The Secret Ingredient Is Not Love but Rather a Seething Animus toward Cowardly Bootlickers

Evelyn tasted one of my biscuits.

Delicious, she said. Buttery. Flaky. Just flat-out wonderful.

Evelyn was one of the judges on the cooking show I was currently competing on. It wasn’t one of the big cooking shows. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones with the famous faces from the culinary world and impressive production values. The show I was on was called “This Is Not a Cooking Competition Show,” but it was a cooking competition show. It was exactly that. I once asked Todd—the creator, producer, host, set designer, editor, and best boy, probably—why he named it what he’d named it, and Todd just winked at me: one of those slow, exceedingly gross winks that people do sometimes when they are trying to be funny. Todd thought he was a clever boy, but I wasn’t so sure about that. The show aired on YouTube, and each episode got maybe fifty views, seventy-five or eighty on a good week.

On this episode, I had been introduced to our hypothetical online audience as an up-and-coming chef from Chicago, but I was not from Chicago (I was from one of the suburbs), I was not a chef (I was a part-time data entry specialist), and, if anything, in terms of both amplitude and momentum, I was down-and-careening. In my life and career, not to mention my mental and physical health, I was, I felt, on a decidedly downward trajectory that could be best described as “screaming toward Earth at terminal velocity.”

But I sure could make a biscuit.

Fucking A, said Bruce, the second judge, after he’d taken a big bite. Bruce immediately put his hand to his mouth. Oops! he said. Sorry. Didn’t mean to swear. I just…wow. This biscuit is so damn good!

Todd laughed. It was such a theatrical, over-the-top guffaw that I thought he might swallow the microphone.

Bruce, Bruce, you’re bad, said Todd, after he’d collected himself. You’re so, so bad.

I guess you could say I’m the opposite of this biscuit, which is so, so good, said Bruce.

Bruce’s face went red. He realized right away that it was a stupid thing to say. He’d already said the biscuit was good. Sometimes when Bruce felt anxious, he repeated himself. He would say basically the same thing he’d just said, but in a slightly different way. He felt so unoriginal, so uninspired.

Yummo, said Bruce, and then cursed himself under his breath.

Bruce, you OK? said Todd.

Bruce nodded, turning to the third judge, as if to say, Please, Nancy, save me. Save me please.

This is the best biscuit I’ve ever eaten, said Nancy, obliging. You’ll have to tell me your secret.

It’s…, I said. The thing is... I looked at Todd. I looked into the glare of the lights. They had a right to know the truth.