There's something I've never told anyone, not even Georgia or Kate. I decided it when I was little, and now I'm pretty much convinced it's true.
Here's the secret: Chen's fortune cookies are magical.
They're made from a secret recipe; they're the best cookies in the world. And somehow they get into the right hands, the hands that need them most. And they always come true.
It's true. I've never seen anyone at Chen's who was unhappy with the fortune they got.
I'm not sure why I never told Georgia or Kate or even my mom about this. I think I'm worried they won't believe me, and I don't want to have to defend myself. I know I'm right.
Georgia and Kate were sitting next to me with their label makers, and I had no idea how they had so many ideas for fortunes so fast. So far I had nothing. I started to write down generic fortunes, nothing exciting. More proverbs than fortunes, really. Like, "It takes a lot of time to achieve instant success," and "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it." I wasn't making these up; they were things I'd heard before.
But then I cheated a little. I peeked over Kate's shoulder and saw that all of her fortunes were about love. And then I realized that maybe that's what a fortune-cookie fortune was supposed to be about. Because what else did people really stress over besides love? I mean, of course adults stressed over losing their jobs and stuff. But for the most part, from all of my observing, I knew that the thing people anguished about most was love.
And today of all days was all about love.
After I realized that, I started thinking about PBJ. I started to think about what kinds of fortunes I always wished for. I wrote, "Be patient. Love will come to you when it's time," and I typed in my favorite quote, the one my mom had taped to the refrigerator: "To love someone is one thing. To be loved is another. But to be loved by the one you love… is everything."
I thought about that quote a lot. It was my mom's favorite, and when I thought about it, it seemed kind of obvious, but I loved it anyway.
One day PBJ would like me back. I knew it.
"Girls, you ready?" Georgia's mom called to us from the kitchen.
"Yup!" Kate yelled back. She hopped off the stool, and we followed her.
Kate was always saying how much she wished her family was like Georgia's. Both sets of Georgia's grandparents lived close by, and they all got together at least once a week. Plus, Georgia had lots of cousins and they all lived in either Brooklyn or Queens. She had built-in friends at every family gathering.
Even though Kate's family was big—she had three older sisters—she didn't really have any extended family. Both of her parents were only children and her grandparents weren't alive anymore. She had a few distant cousins, but that was it.
Sometimes when Kate would say how much she wished she was part of Georgia's family, I would want to say that I wished that too, but then I felt guilty about it. Like if I said that I'd be betraying my own family. So even though I sometimes felt the same as Kate, I never admitted it.
"The first step to wonderful fortune cookies is to have your eyes on the prize," Georgia's mom started. "Once the cookies come out of the oven, you need to be quick. For this part, all you think about is fortune cookies. Got it?"
I nodded. "But, um, I have a question."
"Yes?"
"Mr. Chen started the restaurant, right? So did he teach you how to make the fortune cookies, or did you always know?" I thought I sounded like a journalist, almost as good as Robin Marshall.
"You want to know the whole story, Miss Olivia?" Georgia's mom smiled.
"Maaa, you don't need to give every single detail," Georgia groaned.
"Okay, I'll keep it short. When Georgia's father and I met and started dating, he was telling me all about his dream to open up an upscale Chinese restaurant. People could get takeout too, but if they decided to dine in, it would feel like a night out." She sipped her tea. "And so I told him about how my mother taught me how to make fortune cookies, just for fun. They weren't all the same size like the kind you'd normally find in Chinese restaurants, but they were delicious, and a secret family recipe. And he loved the idea. Of course, I said I'd only tell him the recipe if and when we got married."
She laughed, and I tried to imagine them when they were younger, before Georgia and Kimmie, before they lived on Sackett Street, before Chen's Kitchen. What were they like? Did they stay out late? Did they eat dinner in front of the television? I wondered if Mrs. Chen wore her hair long then, like Georgia did, or if it was always in a bob, the way it was now. "So of course he ended up proposing, and we got married, and then after saving up some money, and with some help from our families, we opened the restaurant. And he decided that one of the things that would make Chen's Kitchen so unique would be the homemade fortune cookies, with fortunes written by people who worked at the restaurant."
"Did you ever think your daughter would end up being one of the people to write the fortunes?" I asked.
"That's a good question." Mrs. Chen smiled at Georgia. "I'm not sure I ever thought about that, really."
Georgia's mom preheated the oven, and she gave each of us a pan that we needed to grease with butter. I tried to imagine myself as a chef.
