Fic: The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook [The Social Network][1/5]
| The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook |
Recipe 1
1. spaghetti and meatballs marinara
The most versatile, quick, and easy-to-prepare meal that does not come in a microwavable container or a ramen noodle packet, spaghetti is an absolute fundamental staple in any beginner's cookbook. It originated in Italy, first appearing as early as the 12th century, and in can be prepared in under thirty minutes, providing a hot meal for even the laziest person. It is to be eaten as messily as possible.
1. When water for spaghetti pasta reaches a boil, turn down heat and add noodles. Cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. In a pan, cook the meat of your choice. When completely browned, add additional vegetables (mushrooms, olives, etc) if desired and marinara sauce. Rinse out the jar with burgundy, shake well, and add. Stir until well-mixed.
3. Strain noodles and add to the meat-and-sauce mixture.
4. Serve.
At this moment in time, Charlie Dockweiler is eight years old.
He's sitting in the backseat of his mother's 2001 Kia -- which is silver and, like most Kias, looks like it would crumple like a tin can if someone looks at it wrong -- staring out the window and imagining himself wielding a giant sword, which he uses to slice down the light poles that line the side of the street, clean as butter.
Like most children his age, Charlie hates his own name and thinks it's incredibly unfair that nobody asked his opinion before they gave it to him.
He'd rather be called Roderick (Roderick Dockweiler sounds like a supervillain, okay) or Viper, or maybe Seven -- having a name like Seven sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? At least, it makes people wonder what happened to Dockweilers One through Six. His favorite things in the world are: the way his The Thing action figure yells "it's clobberin' time!", sticking his fingers in the pits of black olives and pretending he has finger puppets, and getting to the melted juice at the bottom of a freeze pop and then looking at himself in the mirror, with blue lips and tongue.
His least favorite things in the world are: the dread he feels in the morning as he lays awake and waits for his mother to tell him it's time to get up for school, the cursive letter "s" which looks nothing like a normal "s," and the way his older sister Rachael, who wears glasses, always needs to swap glasses when she meets another person wearing them, like it's a matter of great importance that they determine who has the worst eyesight.
Charlie's family lives in San Rafael, but on Wednesdays and Fridays Rachael has ballet at a studio right on the pier in San Francisco. They're on their way home now, Rachael in the front seat, looking ridiculous in her leotard but wearing an expression of great self-importance as she tucks their mother's fast-pass back into her wallet. The Golden Gate Bridge stretches in front of them.
He rolls his eyes and goes back to looking out the window. He likes crossing the bridge. The Kia's tires sound different up here, and at night, the fog's so thick it's impossible to see the water. It's like they're suspended in nothing, stretched out in mid-flight, until they land on the other side.
It's because he's looking that Charlie sees it: the figure of a man, walking in the lamplight with his hand on the railing.
He turns his head, because pedestrians aren't uncommon on the bridge (it's a famous bridge or something) but at night they're usually joggers who flash with fancy reflective gear, and this man is wearing clothes so dark he's impossible to see. Charlie knows that's not safe, but a moment later, the fog swallows the man up, and all Charlie is left with is an impression of his hair, which swept up from his forehead like the back end of a bird.
What Charlie doesn't know is that this man is Eduardo Saverin, and he's twenty-one years old.
His favorite things in the world are: the feeling of his bag sliding off his shoulder at the end of a long day, making other people laugh so hard they go inaudible for lack of air, and the smell of dryer sheets. He attended a private high school and was the only member of his graduating class to get into Harvard, so his teachers singled him out. His driver's license expired on his birthday and he hasn't been in to the DMV to get it reissued. He uses a fake one to buy alcohol, which says his name is Lucien Smith from Minnesota and his eye color is blue.
Once, an older bartender beamed at him and shouted over the din of a busy sports night, "Hey, I'm from Minnesota, too! What part?" and Eduardo, whose knowledge of Minnesota is limited to being vaguely certain there are some lakes there, had answered, "Oh, this little nothing town by Lakeville," and wallowed in humiliation for the rest of the night.
His least favorite things in the world are: the self-consciousness that comes with being kept waiting for someone who's late, dirty socks, and the preemptive guilt he feels when he sees a homeless person and knows he's going to ignore them.
