For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu

Mine was the smallest size jacket they had. It hung flat off my bones the same way it had hung on the coat hanger. I cinched the pants tightly, and the legs ballooned around me like I was a wasting old man.
    â€œI’m . . . new.”
    â€œWe’re all new, but you’re the only one doing nothing. Let’s go.” He led me through the kitchen. “You have three basic tasks: dishes, cleaning, and fetching stuff for the cooks. Voilà, the walk-in cooler.” He grunted as he pulled the heavy metal latch to release the door. The freezer was inside, past another door; a room within a room, about the size of a closet. “There’s no light in the freezer part, so you have to hold the door open as you root around,” he explained. I stuck my head in. Some faint alarm rang at how close together the walls were, at the rush of cold, the dark, the stout icicles lining the walls.
    We walked back to the dish pit and he pointed out its parts. The high-pressure hot-water hose hanging over the double sink. The industrial dishwasher with its vertical steel doors that came down sharp as a guillotine. “All the dishes go through twice. First you wash ’em, then you bleach the fuck outta them. Any questions?” he asked.
    I pictured his tattoo underneath the apron, underneath the jacket. The birds moving with each breath. “What’s your name?”
    â€œYou call me Chef.” He tilted his head. “Your jacket is buttoned wrong.” His fingers settled on my chest. He undid the buttons, pulled the jacket straight, and rebuttoned it on the other side. It took a long time. I could smell his hair, a sharp, cold scent, like the air before it snows. Like the walk-in freezer. He ended by patting the jacket smooth. “Men button it on the left. Women on the right.”
    â€œOh. Thank you.”
    A voice called down the line, “A waitress wants you, Chef.”
    I started an hour later than the rest of the night shift, at six. Dishes were already stacked high enough to form precarious towers. I put on the rubber gloves that floated with the detritus and patches of grease in the sink. The gloves were filled with hot water, which ran into my sleeves.
    Chef talked to the waitress through the pass window. She was large and curvy, crushed into the uniform white button-up shirt and black pants, her coppery hair pulled into a high ponytail that exposed her forehead.
    â€œBirthday at table twenty-three,” she said. “The birthday girl doesn’t like any of the desserts on the menu, and she wants to know if you can make her a fruit plate.”
    â€œTell the bitch to go fuck her grandmother,” Chef said.
    She waited.
    â€œI’m on it. Tell her it’ll be a few minutes.”
    The waitress nodded and disappeared back into the din and artful leather of the dining room. I blasted food off the plates with the hose and loaded them into the dishwasher. The skin on my forearms was already breaking out in a rash. Chef went into the walk-in cooler and came out with an apron full of fruit.
    Watching him work, I found it hard to reconcile his hands with the way he talked. He cut segments from a grapefruit, raw and pink as a baby’s flesh, so that the membranes hung off the discarded peel like pages off a book’s spine. He fanned out paper-thin slices of apple and peach, made spirals from out-of-season strawberries, cut the kiwis into stars, everything stacked toward a single citadel carved from a pineapple and drizzled with honey.
    He placed his sculpture on a square, white plate and flung it through the pass window. As the waitress moved it to her tray, he said, “Stick a candle in it and charge the bitch fifteen dollars.”
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    Ollie found me eating lunch alone at my locker. He sat beside me and unwrapped what appeared to be a T-bone steak in tinfoil. I didn’t mention that we hadn’t talked since elementary school. We didn’t talk about