After I Smashed the Diner's Secret Sauce, I Went Wild

In the kitchen behind the Lucky Grill, the boss told me to reheat yesterday's leftover house special sauce and stir it into the fresh braised pork we were cooking today.

I looked at the pan of sauce, already giving off a sour smell, and my stomach turned.

In my last life, I was young and didn't know any better, so I just did it.

That same night, more than fifty customers were rushed to the hospital with acute food poisoning, and three children didn't make it.

The food safety bureau got involved, and the boss shoved me out front to take the fall. He said I was just a part-timer who didn't know the rules, that I'd secretly used expired ingredients to cut corners.

I got a heavy sentence. My whole life was destroyed.

The parents who'd lost their children came to our door and stabbed my mother to death, the only family I had.

In my despair, I chose to end it all with a single jump.

When I opened my eyes again, I was still in that stuffy, greasy kitchen.

The fat-bellied boss shoved the filthy ladle into my hand and snapped at me.

"Rosie, what are you standing there for? Hurry up and stir it in, don't keep the customers waiting!"

I took a deep breath and took the ladle.

Then I turned around, and in front of every busy prep worker and cook in the room, I hurled the whole pan of house special sauce straight at him.

Grease splattered across his face, and the entire kitchen went silent in an instant.

I looked at his shocked, furious face, and I smiled.

"A job that important? I couldn't possibly do it."

"You're the boss. You should do it yourself, of course."

...

"You still want to keep working here or not?"

The boss wiped his face, eyes blazing.

Grease dripped off his thick chin.

The dozen or so workers in the kitchen had all frozen.

The clatter of spatulas, the sound of chopping, all of it stopped, leaving only the exhaust fan whirring away.

"Rosie, are you fucking tired of living?"

The boss lunged forward, his bulk blocking me, one meaty palm already raised to swing at my face.

"Do you have any idea how much spice it takes to mix that pan of sauce, how much money it costs? That's my family's special recipe! You broke it, and even selling yourself wouldn't cover the loss!"

I turned my head aside to dodge, gripping the empty stainless-steel pan in my hands, my fingertips trembling.

In my last life, because I was only a part-timer and desperately needed this job to scrape together tuition and my mother's medicine, I took the ladle like a coward and stirred that pan of sour, rancid sauce into the fresh dishes, spoonful by spoonful.

That night, the Lucky Grill was packed.

By the small hours, the news had spread. More than fifty customers were vomiting and had diarrhea, and three children never woke up.

The parents knelt in the hospital hallway crying until they fainted, while the boss pressed my head down and pushed me in front of the reporters.

Pointing at edited security footage, he made his case without a flicker of shame.

"It was her! The one mainly responsible for all this! We've got the footage to prove it! But she's just a part-timer here, doesn't know the rules, secretly used expired ingredients. We're victims too, and we've already fired her."

"I'll do everything I can to comfort the families, and we'll make sure the compensation is handled properly. Please keep trusting the Lucky Grill."

He wore an honest, simple smile, and in front of the cameras he wiped his hands clean of the whole thing.

The day the verdict came down, my mother came to see me.

She was thin as paper, but she still forced a smile at me through the glass, crying and telling me over and over.

"Sweetheart, don't be afraid. Mommy will always be waiting for you to come home."

But the next word I got of her came from a prison guard.

She'd been stabbed seventeen times by a victim's family who'd lost their heads in rage, and she fell right at the door of the little apartment we rented.

Her blood trickled out and stained the whole stairwell red.

They said... that right up to her last breath, she was calling my name.

And I was locked away, unable even to see her one last time.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back in that stuffy, greasy kitchen.

My apron wasn't even tied yet, and the boss's dirty ladle was already back in my hand.

"Rosie? Rosemary Lawrence! I'm talking to you! Are you deaf?"

The boss's hand came down hard on the back of my head again.

I was still dazed, so this time I didn't dodge. It caught me square.

I pitched forward, clumsy and off-balance.

Only the fire hydrant beside me gave me something to grab, or I'd have gone down flat on my face.

"You get it now? If you get it, then get back to work!"

The garbage of a man was still yammering in my ear.

I straightened up and threw the empty pot down on the floor with a clang.

Every single person in the back kitchen turned to look at me.

