Once we were in uniform, we left our room and headed towards the staff elevator. The doors opened without a ding, which was quite disappointing.

Inside that giant elevator, there was a mirror. I saw from my reflection that the way I was twirling the buttons of my double-breasted jacket gave the impression that I was twisting my nipples, so I put my hands down.

The elevator stopped at -1 with a small jolt, so I covered my mouth to whisper that ding that the stupid elevator kept omitting.

In front of us, a long corridor lit by painful neon lights opened up.

I grabbed Nico by the sleeve before he ventured forward. There was something terribly unsettling about that corridor. On the ceiling, beyond the lamps, aluminum and orange plastic tubes snaked around. The floor was plain concrete, no one bothered to install tiles or something less aggressive than that raw gray.

"What's wrong?" Nico asked, reaching out to the elevator sensor to stop the doors from closing.

"Mh. I think a clown with a machete will come out of one of those doors and chase us to kill us."

Nico looked at the doors on the left wall and then those on the right wall. "Seems like a rather unlikely possibility."

"But not impossible."

"So let's do this: you go ahead first and I'll cover your back. If a killer clown comes out, he'll reach me first."

"Your sense of sacrifice gives you honor, but I could never live with the guilt."

I ran my fingers along the stiff fabric of his sleeve until I reached his hand. I squeezed his pinky, the way I had learned to hold my mother's hand when I was little, and could never quite shake off.

"Let's go through together," I said, feeling a bit more safe. Then I remembered that I had touched him without permission, which is something you don't do. "Can I touch you?" I let go of his pinky and waited for a response. The elevator door tried to close again, and Nico stammered, "uhb," "uhm," "ah," before rushing to cover the sensor again.

"Uuh... Sure." And he took my hand. The sensation was a mix of squishy and sweaty things making a horrible clack-clack. I shuddered and quickly retreated to my initial position on his pinky.

And so we moved forward. The fact that there was complete silence didn't help. Every good assassin knows how to be silent, like snakes or gas leaks.

I looked back when we reached a T-shaped intersection without incident. That corridor was even more unsettling from that side.

"Safe," I whispered. For now.

To our right was a dead-end alley with a large metal cabinet. On the doors were, from top to bottom, the electricity bolt sticker, the triangle with the exclamation point of danger, and the skull with the crossed bones of pirates, which seemed to mean "attention, you could die."

"I vote to go left."

"We don't have many other choices," Nico replied, after glancing at the death cabinet.

So we continued under the harsh neon lights. As we progressed, the noise of clattering dishes and indistinct chatter grew louder.

At some point, the concrete floor was covered with large dirty white tiles. The right wall gave way to a glass panel that allowed a glimpse of the origin of those noises. It was a bustling room of dozens of people, all in uniform, some from the kitchen, some from the waiting staff, some receptionists. Most of them were sitting, scattered on a handful of long, narrow tables that occupied most of the room.

And then there was a counter with plates to keep the food warm, a tower of trays, a cart, and a small fridge for salads.

After the glass panel there was a door, and hanging on the door, with three pieces of tape, was a sheet of paper that read: "Staff cafeteria."

Nico lowered the handle muttering something. He didn't seem happy. Probably because everyone was already there and already sitting down to eat. Maybe we were late. Maybe it was my fault.

No one paid much attention to us. Our uniforms blended in with all the others; we seemed entirely part of their anthill, except that we were at least five years younger than the youngest person in there.

Nico scanned the tables, chose one, and strode purposefully towards it, dragging me along by my pinky.

The people at the table stopped talking and looked at us.

I realized two terrible things simultaneously:

Nico hadn't chosen that table at random. The man with the gray beard sitting at the end had an Executive Chef's hat on his head. The woman next to him had "Sous Chef" embroidered on her chest. Among the six people sitting at that table, we were facing the boss and his deputy.

I hadn't prepared my introduction yet, which meant I would have to improvise, and it would be a disaster.

Nico said, "Good evening. We're the new kitchen interns from Don Milani school."

The woman looked sideways, towards a large clock on the wall. "You took your time," she said in a tone that I couldn't tell if it was: a. hostile, b. bored, or c. just informative.

"Sorry. Tomorrow we'll arrive earlier," Nico said without offering any explanation for our apparent lateness.

The sous chef waved her hand, that gesture you make if there's a bad smell around or if you want to shoo away an annoying fly. "Don't waste any more time, there are trays and plates over there. Glasses are there. When you're done, leave the tray on the cart."

Nico said, "No problem."

The man who must have been the chef pointed at us with a chicken wing and followed with, "Are you brothers?"

It seemed like a strange question. Nico and I were clearly not brothers.

"No, chef," Nico replied, and quickly turned back, dragging me by the pinky to the counter.

I let go to accept the tray he was offering. With quick efficiency, Nico arranged a plate, a glass, a napkin, silverware, and bread on each tray, as if he had done it a million times before. How had he figured out where everything was so quickly?