After the pans were greased, we left them on the counter and stood around the huge stove in the kitchen, each of us stirring the ingredients into pots. We melted butter, and then we stirred in confectioner's sugar, egg whites, vanilla, and salt. We didn't have to pay attention to amounts because Georgia's mom had taken out the ingredients for us and given us just how much we needed.
"Doesn't this feel like a cooking show?" I asked, pouring in the flour and mixing the concoction.
"Yeah," Kate said. "Oh my God, how awesome would that be? If the three of us had a cooking show together?"
"There's only one problem that I can see," Georgia's mom said. "None of you know how to cook!"
We laughed, but at that moment, I didn't really care what we did, just that we did it together. We could have been picking up garbage in Union Square Park, wearing those blue jumpsuits, and I would have been okay with it.
All three of us stirred our batter in bowls while Georgia's mom supervised. It was hard to believe that one of the chefs at Chen's baked more than three hundred fortune cookies a day. Georgia's dad hired a chef whose sole job was to bake the fortune cookies. Since the fortune cookies were Chen's Kitchen's trademark, they had to be good.
As we were stirring, I noticed the snow was falling even heavier than before and much faster. Thick, puffy snowflakes, the kind that would stay solid for longer than a second. No one was out on the sidewalk walking by; no taxis were honking down the street; no one was calling the restaurant and placing their orders for lunch. I imagined everyone cozy in their apartments, sipping cocoa, staying in their pajamas all day. My dad was probably still only one paragraph into his speech, and I had no clue where my mom was, probably still stranded in Cincinnati. Gabe was no doubt in front of the TV.
"So, the secret ingredient…," Georgia's mom said. The three of us had been concentrating so hard on mixing the ingredients together, we hadn't said anything for a few minutes. That didn't usually happen with us. "Actually, there are a few… . Are you ready for this? I trust you won't be putting this on the Internet."
We laughed.
"I promise we won't," I told her.
Kate started banging on the counter, a drumroll. "Brendan always does that. Like every day before our homeroom teacher starts the announcements. She doesn't find it funny."
"PBJ would never do that," I said. I don't know why. Maybe I felt competitive with Kate or something. She just rolled her eyes.
Georgia's mom shook her head. "Boy crazy. All of you."
Georgia hit her mom on the arm. Her cheeks were pink, the color of the inside of a watermelon. Georgia got embarrassed pretty easily, but this didn't make sense. I never would have described Georgia as boy crazy. I'd never even heard her mention a boy, let alone a boy she liked.
Georgia's mom said, "Chen's cookies have twice the vanilla of average fortune cookies, they don't have any almond extract, and they have a few sprinkles of cinnamon."
"We didn't put the cinnamon in yet," Kate said.
"I know." Georgia's mom handed each of us small cups of ground cinnamon, taken from one of the industrial-size jugs they had. "It's the last thing you do before you spread the mixture onto the baking tins. But it can't be too much. It's just a pinch."
I didn't know anything about cooking, so her explanation didn't mean much to me. It didn't seem possible that a simple combination of ingredients had the power to make their cookies so outstanding and so different from all the other fortune cookies in the world. But I believed her.
We poured a little cinnamon into one of our palms and then used two fingers from the other hand to pinch it into the mixture. As I did that, I felt honored to know this secret recipe. I wondered if it was the kind of thing I'd always remember. Some things, even if they were important, would be forgotten. Not because you didn't try to remember, just because they got buried under all the other important things.
This was one thing I vowed I would remember my whole life. My family didn't have secret recipes. I mean, my grandma's chicken soup was really delicious, but I think that was just because she made it, and only on special occasions. And my dad's macaroni and cheese with tuna fish was great, but whenever I told people about it, they gave me a look as if it sounded like the most disgusting thing in the world.
Our cookie mixtures looked smooth and thick, like the cream of potato soup my mom made for Gabe and me on really cold days. But it smelled way better than that. More delicious than anything in the world. Like vanilla candles and the warmth of a fireplace and sweetness. Like sugar melting in butter on the stove top.
"Okay, so each of you take a tablespoon." Georgia's mom handed them to us. "And scoop a little of the mixture onto the greased pans, but there needs to be space between the cookies."
It was great that Georgia's mom gave each of us our own mixing bowl and our own baking pan, and it was even better that we had the space in the empty kitchen to move around.
We spread the mixture around and made perfect circles, a little bit smaller than silver-dollar pancakes. We had huge baking pans, but we only put four on at a time.