Eduardo's day has gone something like this:
He bought a bagel for breakfast from a woman with three white hairs on her chin. He'd given her a five, and she'd looked at him in pleasant surprise when he dropped the change into the tip jar, rattling in with three pennies and a paperclip.
In the back of an airport shuttle, he passed a sign on the freeway for "Embarcadero Rd" and wondered what kind of people lived there and if maybe, someday, he could give his mother a new address and hear her say, "Embarcadero, what a fun name for a street, I like that, Eduardo," and possibly, she would send him packages to that address, the "E" in Eduardo and the "E" in Embarcadero curling like backwards 3s.
He looked up weather reports for places he'd never been to (it was 80º in Calcutta, Belize, and would rain all week) and two hours ago, a lawyer smiled at him without teeth and held out a pen, expecting him to sign away all but .03% of a company he helped found.
That's less than a full percent. At this point, anyone walking into Wall St. could potentially own more of Facebook than he does, and none of them used to spend their summer evenings in complete darkness, fighting off migraines and running facts through their heads like a scrolling marquee: how many schools, how many members, how much was left in that bank account, were they going to go back to Boston for the school year and run Facebook out of their dorms like they used to, when things were good and bright and everything was a promise, not a reality (answer: no.)
By this point, Eduardo has moved past the whiteout-rage stage of this betrayal and is now firmly in the gutted, "but why?" stage, where he will spend the next good portion of his life.
Which, the way things are going, will only be the next five minutes or so.
So there's a dark kind of comfort in that.
-
The breeze coming off the bay is cuttingly cold, and Eduardo kind of wishes he had a bottle of something golden or amber and reeking of hard liquor (cliche or no,) less because it would make this easier and more because he could really use the warmth. He curls his fingers around the railing, his knuckles raw and red.
This isn't really part of his plan. None of this was really part of his plan, but now that he's here, it feels like a spectacular idea, to just drop off the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, as casual as stepping off a subway train.
Eduardo isn't drunk -- he is stunningly sober, in fact, but his hands are shaking and his nose runs. He wipes at it with the cuff of his sleeve.
It is 2004. In 2007, a very morbid group of individuals with impressive degrees will rank the Golden Gate Bridge as the most deadly spot for suicide jumpers, and so the city and county of San Francisco will declare the bridge off-limits for all pedestrians in an attempt to prevent exactly that. It works, to some extent: it becomes twenty times harder for jumpers to take a dive into the San Francisco Bay, but that just means they jump in front of trains instead, which is all around more inconvenient for everybody.
It's always easier for the city to treat the symptoms instead of the problem, but it doesn't matter yet, because this is 2004 and Eduardo Saverin doesn't want to die, but he wants to face tomorrow even less.
Nobody wants to die, he figures. It's not hard-wired into anybody to view death as the best alternative, but right now, death seems more favorable than what's awaiting Eduardo on the other side of tonight.
Yeah, no, he doesn't even have words for how much he does not want to face tomorrow: the feeling of it alone is like brushing up against something ice-cold in the forefront of his mind, and he jerks away from it instinctively, leaving nothing but a sour, tight nut of nausea and anxiety in his stomach.
He doesn't know what he's going to do tonight, either -- the original plan, obviously, was to get spectacularly drunk at the millionth-member party and pass out with his friends (and assorted strangers that Eduardo was planning on getting to know at some point, being their sort-of boss and all,) at their place, when alcohol would make him more amenable to Sean Parker's presence and his to Eduardo's. That's not going to happen now, so what? Does he kill time till he can go back to the Webster St. house, wait for Mark to overcome his hangover and try to talk to him?
(Because when has that ever worked?)
They still need him to sign those papers. If he's not in the state of California, they can't get his signature, so obviously heading to SFO is another alternative -- although Eduardo hates paying out-of-pocket for flights, it's obscene. Except, what's waiting for him back in Cambridge, anyway, except an empty dorm and a stack of final exam reviews to start filling out? Finals for classes that Eduardo nit-picked with the full intention of creating the best resume possible for graduation, so at least somebody at Facebook would have an impressive degree, and ... well, yeah, that's not going to happen, either.