We then passed by the steaming trays. We were really late; there wasn't much left. The chicken wings that the chef had were nowhere to be found.

There was still half a tray of a pasta with bits of something orange and a semi-solid white cream that gave it a sticky appearance. Nico, who was very brave, took a spoonful of that.

I studied the next tray. There were four steaks as thick as a biology textbook that I would probably take twelve hours to chew. And then there were a couple of hamburgers, which I could chew, but they had onion bits sticking out of the meat, and the thought of finding one on my tongue made all the hairs on my arms stand on end. Nico took the oniony burger, while I sadly headed to the salad fridge. The bowls were glass, so I could see well what was inside. I spotted the curly lettuce salad that I ate at my grandma's house, tomatoes, corn, and some green things that looked like beans. I had never seen them before, I had no idea what they were called, what taste or texture they had, so I couldn't eat them.

Nico had finished and was waiting for me, although he was clearly itching to sit at a table and eat as quickly as possible.

If I had weighed the pros and cons of what I could eat to procure myself the least disgust, it would have taken at least half an hour. I knew my timing.

Fortunately, there was a table with ready condiments in quick little bottles. I squeezed some olive oil onto my plate and went back to get a second roll of bread.

Then I chose the only empty table and took a seat.

Nico sat across from me. "What are you doing?"

"Eating." I tore off the first roll and dipped it in the oil.

"You're not seriously only going to eat bread and oil, are you? We have to work until ten."

I was much more willing to risk getting hungry halfway through the shift than to put that gloopy pasta that looked so much like vinyl glue in my mouth.

Nicola glared at my rolls and began to gorge himself, forkful after forkful.

I managed to finish a whole roll before the diners almost simultaneously got up to dispose of their trays and swarm out of the cafeteria. Nico stuffed the entire hamburger into his mouth and pushed back his chair to get up. He stopped when he saw me still standing there. He wanted to go, he didn't want to risk being even later, and it was my fault we were late.

I felt like Nicola would stay there waiting for me just to be kind, at the cost of breaking his little kitchen helper heart that wanted to make a good impression on the chef.

"I'm done." I stood up.

"But..." he began to say. Then he looked at the trail of staff that was disappearing. He didn't continue to protest.

We stacked our dirty trays on the cart and quickly followed the crowd.

The kitchen wasn't far from the cafeteria. Once we finished the corridor and turned the corner, a larger area opened up, with another elevator on the left and stairs on the right, with a row of stacked trolleys parked next to them. Straight ahead was the entrance to the kitchen, consisting of two wide fire doors held open with pins.

Nicola stopped before entering. He pulled out his chef's hat, which was more of a baker's net, and quickly covered his hair.

It was a good thing to have him next to me for this internship. I would have surely forgotten to put on the hat if I hadn't seen him.

A moment later, we were inside.

It was big, but not extraordinarily larger than the school kitchen. Instead of being a square room, it was T-shaped, with the stove island in the long left side of the T, and stainless steel tables in the short left side.

The ant colony of little white ants each walked their own path. Everyone knew what to do. It was very pleasant to watch, like a bunch of perfectly meshed gears.

"Gio," Nico called. He had moved away and was gesturing for me to follow him. How did he already know where to go?

Ah, because he had chosen a random sink to wash his hands. Right. First things first: wash your hands.

Once I turned off the tap, I dried myself on the twisted rag hanging from my apron (twisted rag means dishcloth, but if you call it a dishcloth in a professional kitchen, it gets offended and depressed).

In those few moments, the kitchen came to life. Everyone was moving, everything was noisy. There were no windows. The hoods, the fridges, the ovens all made a constant VUUUUUM that was only overpowered by the sound of metal against metal. A pot screamed as it was dragged across the stove, like broken chalk on a blackboard.

The feeling of revulsion to that sound was a pure physical discomfort. Like a sudden wave of nausea mixed with a migraine, powerful and fast.

"The Don Milani boys," said a voice that I could connect with the figure of the chef who was now standing in front of us.

"I'm Nicola Demir," my companion said.

The chef nodded, turned his head. He looked at me.

"I'm..." Short pause as I remembered my name. "Gioele Dagostino. Without the apostrophe."

"Good. This here is Manuel, he'll show you around the kitchen. When you're done with the tour, come back to me and I'll assign you to your stations."

The nausea from before hit me like a brick thrown from the fifth floor. Our stations? "Will we be separated?" I whimpered.

"I don't need two interns in the same station," the chef replied very calmly. He didn't give the impression of a crazy cook like the ones you see yelling on TV. He seemed like a normal guy, in his fifties, with the bald spot of a Capuchin friar.

Maybe if I had insisted that he let us stay together, he would have relented.

But then he asked, "Is there a problem?"

And Nicola replied, "No, chef." And so the matter was closed.