Eli over easy, p.1
Eli Over Easy, page 1
Dedication
To Blake Addison,
with all my love.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Phil Stamper
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Dad won’t stop pacing around my bedroom. I watch him take a few steps toward my bookshelf, then to my small desk, and finally back to the foot of my bed, all while rambling about the importance of keeping the front door locked while he’s at work. He repeats this action, silently this time—thank goodness—so I close my eyes and try to squeeze in a few more milliseconds of sleep.
It’s way too early for this.
“Mrs. Martinez is right next door,” he says, as if we haven’t gone over this before. As if I don’t know where our literal neighbor lives. “She’ll come and check on you this afternoon, but if anyone knocks on the door, what do we do?”
“We get the step stool out and look through the peephole before letting anyone in.” I pull the covers over my head in a weak attempt to end the convo.
“Right.” He takes a sharp breath. “Just like at the old house.”
This apartment is nothing like the old house, I think. But I don’t dare say it aloud. The move to our tiny Manhattan apartment only took a couple days, but the last six months have been a hard adjustment, to say the least. Mom led the charge, though, despite my dad’s hesitation, and before I knew it, we were adjusted.
But a few months ago, Mom died, which makes us . . . whatever the opposite of adjusted is. De-adjusted? Un-adjusted? Falling apart. A piece of broken computer code, full of bugs I can’t find.
“I’m going to be fine,” I tell my dad after he takes another lap around my tiny room. I lower my voice to sound a little more confident. “I’m thirteen.”
He takes a seat at the foot of my bed and pats my leg, staring off in the distance.
“I just can’t believe they’re making me go into the office full time now.” He sighs. “Eli, I’m going to find a new job where we can go back to Minneapolis—back home—I promise. Until then, just promise you won’t leave this apartment, so I know you’re safe.”
“I won’t—”
“—unless you hear a fire alarm,” he interrupts. “Then you find Mrs. Martinez and—”
“There’s not going to be a fire alarm,” I say confidently. “It’s fine, Dad. Just go to work.”
He stands again, after a bit of hesitation, and paces another lap around the bed.
“Get up,” he says, exhaustion weighing down his voice. “I’ll walk you through all the emergency numbers on the fridge.”
I roll out of bed after a slightly melodramatic sigh and follow him into the main area of our apartment, a teeny-tiny space that the living room and the kitchen somehow fit into. Gotta love New York City! A list on the fridge has phone numbers of everything from hospitals to Poison Control to the superintendent of the building. It also has all the account information for all of Dad’s restaurant delivery apps. He walks me through them in excruciating detail.
He’s been a little bit like this ever since we moved to New York City, but since Mom died, his anxiety has gotten worse. He’s hesitant, repetitive, frazzled, uncomfortable.
As he grabs his messenger bag and opens the door, I remind myself that it’ll get better someday. It has to.
“Love you, Eli,” he finally says.
With the kindest smile I can muster in this tired state, I push him into the hallway. “Love you too.”
I shut the door with a sigh. Before I can even turn the deadlock from my end, Dad uses the key to lock it, then checks the knob in case it somehow didn’t work. I groan.
The remnants of last night’s dinner are strewn all through the apartment, from the coffee table to the kitchen island to the counters by the sink, so I go around and collect the garbage. Since we moved, one thing we learned the hard way was that if you leave garbage out in an apartment for too long, some critter will find it.
No one told me that moving to a Manhattan apartment means starting a never-ending battle with cockroaches. Yuck.
Once the apartment is straightened up, a brief sense of calm comes over me . . . but that calm quickly turns into loneliness. I step into the kitchen to look for some breakfast, but I lose my appetite when I see the picture of me, Mom, and Dad on the fridge. My shoulders cave in some, and I feel the energy draining from my body as a few unwelcome tears prick at my eyes.
I’ve been left alone plenty, but this time feels different. Dad’s been so overprotective since Mom died three months ago that this sudden freedom, knowing I have eight hours to myself while Dad’s in the office, feels immediately overwhelming. I feel a grief spiral coming on, so I quickly FaceTime my cousin Riley, in the hopes that she’s awake.
The call connects immediately.
“Eli! How’s my favorite cousin?” she says with a laugh. Even though it’s eight in the morning in Minnesota, she’s looking perky as ever. She runs a hand through her long black hair, showing off a new bright pink streak she debuted for her stream last week. Her face is literally glowing, her pale skin harshly lit from one of the many ring lights that make up her bedroom-slash-video-game-streaming-studio.
“You’re up early,” I say, ducking out of sight to find a hat to cover my messy hair. She’s already camera ready, and I look like I just rolled out of bed . . . which I did. “Wasn’t sure you’d answer.”
“The new Songbird Hollow expansion just came out, and I’m obsessed,” she says while touching up her makeup in her bedroom mirror, “so I’ll be live streaming the game all morning. You should check it out.”
