded lips on the hair that brushed the shoulder of her black shirt. In the light wind, a wisp of hair broke away, its ends glowing red-orange as it streaked through the air. It made a beeline for Table Five, where a man was trying to shake his head of rising anger, and a woman was reaching for a phone on the ground. The hair clicked against the glass on the woman’s side of the table, and, with a tiny pop, exploded into oblivion. The glass tipped, sending a cascade of sparkling water over the edge, and right unto Amy’s ducked head.

“Aah!”

*

“What did you do?”

Cyrus was too stunned to react immediately to Amy’s squawking. In his defense, none of his dates had ever glared at him while trying to peel their dripping wet hair off their eyes. “What do you mean what did I do?” he squeaked, when he could speak.

“You—kicked the table! Or knocked the glass!”

He swallowed, the back of his neck on fire as his discomfort rose. She was making a scene, if the growing sound of murmuring around them was a sign. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “Maybe it just—”

“Just stop!” In one motion, she snatched up a napkin, stood, and flounced out, presumably to the bathroom, leaving him to rue his taste in women. His stare landed on the empty glass, perched precariously on the edge of the table, where it stood, right side up.

*

“Chicken for the lady,” Faye said, putting the black dish in front of the now dried Amy—who had spent most of the last ten minutes in the bathroom yanking sheet after sheet of paper towel from the dispenser and dabbing at her hair, her head under the hand dryer—, “and rice for the gent.” She set his meal in front of him, then smiled at the pair. “Enjoy.”

Amy brought her nose closer to her food, her lips wrinkling. “Why did I expect different?” She made a show of coughing into a napkin. “Lowly place, lowly service, lowly food. Just…” she flicked a hand in Faye’s direction. “Go.”

And Faye had thought raining on Amy’s parade—literally—would be enough to knock some humility into her. “Certainly,” Faye said, glad, nevertheless, to have another reason to practice. The charge pumping through her was reaching fever pitch. She turned on the heel of her ballet flats, picking the moment of the swivel to speak inaudibly, her thumb playing a familiar rhythm on her other fingers within her skirt pocket.

“Eek!”

Faye managed to keep a straight face while walking to Table Eight.

“What?” Cyrus. The tiredness was creeping into his voice.

“It moved!”

“What?”

“The chicken!” Amy’s voice was a composition of awe and shrill whispers. “It…bounced!”

Cyrus’s sigh was audible enough to steal a giggle from Faye. “You’re poking it, remember? It will move.”

“Not like that! It—”

“Just eat, Amy.” His tone was a promise that if she didn’t just eat, he would leave her there. Just as well. Faye was beginning to think he was a masochist.

There was a “humph,” and more metal on porcelain. “Thanks,” Faye said, smiling as she received payment, her other hand still in her pocket. Time to crank things up a notch. Table Five in sight, she ran her thumb over her fingers, and muttered a phrase. Three cubes of sauce-drenched chicken leaped out of Amy’s dish in rapid succession and socked her on the forehead.

“Ow! Aw! Aw!”

Pocketing her tip, Faye winced as Amy’s shriek pierced her ears. Sometimes hyper-hearing was a curse.

“What?” For a word that had no s, Cyrus’s utterance was a brilliant impression of a hiss.

“It flew!”

“What flew?”

“The chicken! Look, it did! And knocked me here—”

“Yes. Of course. The chicken, a flightless bird when alive, somehow found a launching pad in your meal, and decided that your face would be a good landing point.”

“Oh? You don’t believe me?”

“Well of course I do! Am I to think the reason there’s sauce dripping from your eyebrows is that you’re a messy eater?”

“Oh shut up!” There was that arm of Amy’s again. From where she stood by the kitchen door, Faye rolled her eyes. That arm was beginning to piss her off, and she hated being angry. Indifference was her preferred disposition. She could not be blamed for what was about to happen. A vibrant magenta mist swirling in her left palm, Faye whispered another command. “Manu’umtuarum nefrigore.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God.” The insolence had left Amy’s voice long enough for surprise and terror to creep back in. “I can’t—it won’t—” Her wide eyes, shining with fright, switched between Cyrus and her raised arm, as if expecting one of them to react to her incomplete statement. One of them did—Cyrus raised his arm then, to catch Faye’s attention.

“Bill, please,” he said, when she reached their table, not one second spared on looking at the petrified woman across him.

“Cyrus!” Faye, taking her sweet time to get the bill, flinched again at Amy’s outburst. “Are you listening to me?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“My arm. It won’t come down.”

“What do you mean it won’t come down?”

“It’s…stuck!”

The man sniggered. “Just as well. You’ve done nothing but keep it in the air all evening.”

“You think I’m joking!”

The waitress walked out the kitchen, glad there was still enough current simmering within her to work up a full, genuine smile. There sat Amy, her recalcitrant arm stuck in space, the muscles in her other arm tense as they tried to pull it back to her side, while her date wisely shoved the last bits of shrimp into his mouth and avoided eye contact. Faye put the bill next to Cyrus, and shook out her left hand. Amy’s arm hit the table as the spell broke. She gasped, and massaged the back of her hand with her other hand, her eyes darting around the restaurant in growing paranoia. “It’s haunted. This place is haunted,” she kept saying. Her chanting, paired with the hair that had turned ratty after her emergency pat-and-blow-dry, gave her the look of someone a few days from taking up residence in a home for the incurably insane. “This place is haunted.” Her eyes flitted up and met Faye’s. The waitress’s amusement was enough to kick away Amy’s terrified expression. Back was the anger. “You! You did this!”

Faye blinked, at her innocent best. “Did what?”

“Everything!” She snatched up her purse and stood. “You…witch! I’ll make you pay!”

“I’m sorry,” Cyrus said on the back of another longsuffering sigh, putting money on the table, while his date left the restaurant in a symphony of clacking heels and huffs. “She’s…a little stressed.”

“That’s alright.” He stood. A pang of guilt hit Faye. She had contributed to ruining his evening. “I’m sure things will…look up,” she said awkwardly, patting the back of her hair.

He flashed her a smile. “Thanks.” He made for the door. From the corner of her eye, Faye saw the woman from Table Sixteen approaching the door. A pink rectangle peeked out the woman’s side pocket. Acting on the liquid heat rushing through her veins, Faye lightly tugged the air before her, her lips moving. A wallet slithered out the woman’s pocket and hit the floor.

Cyrus’s good guy instincts kicked in. “Excuse me,” he called, bending to pick up the wallet, quickening his stride to meet the woman who had stopped outside. The ensuing conversation Faye observed through the glass doors was a little too long and giggly to be just a wallet exchange.

Faye let out a breath, fanning herself. Who knew? It could be the beginning of something good. And if it wasn’t? She popped one of Amy’s chicken chunks into her mouth. They could always return to the restaurant for a little more magic.