“Oh!” Lily said. “The God of Death sent ghosts to tell me the recipe!”

  Hazel looked down at the little girl with brown hair and bright blue eyes who was clearly lying.

  “You know, if you wanted to keep it a secret, you could have just said so,” Hazel said.

  She was just the slightest bit hurt!

  “No, it’s true! Look!” Lily said, pointing at the ghosts of the WcDonald brothers, Rich and Mac.

  “We told you, Lily. She can’t see us.”

  Lily’s eyes got watery. She was telling the truth!

  Hazel, however, wistfully looked into the middle distance and sighed dramatically.

  The breeze gently blew her hair behind her.

  It was super picturesque. Good job, Goddess of Winds!

  “You know…” she said, “my dream is to become a chef in a restaurant…”

  Lily and the ghosts listened attentively.

  Mr. Cat… fell asleep.

  “For as long as I can remember, my Mom’s cooking and my Dad’s reactions at the dinner table have inspired me… I want to make people happy just like my Mom does…”

  Hazel went on and on, telling her backstory!

  The time her Mom made her a birthday cake!

  The time thunder scared her and she couldn’t sleep at night!

  The time her childhood friend moved away for a couple years, then came back with tales of restaurants in the big city!

  Man, Hazel really could talk!

  “...and then, after two consecutive all-nighters, I passed my final exams, and graduated from school, but now I don’t know what to do. I want to become a chef, and make people happy with my food, but there are no chefs in this town I can work under as an apprentice, who can teach me the true art of haute cuisine…”

  Lily was listening attentively! Although she really didn’t know what all this had to do with her!

  Hazel was a surprisingly good storyteller!

  And Hazel…

  Took a bold step!

  “And that’s why, Lily—no, Master Lily, please, make me your apprentice!”

  “No!” Lily responded immediately!

  The cat, who had been pretending not to listen, but who had gotten interested in the story halfway through, jerked up and looked at the french fry girl.

  “What?! Why not?”

  But Lily folded her arms. “I’m too busy, and besides, I’m not really a chef!”

  Hazel waved her hand. “No, no, you’re definitely a chef, Master Lily!”

  Lily looked down with a sad smile, and her hair fell to partially cover her eyes in a really picturesque way.

  “No, I’m not. I’m really not. I’m just… a burger flipper. All those things you said, Miss Hazel, they really opened my eyes. There’s so much more to fast food than just the fast… I was too focused on speed, and the money, and not enough on the food…”

  Well, Lily’s goal was to make money and pay for her parents’ retirement, after all.

  Food was just how she was doing that.

  But compared to Hazel’s passion…

  Lily really felt the difference between her and the more grown-up girl.

  Hazel…

  Started crying.

  “But, but…” she sniffed, tears falling down her cheeks. “If I can’t be your apprentice, I’ll never be able to become a chef…”

  Lily started crying too!

  That was just too sad!

  She was really invested in Hazel’s story and character arc now!

  How could she not be after listening to all that backstory!

  Lily threw her head back and covered her crying eyes with her arm. She grit her teeth!

  She wanted to take Hazel as her apprentice!

  But Lily wasn’t even really a chef! There was hardly anything she could teach her!

  What could she do for Hazel?!

  “You know,” Rich said, “you could really use an employee.”

  “Yeah,” Mac said, “when we had our fast food restaurants, we didn’t do all the cooking and serving ourselves. We hired young men and women, and they flipped the burgers, put the fries in the bag, and served the customers…”

  “It was a good system. Kids could get work experience, and then move on to other jobs as they picked up skills and proved they were good workers…”

  “There were other problems, later, but that was where things got complicated…”

  Lily raised a hand, cutting him off.

  She’d hit her limit for complicated stories today!

  Hazel was going to take priority!

  “Hazel, I can’t take you as an apprentice,” the eight year old girl said to the fourteen year old teenager. “But, Lily does need help running Lilyburgers. Would you like a job?”

  “A… job?”

  Hazel wasn’t sure.

  She wanted to be a chef, which meant she had to become an apprentice and learn from a master chef.

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  Her ideas of how things were supposed to work were making this confusing.

  “Yeah, a job!”

  Lily explained how her business worked. How she woke up in the morning, picked up her fresh ingredients, brought them to the cart, and prepared the food before lunchtime. Then, during lunchtime, she sold the food she had prepared ahead of time until she ran out, then she cleaned everything up and bought and ordered more food for the next day.

  “If you could come help me in the mornings, with carrying the ingredients and cooking the food and then selling it, and cleaning up after, that would be a big help! We could serve all the hungry miners every day!”

  Hazel hesitated.

  She really only cared about the cooking part of all that.

  The rest just sounded like… work.

  “Hmmm… she doesn’t look really interested…” Mac commented.

  “Tell her how much you can pay her. Ten dollars a day should be fair for a morning shift ending after lunch.” Rich said.

  When Lily did chores all day, she made about that much. It wasn’t bad for a part time job for a young woman in their village. Most girls Hazel’s age made about fifteen to twenty dollars for a full day’s work.

  Besides, it wasn’t like Hazel was doing anything super productive this summer, anyway!

  “I can pay you ten dollars a day,” Lily said, and Hazel’s eyebrows shot up.

  “And the work would end after lunch?” she asked.

