She's Kind of a Disaster

36- Epilogue

One Year Later

"Is this salmon?"

"No, I think that it's grouper," I answer after tasting a bite of the fish. Lucas is standing at the station with me because this is a partner project, to cook three filets of fish and to identify which one is which. Lucas, who doesn't like any sort of seafood, is having some trouble with the assignment.

"They all taste the same. They're the same animal, come from the same place. Who cares?" He whispers to me, because he knows that he'll get docked points if our instructor hears him talking like that about the fish. This is a 'Seafood Identification and Fabrication' course, and it's required here, so he's hated this class all semester.

"Get it together. Come on, this one is easy," I promise him as I hand him the fork with the next type of fish on it. Fortunately for Lucas, he's still a talented cook, so the fish is cooked well despite the fact that he hates eating it. Let alone identifying it.

"Okay. This is the one that I can tolerate, so I know that it's the tilapia," He decides definitively. "There is no taste at all."

"See? You're getting the hang of this after all," I say with a short laugh. "This is the last one."

He runs his fingers through his long dark hair to prepare himself for the last bite. "Alright, let's get this over with."

With the last bite, he grimaces and then forces it down. "That one tasted just like the first one," He mutters and then takes a drink of his water. "Maybe it was fattier? This one definitely skipped the cardio."

I laugh and wait for his answer. "You have to make a decision eventually."

"Right, okay. So this one is salmon. The first one was grouper, because that's what you said it was. And the middle one was tilapia. Am I right or am I right?" He asks me with a boyish grin.

I flip over the notecard that has the answers on it to see what the correct answers are. "You are correct. Got all three of them."

"Thank god," He sighs in relief, knowing that if we didn't get all of them right, we might have had to stay back and try three different types of fish until we got it right. The instructor in this class is kind of awful. I'm glad that I met Lucas this semester though, so that we could suffer through it together.

We actually met because on the first day of this class, we had to taste test shrimp. With my hatred of all things shrimp and Lucas's detest for all things seafood, we were both miserable in class that day and we started to bond over it.

"We should celebrate," I decide as we start cleaning up our station. About half of the students from the class are already gone because they figured out their fish quickly. The rest of the students are still trying to decipher the fish types with their partners. "You want to go for coffee?"

"Yes, I need something on my tongue that didn't come from the ocean," He agrees with me.

We only have one pan and a few utensils to clean up now, so I quickly get it washed and then we take off our aprons and grab our things to leave the room. "You know that next week is octopus, right?"

"What?"

I shrug at him sympathetically. "That's what it says on the syllabus."

"I think that I might catch a bad flu over the weekend," Lucas tells me and then lets out a fake cough. In the California fall, the breeze feels nice. We live in the same building, so we carpool to campus. That makes it easy for us to just get in his car and drive down the road to our favorite coffee shop.

"What a tragedy," I say jokingly. "Anyway, to get your mind off of this class-"

"Also known as my worst nightmare, but yes, continue."