I nod vacantly, as I always do when she talks about video games and streaming. Though it’s never been my thing, she’s built up a pretty good following of fellow video game nerds who watch her play. Ever since we moved here, having her streams on makes me feel a little less alone, even if I have no idea what she’s talking about half the time.
“How are you doing?” she asks while arranging a series of plushies to go in the background of her stream. “Did your dad actually go to work today?”
“He did,” I say, willing some sense of independence to come back to me. But then I deflate. “I feel very . . . alone right now.”
She stops what she’s doing and turns to look at me. “Need to talk about it?”
“No, it’s fine, you’re busy. I could just feel myself spiraling and wanted to see a friendly face.” I shake my head. “My virtual summer coding boot camp starts soon, but I’ll keep your stream up on the TV. Between my new classmates and you—and all your adoring fans, of course—how could I be lonely?”
“Exactly.” She smirks. “I can’t believe the first thing you do after school ends is . . . sign up for more school. What a nerd.”
“I think we’re both pretty nerdy.”
“Terminally nerdy,” she says with a laugh. “Isn’t it the best?”
I root through the fridge and freezer for the third time since I started the call, eventually sighing when I realize there’s nothing I want to eat. It’s all frozen breakfast burritos and other microwavable egg dishes. Gross.
I plonk a burrito on a plate and throw it in the microwave, then set it for two minutes.
“What’s for breakfast?” Riley asks, and I shake my head.
“What else? A breakfast burrito that will somehow be both scalding hot and ice cold at the same time. It’s magical, really.”
“Ooh, remember those breakfast burritos your mom used to make? Where she’d put the hash browns in the burrito? Oh, or those little Hungarian crepe things?”
“Palacsinta,” I say, and for a brief moment, I’m missing more than just Mom’s cooking. The questionable smell of the burrito clashes with the memory of the amazing smells that used to come out of this kitchen.
Mom’s passion for cooking is the thing that brought us to New York City in the first place. She got a job in the test kitchen for a big food magazine, creating and perfecting recipes so they could publish them. But when she came home, she’d cook one of her own staples. Chicken paprikash, fried bread, and so many other dishes I’ll never have again. I take a deep breath to keep the tears at bay.
“Sorry,” she says weakly. “I’m sure this burrito will be good too.”
I shrug. “It is what it is.”
There’s a silence that comes over us, one that I’d normally want to patch up with distracting talk about something, anything, but I don’t have the energy for it.
“I’ve got to go,” I say after a few more seconds. “Good luck on your stream today. I’ll tune in, promise.”
“No, you focus on your coding class! You’ve been begging to go to this academy for years. Aren’t you so excited?”
“I am!” I say, though I know my face doesn’t show it. “Just feeling weird today. But you’re right, I’ve been wanting to do this boot camp forever. Did I tell you we’re going to fully design and code our own app by the end of the summer?”
“That’s so cool,” she says. “You’re going to crush it, trust me.”
I smile and say goodbye before ending the FaceTime. I take my piping-hot burrito from the microwave, throw it on a plate, grab a bottle of hot sauce, and walk into the living room.
I try to focus on my upcoming coding class. I’ve been waiting for this for so long, and I’ve been practicing too, spending countless hours on websites with free coding activities. With some logic and a few lines of code, you can tell a computer to do anything.
Hope swells in my chest, but as soon as I bite into the bland frozen burrito, burning the roof of my mouth, that hope dies. The dam breaks, and the first tear falls.
Having a professional cook as a mom came with a ton of benefits, even if the test kitchen kept her working late most days. When she died, I knew it would be hard, and that I’d have reminders of her all around . . . but this is too much.
Every time I microwave a lackluster burrito, I think of what I’ve lost.
My coding class doesn’t start for another forty-five minutes, so I take my breakfast to bed and curl into the covers as I eat. Halfway through the burrito, I set the plate on my nightstand and slide fully under the blanket. I set an alarm for five minutes before the class starts and try not to think of her as I drift off back to sleep.
2
I wake up a few minutes before my alarm, thanks to a “just checking in! everything ok?” text from my dad. I groan and make my way back to the living room so I can get into coding mode.
Okay, this is when the excitement hits, I think. But as I open Mom’s laptop, sign into our online course portal, and start pulling up instructional videos and waiting for the Zoom session to start, the emptiness inside me holds on.
I glance through the syllabus, and as I look in more detail at our final projects, our weekly videos and coding activities, finally some bit of adrenaline floods through me. It’s a little overwhelming, but I know I can do it.
As a kid, I’d beg Dad to find me different logic puzzles, sudoku, math problems. He couldn’t keep up, until his developer coworker suggested something that might interest me: coding. And I haven’t looked back since.
My brain eases as I pull up a lo-fi music track on YouTube and put on my noise-canceling headphones. The noise . . . isn’t exactly canceled. Sounds in New York City, I’ve learned, never stop. Trucks hiss all day and night, street produce vendors shout to each other every morning as they set up their stands, and during rush hour, people lay on their horns. It’s not like Minnesota, but there’s something exciting about being a part of the city that truly never sleeps.