  “Yeah, after we clean up and put the cover on the cart,” Lily clarified. After that, Lily could go and put in the order for ingredients herself.

  Still, Hazel hemmed and hawed.

  She couldn’t decide.

  It sounded like she’d have to wake up early…

  She’d do it as an apprentice, of course, but then she’d be cooking and learning all day…

  Or so she thought!

  She had no idea what being a chef’s apprentice was really like!

  Endless cleaning!

  Endless boring ingredient preparation!

  Peeling potatoes! Washing produce! Sorting cuts of meat! They barely made one dish a day, if they were lucky!

  Hazel had no idea!

  She was running entirely on vibes and stories her childhood friend had told her!

  “I don’t know…” Hazel said.

  Lily…

  Shrugged!

  “Well, if you don’t know what to do, you should pray to the Gods and Goddesses,” she advised.

  And with that, Lily started cleaning up, and Hazel walked home.

  Hazel walked down the path, back into the village, and then through the village to their home on the other side from the mine.

  It was a fair bit of distance, giving her time to think, and burn off some of the calories from her first fast food meal.

  Her family could have lived closer to the mine, like Lily’s family did, but her Mom had wanted to live in a nicer part of the village, near one of the creeks.

  By the time she got back home, her Mom had already left to her own part time job, as a bookkeeper for the transport company that took the ore the miners dug up and took it off… somewhere.

  Hazel’s Mom and Dad had explained it all to her a bunch of times but Hazel never remembered.

  She just didn’t care what happened to dirt and metal.

  It wasn’t interesting like food and cooking was.

  She was such a teenager!

  That night, at dinner, she told her Mom and Dad that she had been offered a job at Lily’s burger cart, and her parents…

  Bit their tongues!

  Why didn’t their daughter just say yes?!

  It was the best opportunity she was going to get in this village to do anything close to being a chef!

  “I don’t know about waking up early…” their daughter said.

  She really said that!

  Tim woke up early every day to go to the mine to work all day!

  So did Becky, Hazel’s mother. She woke up early to fix Tim’s lunch and get all the housework sorted before her job in the afternoon!

  They were trying to be patient, but Hazel was sleeping in every day, lazing around the house all morning, and then just hanging out with her friends in the afternoon!

  They both silently prayed to the God of Parenting, for patience!

  Because they knew…

  They knew if they told Hazel to do it, she wouldn’t want to!

  She was in a bit of a rebellious phase!

  They had to be really careful about how they worded things!

  “Didn’t you say you wanted more of an allowance?” Becky said with deliberately idle and disinterested tone.

  “Oh, yeah! There’s this new style of top that’s in fashion, and I’d like some new shoes, as well…” Hazel began.

  “Hm,” Tim grunted. “The family budget’s a bit tight for all that. In fact, it’d help out if we reduced your allowance a bit…”

  “What?!” Hazel squawked. “But it’s only five dollars a week!”

  “Every bit counts,” he said, “and you’re old enough to be earning your own money, now.”

  “And we do need to get the roof looked at soon, before summer ends…” Becky added.

  Tim and Becky shared a look.

  They silently communicated.

  They were in this together!

  “But Dad…” Hazel whined.

  “Gotta pay for the roof,” he said, and then filled his mouth with another bite of his wife’s delicious rice pilaf.

  Nobody cooked rice as good as his wife did!

  He sent his wife a passionate gaze of appreciation!

  She smiled back demurely!

  “Ugh,” their teenage daughter said, taking a bite herself. “Maybe I should just take the job, then…”

  Yes!!!

  Hazel’s parents silently celebrated!

  “You’d certainly get to cook, at least,” her father said. “Poor Lily cooks twenty meals a day by herself, now. She always looks so sad when she runs out of food to sell. The other miners are sad, too, the ones at the back of the line.”

  “Really?” Hazel said. Twenty meals was quite a lot of cooking…

  Maybe taking the job was a good idea after all.

  At least for a week, to make enough money to update her wardrobe.

  That night, before bed, for once Hazel stopped and prayed to the Gods and Goddesses.

  It wasn’t a particularly good prayer. She didn’t have much practice. But it was sincere, and that counted for a lot! She asked whether or not it was a good idea to work for Lily, and if it would help her with what she wanted to do in life…

  And…

  The Gods answered, in her dreams that night.

  Hazel’s Piety Points weren’t very high, so it was subtle, and faint.

  But it was there.

  Yes.

  Do it.

  Help Lily out, and cook delicious food to make people happy.

  Yeah.

  That’s right.

  Her entire goal was to cook delicious food and make people happy.

  Lily was already doing that, and she never apprenticed to a chef or anything.

  She was simply making it happen.

  And she was only eight years old!

  Hazel was fourteen, almost twice her age!

  She could do it.

  And so…

  Hazel woke up the next day, at the crack of ten AM, and set out to tell Lily she’d take the job!

  Meanwhile, at the cart…

  “You’d better give me more french fries today!” Mr. Cat cried.

  “You can only have five!” Lily retorted. “And I’ll give you five more if you become my pet!”

  Even as she argued with her future pet (though Mr. Cat would disagree with that sentiment), Lily’s hands didn’t stop moving.

  She flipped burgers.

  She cooked the fries.

  She mixed the lemonade.

  She had to hurry before the lunch rush!