How can you just fire someone from being CFO with no warning?
How many people were in on this?
How is Eduardo going to tell his parents --
Oh god, no, there's that mental block, that great big blinding Do Not Want, and Eduardo hitches forward involuntarily against the railing like he's trying to get away from it, like the awful inevitability is standing right behind him with a proprietary hand on his shoulder and there is nowhere to go.
He can't see anything out beyond the edge of the bridge and the pool of lamplight, only the sheen of fog, broken occasionally by the headlights of a passing car, and he feels a little bit like a letter trapped at the end of a line of text -- if he moved just one step forward, he would walk right out of his carefully-constructed sentence into the nothingness of a white blank page.
Somewhere out in the fog, a seagull calls out confusedly, an echo of a lonely sound.
"Hey!"
The voice is sharp and it comes from directly behind him, loud enough that Eduardo jumps, as alarmed as a cat with a tail that's been trod on.
He spins around, twisting himself up in his own feet and jabbing himself painfully in the side with the railing. For one bright, bell-clear moment, his mind is silenced of everything but a ringing dismay. It's so much easier to stand here and contemplate jumping when no one else is culpable for it, and now there's someone else here to be witness. Even if he convinces them to go on their way, that everything's just fine and so maybe he wanted to take a walk along the Golden Gate Bridge at night in a very nice suit, with eyes as red as apples, and it's perfectly all right ... even then, they're going to wonder. They're going to feel guilty.
And the people Eduardo wants to be plagued with guilt are not here, are not this person.
By the time his eyes have clapped on her, the dismay has passed right into a sharp bloom of relief, settling low in his stomach.
She's a girl, straddling a racing bike and wearing an enormous turquoise windbreaker over black leggings, patched with squares of reflective lenses. She shifts her weight, the bike moving with her, and all he can see of her face from this angle is that she's blonde and has a very large forehead.
Eduardo holds up his hands, palms out. "Look --" he begins.
"No," she cuts in, and swings her leg off the bike, leaving it to lean against the lamp pole. She pushes her hood back, revealing a windswept bun perched on the back of her head and wide, eager grey eyes. "No, you've got the right idea. Let's jump!"
It's as if the cold steals his breath away for a moment.
"What?" he manages, baffled.
She steps up to him, grabbing hold of his arm and pulling him around so that they're pressed up against the railing again, looking out into the fog. "We all think about it, don't we?" she goes, fixing her eyes on him. Her voice is low, private, like she's got a secret to tell. "There are so many precautions stopping us from getting to the other side -- doesn't it just make you want to give them the middle finger and step out anyway? Face the danger, come on!"
The railing is thick and difficult to get over, designed so that tourists and bicyclists can't accidentally tip over the edge and plummet to their grisly deaths, but she pulls so hard that Eduardo can't dig his feet in fast enough, and then, suddenly and without warning, he is standing on a very narrow beam jutting out over absolutely nothing.
He grips the railing so hard his knuckles are white with strain. Beside him on another beam, the girl slants a smile at him.
(He doesn't know it right now, but her name is Amelia Ritter, and at this moment in time, she is 22 years old and frequently bikes this way at this time of night.)
"We are so close to dying right now, can you feel it?" she goes around a smile full of teeth, and with the hand that isn't holding onto the railing, she outstretches her arm, like a child pretending to be an airplane. Her voice is fervent, saying, "Thank you, I've been wanting to do this for ages, but I've never had the excuse."
"Are you drunk?" Eduardo demands.
Again, that look. "No!" she replies. "Are you?"
"No!"
She pivots on the balls of her feet so that she's facing him, so nonchalantly suspended over the bay that he makes an aborted movement to grab at her wrist, to catch her in case she falls. Today sucks hard enough already, he doesn't need to be responsible for this, too. Her ears and nose are bright red from the cold, and he doubts he looks much better.
"So why are we here?" she wants to know.
Eduardo stares at her. He opens his mouth, closes it again, and then blurts out, "Because you're crazy and dragged me over the railing?"
"But that's what you were going to do anyway," she points out, sounding perfectly reasonable, like this is something she explains all the time. "Won't it be easier to do when somebody else is with you? No, but really --" she cuts above his automatic protest. "Tell me, why are you here?"