"Boss, you're telling me to use yesterday's leftover sauce."

My voice wasn't loud, but the kitchen had gone strangely quiet, quiet enough that every word carried.

"But that's a day old. It already smells sour. You want me to stir it into today's fresh dishes, and if someone gets sick, whose fault is that?"

"Are you going to take the blame? If you are, then you can stir it in yourself. Save us both the trouble."

He'd probably never imagined I would talk back. His face went a deep, blotchy purple in an instant.

"What the hell are you spouting? I've been in the restaurant business twenty years. Every neighbor on this block will vouch for me. You think I'd serve people expired food? Don't you dare spread lies!"

He jabbed a finger at the broken shards on the floor, his face twisting uglier.

"I think you did that on purpose, didn't you? You smash my secret-recipe sauce, and now you want to flip it around and blame me?"

"Either you scoop that sauce back up and do it the way I told you, or you pay for it!"

"I won't"

Before I could finish, Sidney James, the prep cook, cleared his throat and set down his knife.

"Rosie, take a word of advice from old Sidney. The boss says to use it, so use it. We just do the job we're told to do."

"If I remember right, don't you start college this September? Have you saved up enough for tuition? That's how it goes, working for someone. As employees we just go along with the boss and that's that."

Rudolph Finch, working the wok, nodded along too.

"That's right. We did it this way every day in the past, and nothing ever went wrong."

"You silly girl, what's a part-timer worrying herself over?"

Natalie Whitney, sorting vegetables, muttered it under her breath.

"Young girls always make such a fuss."

I looked around at them.

One familiar face after another, saying familiar things.

In my last life, they'd said the same things.

But when people actually died, when the boss dumped it all on me, every one of them changed their story.

"She's the one who always liked to cut corners."

"How was I supposed to know? We all told her not to use it, and she wouldn't listen."

"Part-timers, that's how they are, prone to mistakes, not like us longtime staff. It was kind of the boss, really, not firing her sooner."

Thinking of that, I pulled out my phone and started recording audio and video.

"Boss, would you mind saying it one more time? You're confirming you want that pot of yesterday's sauce used, correct?"

The boss's pupils shrank for a second.

Then his hand shot out to snatch it.

I twisted away.

I stumbled back two steps into the stove, my elbow cracking against the rim of the wok, and the pain made me suck in a sharp breath.

"What are you recording for? You think I won't fire you right now? Don't count on this month's pay either!"

He roared it at me.

I looked at his furious face, and suddenly I laughed.

"Fire me? Sure. Go ahead."

"Then before I go, let me call the health department and ask whether the Lucky Grill can guarantee food safety using day-old sauce."

I gave my phone a little shake, then went on.

"In the back kitchen, I'm the witness, and the recording is the evidence. Do you want me to dial right now?"

The whole kitchen went dead silent.

The boss's face cycled from red to white, the corner of his mouth twitching like mad.

He probably never imagined I'd push back this hard.

In my past life, Rosemary Lawrence had always kept her head down and taken the abuse.

Just so she could collect her wages smoothly each month, without them being withheld.

But in this life I didn't want to swallow it anymore.

After all, what could ever matter more than my mother's life?

While the kitchen was locked in a standoff, Everard Clayton suddenly poked his head in.

"Boss, table four out front is asking about their order."

Just like that, the boss grabbed at it like a lifeline and spun to fire on him.

"Asking what! Can't you see I'm busy?"

He heaved a few ragged breaths, then turned back to me, his voice pressed low and vicious.

"Rosemary, you dared to smack me in the face in front of all these people today. I'm keeping a tab on this!"

"Now get out. You're not getting a cent. Get off this food street and don't let me see your face again."

I didn't move.

You get paid for the work you do.

What was mine, I was going to get back, down to the last cent.

"Fine."

I untied my apron and threw it on the stove.

"I'll come collect my wages through a labor board complaint tomorrow."

"But boss, did you forget? I'm only seventeen this year. It's still over ten days until my birthday, until I turn eighteen. No labor contract, employing a minor. That's illegal!"

"You!"

The boss choked on his words.

A dozen pairs of eyes in the kitchen swung to me at once, like they were looking at some kind of freak.

Rudolph's mouth fell open, and the spatula in his hand slipped and clattered into the oil.

