Chapter 7

Chapter seven, To be truthful, my lunch bag wasn't entirely the answer. It was only half an answer. The contest was starting in less than a minute. Ms. Smiley hurried me over to station number six. "Your ingredients are laid out on the cutting board," she said to me. "There will be two judges. Do the best you can. Just make sure you look busy for the photographers." With that, she disappeared into the big kitchen space and left me staring at the cutting board in front of me. There were a couple of crab legs still inside their shells. I thought I saw them wiggle. There was a jar of little green raisin-type things in juice. I figured those were the capers. And right

in the middle of the cutting board were some baseball-size green things that looked like cactuses. They had a whole lot of leaves, and each leaf had a sharp thorn at the end of it. I know this because when I picked one up, it felt like a needle had pricked my finger. "Ow!" I screamed. Judith Ann looked up at me from her station. "That happened to me the first time I picked up an artichoke," she said. "Those things should come with a warning sign." "And a pair of gloves," I added. "There's no way I can make anything out of this. It's dangerous." "You have to cook something," Judith Ann said. "You don't want to look bad in front of the photographers."

"Never fear, Hank is here," I said. "With a plan. Actually, half a plan." I bolted from my station. I grabbed my lunch bag from Ashley. I knew exactly what was in there, because I had made it myself. A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, with some extra strawberry jam thrown in for fun. A banana with no brown spots. A box of chocolate milk with a straw. A plastic bag with a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin cookie, because I didn't want my tongue to get bored. And a Happy Birthday napkin left over from Emily's reptile birthday party. "What are you doing, Hank?" Ashley asked. There was no time to answer. I made it back to my station with my lunch bag just as the starting bell rang. Ms. Smiley's voice came over the loudspeaker.

"Attention, junior chefs," she announced. "You have forty-five minutes to create your favorite dish. After that, our judges will perform a taste test and select our two finalists. You cannot look at a written recipe. You cannot pick your nose, touch your hair, or otherwise dirty your fingers. You cannot borrow another contestant's food. Now—ready, set, cook!" The first thing I did was push the artichoke and crab legs off the cutting board, being careful not to get pricked again. Then I put my brown paper bag right in the center of the board. I looked around at the other kitchen stations. The chefs were hard at work. In one station, a curly-haired girl wearing goggles was chopping tomatoes. Boy, were they juicy. It's a good thing she had on those goggles, because the tomato seeds were squirting all over her face. Next to her, a teenage boy with green streaks in his hair was chopping onions. He

was crying like a baby. He could have used that other girl's goggles. Right next to Judith Ann was a girl named Lily Chun who's in the fifth grade at my school. I know because her class comes to help us during language arts, and she tutored me in spelling. She was really nice when I couldn't remember how to spell any of my words except for "cat." I could tell Lily was going to bake a cake, because she was pouring flour into a bowl. It looked like she was in the middle of a white dust storm. There was flour everywhere— on her hands, on her apron, even on her nose.

"Hank!" a voice called from the audience. It was Ashley. "Get going. Do something. You've been just standing there for ten minutes." "Oh, right," I said. I could feel my mind coming back to earth. Sometimes it wanders far away without even asking permission. I want to concentrate on what's happening in front of me, but my mind has ideas of its own. I looked around and saw Ms. Smiley walking up and down between the kitchen