"I never --" Eduardo starts, vehement.
"If we're going to jump, I want to know why!" she says very loudly, drowning him out.
"Because I have lost everything!" he screams back at her, torn unbidden from his throat.
Her mouth snaps shut.
Eduardo's voice comes shuddering out of him, "Everything. My company, my future, my friends -- oh, god, my friends. Why didn't anybody warn me?" he wants to curl into a ball, the ache of it is so stunningly acute, and her face creases in pain at the sound of him. "Why didn't anybody try to stop it?"
All this time, Eduardo has been one e-mail, one call, one text message away (isn't that the point of running a networking site -- that distance should be meaningless,) so why didn't Mark or Dustin or Chris or even Ashleigh (who's kind enough to send him updates on who broke what shit in the break room this week and is his unofficial spy, ever since he threatened Sean Parker with castration if he ever told her she had legs like a stairway to heaven ever again,) oh, he doesn't know, bother to tell him that they were plotting to dilute him out of his shares without so much as a whoopsie-daisy?
He shakes his head at that thought, trying to dislodge it.
There's got to be another reason for this.
"I'm not completely gone," he tells her, clinging to this as hopelessly as he's clinging to the railing. "I still own --" .03%, come on, Eduardo, you're not fooling anyone. That's not even enough of a percentage to own a Facebook stapler, "-- a small percentage. I'm still employed. I'm still --"
A number of plans flick their way back and forth across his mind, fast as flashing lights; already, some part of Eduardo is thinking about how he's going to go back to Facebook and apologize for his behavior, then sit down with Mark (who will probably need something for a hangover, remember that, Eduardo, a million members, congratulations, man,) and calmly ask for an explanation. They need to discuss those papers that Eduardo hasn't signed, and they need to discuss what Eduardo has to do to be let back into the fold.
Until he signs those papers, he still has his original 34%. He can still fix this; if Mark truly wanted Eduardo gone, he would have just fired him -- a CEO can do that, and god knows Mark wouldn't hesitate.
So there's got to be something to the dilution. Something Eduardo hasn't seen yet.
(Something that will appease that tiny, cold little voice in the back of his mind, whispering, you know you saw this coming. You know you did. Why else would you have gone straight to Mark? Why didn't you attack Sean, why didn't you attack that lawyer, why didn't you go yell at the finance office? You want to know why you went straight for his throat? Because deep down, you know Mark's responsible. This is what you've been afraid of all along.)
(How long has he been planning this?)
He becomes aware that he's making a noise -- some high, hysterical keen in the back of his throat, and whatever's all over his face, it makes the girl reach out for him.
"Hey," she goes, from very far off, her voice no louder than the hum of a very badly tuned radio. "Hey, hey, there."
(How long? Think back, Eduardo. Do you think he started planning this when you returned to Harvard to start your senior year, instead of staying in California? Or earlier, when you froze the existing lines of credit to your bank account? Or earlier, with the fucking chicken? Or earlier, when Sean said, you must be Mark? Or, or, or ... or even earlier than that, when you stood in front of him and you said, breathless and shaking with it, hey, hey, guess what? I got punched by the Phoenix, like that was the be all, end all, like for some reason your stupid young self thought it was going to be more fucking important than what Mark was about to tell you?)
(Is this your punishment?)
(White blank page, Eduardo, the fog and the sea. There's nothing stopping you.)
(And who needs you, really?)
"Wait!" Her voice is as high and shrill as the cry of a gull, both her hands on Eduardo now, and the moment he realizes this, feels the knots of her knuckles pressing against him through his suit jacket, Eduardo twists, securing an arm around her and hooking the other around the railing, because her grip on him is the only thing keeping her from falling.
They teeter precariously a moment, shoes skidding on the beams, but Eduardo rights them, pressing up close against the railing, like birds huddled against a wind.
"Wait, just wait," she says again, so near that all he can hear is her voice and the vinyl sounds of her windbreaker as she shifts in place. "Wait. Before we jump, there are two things you should know."
"How important can it be?" Eduardo asks, tone gone cutting with fear and impatience.
"Very!" she goes desperately. "The kind of thing you can't die without knowing!"