Natalie's hands froze midair over the vegetables, mashed leaves smeared all over her fingers.

"Say that again?"

The boss's face went purple.

I looked at him, my voice only firmer.

"I'm seventeen. You never signed a contract, never paid into anything, and you have me working eleven hours a day. Labor law says a minor between sixteen and eighteen can't work more than eight hours a day. You broke the law, boss."

Sidney suddenly started coughing hard, like he'd choked on his own spit.

"I... I didn't know you were only seventeen!"

The boss's eyes darted around as he scrambled to argue.

"You said you were an adult when you came in to apply!"

"You didn't care, is more like it. You'd found yourself a cheap part-timer. You never asked, and I never had the chance to say."

I pulled out my ID card and held it up for him to see from two steps away.

The date of birth was etched right there, clear as day. Sixteen days until my eighteenth birthday.

The kitchen was utterly dead now.

Natalie was the first to come around. She dropped her vegetable basket on the counter and fumbled through her words.

"Boss, Rosie really isn't eighteen yet. When she first came, I thought she looked awfully young..."

"You shut your mouth!"

The boss couldn't take in a word from anyone now, and he roared at her.

I put my ID away and said nothing more.

I turned and pushed open the iron kitchen door, and the hot summer night air hit me in the face.

Behind me came the sound of the boss slamming down a ladle, and Rudolph muttering under his breath,

"Now it's really kicking off."

I ignored it and strode out.

I crossed the dining hall packed with customers, chopsticks clicking, drinking games shouted, beer bottles knocking together, all of it blurring into one.

Someone was lifting a piece of braised pork toward his mouth.

My fingertips went cold. That pot of spoiled sauce was still lying there on the floor, and Natalie and the others had all seen it.

But who could promise nothing would go wrong tonight?

I hurried out of the diner and didn't stop until I reached the milkshake shop on the corner.

I crouched at the curb and dry-heaved twice, my stomach churning, but nothing came up.

After a long while, once I'd steadied myself, I pulled out my phone and dialed my mother's number.

"Rosie? What is it?"

Her voice was thick and stuffy, but it made my eyes go hot.

"Mom, whatever you do, don't go out today. Don't open the door for anyone. Lock the windows, bolt the door."

"What's wrong? Did something happen?"

"It's nothing... I got into a fight with the boss. I'm afraid he'll send people to make trouble."

There was a two-second pause on the other end, then my mother's worried voice came through.

"Then hurry home. I'll make you a bowl of noodle soup."

My eyes stung, and the ache in my nose grew sharper.

In my past life, I never even got to eat that bowl of noodles.

I hung up, wiped my face, and headed home.

Passing the local police station, I paused, but in the end I didn't go in to file anything.

Instead I felt my way into my email and hit send.

The boss hadn't laid a hand on me yet. A pot of sauce and one argument weren't enough to open a case, but they could still trip him up.

But I'd underestimated that Lambert guy's talent for twisting the truth.

At seven thirty that night, I'd just gotten home when my phone started buzzing.

Unknown numbers called one after another, and I ignored every one.

Then Sidney's message popped up.

[Rosie, hurry and look at the local trending page!]

I opened it and saw at a glance that on the local community forum, a post already carried the "trending" tag.

[Lucky Grill exposed: vindictive employee spikes the sauce to get back at the boss!]

The post spun the whole thing out in vivid detail:

Rosemary Lawrence, a part-timer, had held a grudge over a wage dispute and deliberately ruined the house special sauce. She'd even shouted in the back kitchen that she'd "make the boss regret firing her, and make the customers pay for it."

The attached photos were a few blurry security-camera screenshots.

They only caught me bent over that basin of sauce.

The angle was cunning. It really did look like I was adding something to it.

The comments had already blown up.

[Holy hell! I ate at the Lucky Grill tonight! My stomach's churning right now.]

[This woman is pure evil. She can't get her wages sorted so she poisons the customers?]

[Dox her! Make her pay!]

[The Lucky Grill's owner really got the worst of it. An employee like that should've been fired ages ago.]

I gripped my phone, fingertips going cold.

He'd moved fast, so fast I hadn't even finished digesting the last bucket of filth before he'd pinned a new one on me.

And this time the evidence came out so quickly it was hard to believe it hadn't been planned in advance.