"You have very little time to shape them because once they harden, it's too late," Georgia's mom explained. "You'll see. That's why we're starting with only a few at a time."
We put the baking pans into the oven, and Georgia's mom turned the light on so we could see the cookies baking. They poofed out a little at the top, but not much. They looked like ultrathin, paler-than-normal pancakes, but the smell kept getting better and better.
They only baked for about four and a half minutes. Then we laid our paper fortunes in the insides of the circles. The hard part came after the fortunes were in. Georgia's mom gave each of us a pair of white gloves so we'd be able to touch the cookies without burning our hands.
We used the end of a spatula to pull the sides together, pinching the dough at the edges and making half-moons that looked like mini empanadas. And then there was the most fun part: taking the molded dough and bending the inside over the edge of a mug to make it into a fortune cookie.
A real, actual fortune cookie.
Well, kind of.
"Mine look all lopsided and weird," I said. "See how the top of this one is caving in, kind of like a badly put-together tent?"
"Yeah, mine has a huge crack in it." Kate frowned. "They'll still taste good, right?"
"Yes, they'll still be delicious," Mrs. Chen reassured us. We put the cookies on wire trays to cool and started the whole process over again: scooping, spreading out, baking, putting in fortunes, molding. "Do you girls realize that if it hadn't been a blizzard, this would have been our fifteenth Valentine's Day menu?"
We shook our heads. I had some batter on my fingers and there was a piece of hair in my eye and I couldn't move it away. "So you opened the restaurant two years before Georgia was born?"
"Yes, we were so young. I was only twenty-four." She smiled, and I wondered what she was thinking. "The building was so different too."
"Really?" Kate asked. Kate and her family had been living at 360 Sackett Street for four years, but I still considered her to be the new one. Georgia had lived here the longest, since she was born, and my parents, Gabe, and I moved in when I was in first grade.
"People needed to stick together more back then," Georgia's mom said, making a few cookies herself this time around. "Maybe it was because the building wasn't as fancy. It was pretty run-down. We had a different management company, and they weren't very attentive. We had to sign petitions to get window guards, to fix leaks, things like that. So we knew everyone on the floor, and most people on other floors too. We used to have potluck dinners in the lounge, and people would stop and ring each other's bells, just to say hi. Once when Georgia was a baby, and I had to run a quick errand, I left her with this lady, Mrs. Ensley, down the hall. I wouldn't do something like that anymore."
"Um, Mom, I don't really need a babysitter anymore." Georgia rolled her eyes.
"You know what I mean, Georgia!" Mrs. Chen laughed. "Times change, I guess. The building is much nicer now, so that's good."
I thought about what my mom was always saying about people keeping to themselves, getting so absorbed in their routines. She said a lot of it had to do with people feeling more scared of strangers and terrorism and all of that. I wasn't convinced though. If people were scared, wouldn't they want the comfort of others? It didn't make sense.
Georgia's mom kept talking, telling us stories. She said one day the whole seventh floor had a picnic in the hallway, spur-of-the-moment. Everyone brought out what they'd planned on cooking for dinner, and everyone shared and ate together.
As I was listening to her, I was assembling more cookies (they were looking better and better with each one I made) and rushing to be fast like Georgia's mom said we needed to be. And for some reason, hearing Georgia's mom say all that stuff about the old days made me feel wistful. But I didn't know why I was feeling that way; I wouldn't want to live in a run-down building or sign petitions to get things fixed.
But Georgia's mom was right—we barely knew anyone in the building anymore. I knew Georgia and Kate obviously, and we spied on Natasha Robinson. And we saw a random girl in her twenties crying in the laundry room last week, but I had no idea who she was.
"Yeah, I always say how lucky I am that my parents picked the apartment on the seventh floor, because I got to meet you guys," Kate said. "Imagine if I had moved to the apartment on the third floor that my parents were considering. I bet I'd never have met you."
Georgia frowned in an over-the-top sort of way. She was already done assembling her batch of cookies. When I compared our three batches to Georgia's mom's batch, Georgia's definitely looked the best. Maybe it was in the family genes.
There were four wire racks of assembled cookies out in front of us. We'd each made twenty cookies. The restaurant wasn't even open. What exactly was going to happen to these cookies? Would we eat all of them? I mean, I was fully capable of eating a billion Chen's Kitchen fortune cookies—they were that delicious—but it didn't seem right.
"You guys," I said. "I have an idea."