"I very sincerely doubt you're the leading expert. People don't go around with an In Case of Death, Say These Things placard on them."
"Stop." Her palm presses flat against his mouth. She's wearing biking gloves, and her hand smells like pleather. "Listen to me. The first thing you need to know is that the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold. And the second --" she twists sideways, sliding out from under his arm and then she's back on the bridge, behind the railing, standing safe on the pedestrian walkway. She beckons. "The second is that you shouldn't die until you know what it's like to kiss me."
Eduardo's chin jerks to face her. "What?" he goes.
Her mouth curves. "Death can wait." She curls her finger, like a fish on a hook. "Come here and kiss me, just a few heartbeats longer."
He licks his lips, instinctive and unable to help the way his eyes drop to her mouth at the invitation. It's weird, it's maybe the weirdest thing that's ever happened to him, but already his brain is saying, why not. You have nothing left, so why not have this? And then it seems perfectly plausible. (Die with the taste of a woman on your lips. There are worse ways to go, Eduardo.)
He climbs back over the railing, slower than he'd like, stiff from adrenaline and cold. His shoes land on solid concrete again. A car goes by, but it's on the other side of the median, too far to even catch them in the pool of its headlights.
He comes to stand in front of her, and she tilts her head up. "That's it," she says. Her face is round, soft, and most of what he can see of it is forehead, but that's okay.
(What he doesn't know is that in this moment, Amelia Ritter is more terrified than she's ever been in her entire life.)
"I-I'm sorry," he manages. "But I don't think I'm the type of guy to kiss a girl without knowing her name."
She laughs at that, a little too loud. "That's okay, I'm exactly that kind of guy," she goes, with a forced kind of airiness. Then, softer, "My name's Amy."
"Hi, Amy," says Eduardo. "My name's Eduardo."
"Nice to meet you," she murmurs, polite.
Her mouth, when he tilts his head down to it, is so warm it's physically painful.
-
They walk her bike back to the San Francisco side of the bridge, and then she takes him home to an apartment way down in the south side.
Much, much later, when Eduardo is a lot older, wheeled out to get some sunshine like he's a potted plant and not a man still in possession of his full faculty, thank you, someone will ask him -- as people always inevitably do -- what the worst moment of his life was. And Eduardo won't think about that night in the hallway of the Webster Street house, dripping wet and his eyes stinging, and he won't think about being escorted from the Facebook premises and he won't think about the depositions and the way people whispered behind his back for years to come.
Instead, he'll think of this: this is the moment his window of opportunity closed. Everyone's familiar with it -- it's the moment after you decide not to kill yourself, when you have to live with the consequences of that, same as you must live with all your consequences, because it's not like your problems have gone away in the meantime. The worst moment of his life wasn't the bridge; it was the hours after the bridge.
Finally, finally, the last shred of strength leaves him, and Eduardo breaks down.
Even in the telling, many years later, it doesn't become romantic, or sadly poetic, or anything but what it is: horrible, and awful, and the worst kind of lonely. What he goes through right then is the kind of feeling he'd never wish on anyone.
He cries until the back of his throat is sore and he's sucked back so much snot his stomach actually feels full, and then he cries until he throws that up and feels empty again. The cuffs of his dress shirt are soaked through, runny with the effort of not getting snot on the pillow and blanket Amy lent him. He feels too gross, too disgusting, like he needs to shed his skin and get a new one just to survive.
Amy's asleep in her room, but she's left the door open so that Eduardo can hear her moving, twisting around in her down comforter and mumbling in her sleep. It's enough, just to know that she's right there.
He wanders into her kitchenette area around dawn, a low, shifty kind of guilt settling in the pit of his stomach. He's disrupted her routine and taken over her apartment without ever really asking permission-- and yeah, no, the self-loathing probably isn't going to go away anytime soon, he's going to have to learn to work around that -- and it's a vague impulse: the girl saved your life, be a gentleman and cook the girl some breakfast.
Eduardo, however, has no clue where anything in her kitchen is, or even when Amy wakes up usually so he can have breakfast ready for her, and even if he did, the list of dishes he can safely and competently prepare consists of maybe three items.