He said nothing about the day-old sauce. Instead he bit back and accused me of poisoning the food.

On top of that, from that angle, the camera really couldn't catch the original color of the sauce in that basin, or the flies circling over it.

I opened the post and checked the poster's ID.

A freshly registered account, the default gray avatar.

I screenshotted it and saved it to an encrypted album, then dug out the original back-kitchen camera footage I'd backed up to my phone ahead of time.

That clip caught it all clearly: the whitish mold rimming the sauce basin, and the whole process of the boss forcing me to stir it in.

But I didn't want to release it now.

Because if I did, they'd just insist I'd faked the video to clear my name.

I had to wait. Wait for the health department to show up, wait for this to boil over into something big enough that the truth was beyond anyone's power to bury.

At one in the morning I lay in bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.

My phone buzzed again. This time it was Natalie.

"Rosie, get out of there fast! The boss posted your home address in the group chat and told all those 'righteous netizens' to go settle the score with you themselves!"

I bolted upright, cold sweat soaking through my pajamas in an instant.

I ran to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain to look down.

Three figures crouched under the streetlight below. I couldn't make out their faces, but the red tips of their cigarettes glowed and faded in the dark.

I rushed into my mother's room and shook her awake. She blinked up at me, dazed, asking what was wrong.

I had no time to explain. I just said someone had come to cause trouble and we needed to leave right now.

She didn't ask twice. She threw on a jacket, and I pulled her down the fire-escape stairs at the back of the building.

We spent the whole night sitting in the 24-hour convenience store at the end of the alley.

My mother was so tired she kept nodding off, her head resting on my shoulder, her breathing light and shallow.

I draped my jacket over her and stared out at the pitch-black street, my heart pounding, each beat slow and heavy.

Just before dawn, Sidney sent another voice message.

I opened it. His voice was pressed down very low, with a chaos of shouting in the background.

"Rosie something big happened. Last night a customer went home after eating, and in the middle of the night he was throwing up and had diarrhea. He's already in the hospital. The family's making a scene at the shop right now, saying the boss poisoned him. And the boss, he's out there yelling all over the street that it was you, saying the camera caught you putting something in the sauce You, you'd better just turn yourself in. Don't drag us down with you."

I clutched the phone, my nails biting into my palm.

Last time it had been more than fifty people.

This time, because I'd fought back, that basin of spoiled sauce never made it into the new dishes. And still a customer had gotten sick.

Sidney hadn't given a number, but if someone had been sent to the hospital, it was no small thing.

Then it hit me.

The day-old sauce, even if it never got mixed into the new dishes, would still cause trouble as long as some other dish that day used ingredients that were even a little off.

The Lucky Grill's back kitchen had been filthy far too long. Smashing one basin of sauce wasn't going to scrub it clean.

And now the boss had aimed every accusation straight at me.

I opened my phone. The original footage from the back-kitchen camera was still safely stored.

On the screen, the surface of that sauce was mottled with gray-green mold, and near the rim you could even see the fine white threads of fungus.

I zoomed the frame all the way in, screenshotted, enlarged it, and clearly captured the grease spattered along the edge of the mold from when the basin was smashed the night before.

I had my evidence.

But my mother was still beside me, we couldn't go home, and those three figures downstairs hadn't left until first light.

Still, I knew this was far from over.

The forum post had already passed a hundred thousand views, and in the comments someone was even claiming to be a victim's family member, saying an elderly relative who'd eaten at the Lucky Grill was still in the ICU.

I stood up, walked my half-asleep mother home, then headed back to the food street alone.

The sky hadn't fully brightened, and a ring of people had already gathered outside the Lucky Grill.

Some held banners, some held up phones live-streaming, some shouted at the top of their lungs, "Give me back my family, you heartless owner."

I saw the boss standing behind the rolling shutter, squared off against the crowd through the iron gate.

When he saw me, his eyes lit up, like a man grabbing a lifeline, and he jabbed his finger frantically in my direction.

"It's her! It's that part-timer! The camera caught her mixing something into the sauce!"

"She did it, all of you go after her!"

Every last one of them turned in unison to look at me.

Then the crowd surged toward me like mad dogs that had caught a scent.

"It's her!"

"Give me back my family!"