Although, since Mom died, we’ve barely left the apartment.
Dad may be content spending twenty-four hours a day in this tiny apartment, but I want to see the city. A little bit.
“Welcome, I’m Mr. Parker, and I’m going to be your teacher for the next eight weeks.”
All of our cameras are a little blurry and poorly lit, but his feed looks crisp. He’s dressed casually, in a vintage tee with dark-rimmed glasses, and something about him just oozes coolness. I self-consciously run a hand through my disheveled blond hair.
Mr. Parker walks us through the syllabus, then takes the next hour to go in depth on the history of coding and some computer basics, some of which I know from my own research. Even so, I take diligent notes.
My eyes keep darting to my iPad, which has Riley’s stream on it. In her all-white room, her jet-black hair pops out, and so do the pink cat-ear headphones she’s wearing. She’s laughing, seamlessly toggling back and forth between her console and her keyboard to chat with all the people viewing her stream.
Riley wants to do this for a living, and she’s already well on her way. Even though she’s only a year older than me, she already knows what she wants to do with her life. But then again, so do I . . . maybe. I guess that’s what I’ll find out this summer.
I snap back to the laptop as my teacher goes into more detail about the coding languages we’ll be working with: HTML, JavaScript, and Python. Excitement thrums within me, thinking of all the different projects I’ll be doing in this class. I’ve been begging to do this forever, and now’s my chance.
For the quickest second, I picture my mom cheering me on, asking me dozens of questions about my assignments, and listening as I tell her all about the coding languages I learned about today while I help her cook dinner. A brief nostalgic moment, followed by a harsh ache in my chest.
I grit my teeth as I turn off Riley’s stream—she’s right. I can’t afford any distractions.
Once today’s lesson ends, I close Mom’s old laptop with a sigh. This makes my brain hurt way more than regular school does. I started the day thinking I knew a lot about computers, but now I feel like I know nothing. This is going to be a lot of work.
But there’s something captivating about it too. It’s not exactly like Riley’s passion for streaming, but I am interested in this, I think I’ll be good at it, and maybe it’ll be my thing someday.
My stomach grumbles, and I sigh.
I look into the kitchen from my spot on the couch, but a sad feeling takes over when I think through my lunch options. I like Hot Pockets as much as the next guy, but there’s only so many I can eat before I lose my mind. And if you think about it, microwaved Hot Pockets and microwaved burritos aren’t all that different: they’re all frozen mush in some sort of bread wrapping.
I’m usually good about keeping my mind off my mom, but every single time I eat a frozen meal, I wonder what recipe Mom would have made instead.
Even if I wanted to make one myself, I wouldn’t know how. Some recipes she got from the old restaurant she worked at in downtown Minneapolis. Others she got from her family, and she could trace the origins all the way back to her ancestors in Hungary. I don’t think a single person in the family wrote them down—they just taught their children how to make them.
Sure, I helped her sometimes, but not enough to know what I’m doing.
A light bulb flashes in my brain as I remember that one meal we’d make that never needed a recipe. We’d go downstairs to the produce street vendor, pick out a bunch of potatoes, onions, and whatever other vegetables that looked good, and make a . . . what was it called? A hash! That was always easy!
I take out my coding notebook and flip back a few pages, my heart falling when I read the title of each page:
Mom’s Chicken Paprikash
Mom’s Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
Mom’s Palacsinta
Beneath each title are little scribbled notes from the corners of my brain, failed attempts at remembering each of these recipes Mom knew so well. The feeling of failure claws at me, but I turn a new page and label it “Mom’s Breakfast Hash”—I know I can do this.
I scribble a makeshift recipe down in my notebook from memory. Then I dart to the fridge, excited about food for the first time in ages. I push past dozens of flavored seltzers to find an egg carton. There’s only one egg left, and when I look at the expiration date, I sigh with relief when I see it’s still good.
After running to my room, I sort through the change I keep in a jar by my bed. Four dollars and . . . twenty-eight cents. I’ll start with the potatoes, onions, and hopefully I can afford a pepper too. That should be enough for a one-person hash, right?
I decide it’s worth a try.
I grab the spare key and slip it in my jeans pocket, but I hesitate when I get to the door.
Yeah, I shouldn’t do this. I know that. But . . . this feels important. I helped Mom make this meal every week. Sure, it’s silly, but I know if I could just perfect one of her meals on my own, maybe a part of her will live on. Maybe I could make it for Dad someday, and we’d feel more like a functioning family again.
Maybe.
If Dad finds out, I’m toast. But I’ll have plenty of time to cook, eat, and clean, and Mrs. Martinez isn’t supposed to check on me until later this afternoon. My stomach grumbles again, and I decide it’s worth the risk. I pull on my mask, grab a tote bag, turn the doorknob, and step out into the hall.