He checks her cupboards. He checks her fridge. She's got magnets from Monterey Bay and Stanford Federal Credit Union and Yosemite National Park, which pin up photographs of smiling girls, arms looped around each other to fit into their photographs.
"Okay," he goes, swallowing around the nostalgia. "Untraditional it is."
-
"What, no pancakes?" says Amy from the doorway, leaning her hip against it. "Mmm, waking up to the smell of meatballs and ... is that basil? You sure do know how to win a girl over, Eduardo."
Eduardo puts his back to the stove, lifting his shoulders up around his ears sheepishly. "I thought about making pancakes, but ... I don't know actually know how," he confesses, and then the timer on his phone beeps and he hauls the pot off the burner, dumping the steaming noodles into a strainer. When he looks back, she spares him a tolerant smile and pads over, stretching over his head to pull a pair of bowls down from the highest cabinet -- ceramic, arts-faire types, with a chain of sunflowers stretching along their lips.
"Spaghetti it is," she goes, handing him one. Her eyes are warm, crinkled in the corners. "You pass."
This.
This is Amelia Ritter. At this moment in time, she is 22 years old, and she's not scared at all.
Her favorite things in the world are: reliving her childhood through Disney movies; the satisfaction that comes with sitting down to take an exam, armed with a number two pencil and the calm, centered feeling of being prepared; and pouring milk into a cup of coffee as she stirs it, just to see the swirl bloom.
Her least favorite things in the world are: when her nail polish chips the same day she paints them; getting her earbuds yanked out when the cord becomes tangled in something completely random; and platitudes like, "just be yourself and don't care what anyone thinks of you," because if anybody knew who they were or how to stop caring, they'd have done it already, thanks.
She lives in an apartment with a cost she doesn't think about, with floorboards that creak with every step and assorted items she's become too attached to, in lieu of making meaningful friendships and keeping those instead.
Her greatest fear is the sound of breaking glass, left over from a car accident when she was eight. She's afraid, too, of the smell of open containers of alcohol and headlights when they get too close, but it's the soft, bell-like sound of breaking glass that takes her right back; a little girl with buck teeth and a burgundy-colored leotard, brushing shards of windshield out of her hair and watching her mother shriek with laughter, waving her arm around, going, "look, Amelia, sweetie, look!" as it flopped back and forth, broken bone jutting out of her skin like a door hinge.
Amy's tried hard to block it out and her mother is thirteen years sober.
It's the closest she's ever felt, she thinks, to the way Eduardo felt on the bridge.
She's never thought about suicide beyond the way most people contemplate it -- questions like, who would miss her first? Who would tell her friends and how would they phrase it? Would it be painless, quick, if she just jerked the steering wheel the slightest bit, right into oncoming traffic?
"What are you going to do?" she asks, pinning a meatball against the side of her bowl with her fork and twirling noodles around it.
Sitting cross-legged beside her, Eduardo chews thoughtfully. He's off the bridge, he's made a meal: he's come pretty far, all things considered, and there's nowhere to go but forward.
"Do you know how to make pancakes?" he asks, because that feels like something he should know how to do at some point in his life. (It gets little to no fanfare, but there it is, the biggest victory yet: Eduardo is thinking in the long-term again.)
"Yes!" she smiles. "By which I mean, Google does, so let's ask."
-
When he gets back to his dorm on the Harvard campus, there's snow on the ground that wasn't there before he left. He finds a package slip in his mailbox, and, curious, he takes it down to the front desk.
It turns out to be an enormous flower display, long lily tongues and sprays of small white, blue, and yellow flowers he doesn't recognize, all springing out of a white wicker basket. It looks a lot like the sympathy arrangements you'd find lining a coffin at wakes. The bewildered RA hands him a card; plain stationary and no note, just Sean Parker's signature.
Eduardo smiles to himself. He thanks the RA, shouldering the basket and heading up the stairs.
Sean is trying to piss him off. Sean is still trying to piss him off, with the same shit-eating, adolescent vitriol he usually reserves for Mitchell Manningham and the Case Equity guys. Truth be told, it makes Eduardo feel rather pleased with himself: it's nice, after all, to receive the acknowledgement that if you're not going to be a friend, at least you're still a threat.
-
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