Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

sweat it when they blind-side you?  Well that attitude comes from watching too many cop shows.  In reality, you cave.
                  “You were good in there,” Kirby said. “Pretending like you had the flu.  Fooled me.  Hungry?  I am.”
                  Captain Kirby, it turns out, was going to be a chef.  “Actually, I already am,” she said.  “But you know, it doesn’t hurt to learn some basics from the masters.”  The masters being chefs at a culinary arts camp she was going to this summer.  “Always learning, that’s like my theme song.” 
                  “I’m going to drop out, too,” I told her.
                  “I’m not dropping out.  I never said I was dropping out.  You’re thinking about dropping out?  That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”
                  “There’s nothing I can’t learn on-line,” I said, feeling, well, stupid for the first time since I started saying it out loud. 
                  “That’s bullshit.”
                  “What do you think you’re going to learn in school?  How to make cheesecake?  It sounds like you can already do that.”
                  “I don’t know what I’m going to learn.  But that’s just it.  I don’t know yet.  What if I miss something big?  What if I find out that cooking is just a way into something else that’s way cooler?”
                  “That’s a lot of ifs,” I said.
                  I helped her get out some pots and pans—all of which she scrubbed—a good chef always makes sure her tools are clean, she said.  She put the salmon in the broiler, the brown rice in a pot, adjusted the temperature for both and began washing the lettuce—telling me about the poisoned food chain—“Michael Pollan is like a god .  I would marry him right now if he were in the room.  Well, if he were a girl”—and how she was going to have her own organic restaurant using vegetables she grew in the back yard.
                  “Would you raise chickens, too?” I asked.  “And cattle?”
                  “I don’t know much about animals.  I guess I’ll have to learn.  But, yeah, why not?  Start with chickens, mooooove on from there.”  She laughed at her joke.
                  She was telling me about what the big corporations did to chickens—“They cut off their beaks because they keep them in like overcrowded cages and they lose their little minds and would peck each other to death if they could and that’s what they feed us.”
                  “No way!”
                  “Way!”
                  Jane walked in, carrying a box of booze for tomorrow night’s festivities.
                  “Something smells good,” she said. 
                  Tim came upstairs from the Trap where he had been waiting for me.  “You having an actual dinner in here?” he asked. 
                  “This is Captain Kirby, our drummer,” I said.  We were supposed to vote on it, but the reality in any event was that Captain Kirby was the only one who showed up to audition.
                  “That’s cool,” he said. 
                  He came over to me and kissed me on the cheek as if he had been doing that forever and I blushed and Jane and Captain Kirby exchanged a look.
                  Somebody set the table and we sat down to what felt like the first real sit-down homemade dinner we ever had at the house. 
                  “This is different,” Jane said.
                  “Because it’s real food,” I said.
                  Tim was the first one up.  “Thank you very much Mrs. O’Reilly.  We gotta go.”  He motioned to me and Captain Kirby to follow him down to the Trap, leaving Jane with