"What? You want to bring all these cookies to PBJ?" Kate put her hands on her hips and made a face at me. Where was this coming from? I'd only brought up PBJ once so far today. Of course, I was thinking about him. I was always thinking about him. He had a permanent place in the back of my brain; it seemed like thoughts of him just camped out there. Forever.
Before I could say anything, Georgia just said "Kate" in this warning type of voice. Then Georgia and Kate glared at each other, like they were having a whole conversation with their eyes.
"Actually, I think we should give the cookies out to the people in the building," I said, trying to get their attention again. "I mean, we know they're home. It's a blizzard! And it's Valentine's Day. It'll cheer people up."
Georgia's mom moved her head from side to side like she was debating the idea. She didn't say anything right away. Neither did Georgia or Kate. I figured they still needed some convincing.
"We'll just ring people's bells—they don't have to answer. Then we'll actually get to meet our neighbors," I told them. "And we can give some to the doorman too. I think Eddie's there right now."
"I think that's a great idea," Georgia said. "Really, really great."
I looked at Kate to see what she thought, but she was staring at her phone. I didn't even notice her take it out of her pocket. "Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." She finally stopped saying that and looked at Georgia, then at me, then at Georgia again. "That is the best idea in the entire world."
I stepped back a little, and my eyebrows crinkled together. "For real?"
"Brendan Kellerson is on his way to our building. Right now. Right this very minute." She started jumping up and down like a crazy person. She didn't even seem to care that Georgia's mom was right there. I was crazy about PBJ—everyone knew that—but I would never act this way in front of an adult, that was for sure.
"Oh, Kate. You've only been a teenager for a week. If you are like this now, how will you be in two years?" Mrs. Chen shook her head. "I worry. I really do."
"Don't worry, Mrs. Chen, really," I reassured her. "Kate's just excited." I didn't want her to think we were all crazy, because then she'd start telling my parents and Kate's parents and we wouldn't be allowed to do stuff on our own anymore.
The restaurant's phone rang, and Georgia's mom went to answer it by the ma?tre d' stand at the front of the restaurant. "So what exactly did Brendan say? Did he just text you?" I asked.
Kate took her hair out of a ponytail and put it back up. I was pretty sure things like that were illegal in a kitchen, but I wasn't going to say anything. "No. So, okay, Kelly texted me that she heard from Ashley, who heard from her brother, who is her twin by the way, and he's friends with Brendan, that he was coming to our building to hang out with a friend of his from soccer."
"Oh, um, okay," I replied. Georgia didn't seem to be listening. She'd moved to the swinging door of the kitchen, almost like she were trying to eavesdrop on her mom's conversation out front.
"So I have no idea who the friend is or which apartment the friend lives in." She clenched her fists and moved closer to me. "But Olivia Feiler, your idea is genius, because by handing out the cookies, we'll be able to find him!"
I knew Kate well enough to know that she only used my whole name when she was trying to butter me up. Like if she thought I was annoyed at her about something and she wanted me to stop feeling that way, she'd use my whole name. I'd observed this over time. I wasn't sure why she did it, but I guess it worked. I kind of liked it. I was proud of my name.
There weren't that many Feilers. In fact, whenever we went on vacation, my dad would use the hotel phone book to see if there were any Feilers in the town we were in. I tried to explain to him that he could just do a national search on whitepages.com, but he said that took all the fun out of it. He had a point.
"Who was on the phone, Mom?" Georgia asked.
Georgia's mom gave her a suspicious look. "Chef Park… why? Are you expecting a call here?"
"Just curious." Georgia looked away, smiling a little bit.
It was ten in the morning during the biggest blizzard the city had seen in a decade. Something big was definitely going to happen.
While we were waiting for the timer to buzz on the next batch of cookies, I snuck away to the bathroom and called Robin Marshall. She didn't answer, and it went to voice mail. I left her a message saying she was off the hook because of the blizzard, and hopefully she'd be able to come and write the column on Georgia and Chen's another time, maybe even next year on Valentine's Day.
I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to meet Robin and that she wouldn't get to see Chen's. But I had other plans to focus on now. A plan to get to know our building better. And a plan to spend the whole day with my two best friends, making sure that whatever tension surrounded us totally disappeared.
Maybe this blizzard really happened for a reason. I could live without a homemade valentine from PBJ for another year. I could live another year not knowing if he liked me or not. It would all be worth it if everything was okay between Kate, Georgia, and me, the way it used to be.
