TIL CHOCOLATE DO US PART

Natasha had wanted to be a pastry chef since the moment she unwrapped her first Easy Bake Oven for her birthday. She had worked tirelessly toward that goal for the last few years. Natasha attended a prestigious cooking school, worked nights and weekends for a catering business, and hired an expensive life coach to help bedazzle her resume and interviewing skills to land her dream job. She was as ready as she would ever be to begin this decadent adventure. As Natasha stared in awe at her shiny new kitchen with all the latest gadgets, she could feel eyes on her, and her spine tingled a creepy warning. But after introductions were made to the kitchen staff she would be working with, they went back to their preparations for the upcoming dinner crowd. She found no one staring back at her. She followed the owner of this brand new restaurant out of the kitchen and into the dining area to meet her serving staff.

Natasha began her new job innocently enough, with no major catastrophes in those first few weeks. She enjoyed the staff and clientele alike. The owner and managers gave her some leeway to create her own sugary, culinary delights, and she was getting rave reviews from the staff and customers. The server she worked most often with was an older girl named Amy, who started out nice enough. She bought her lunch during their break one day welcoming her to the "team", and saying how nice it was having a fresh, young face in the kitchen. It was all hearts and flowers for those two in the beginning. However, Natasha sensed something more sinister in Amy's overall demeaner. Honestly, though, she was too busy being the new kid on the block to really pay much attention.

One late night, after her shift, she noticed something off about the gas cap as she walked to her car. Upon further inspection, she discovered a grainy substance overflowing from her gas tank. Not knowing quite what to make of it, her went back inside to ask a bus boy she had befriended to take a look. Sugar, was the verdict. Apparently sugar in a gas tank will cause the car not to run when starting and/or driving it and could potentially ruin the engine. Who even knows this fact, let alone would do that kind of evil to someone else? Natasha took care of the problem and chalked it up to a teenage prank.

A few days later she was on her lunch break chatting with a few of her new friends when a chill blew into the room. So did Amy, declaring that her job was so important to her, that in order to please her customers, she even worked through her breaks. Another day Natasha's homemade lunch she had packed in order to avoid packing on the pounds from restaurant food had disappeared. The following week her tire was slashed one night, followed by her windshield being cracked the very next night. On the heels of both of those incidents she went to her manager to ask for surveillance footage from the security cameras. She was told her car had been parked out of the range of those cameras. Natasha informed her manager of the other sinister events, and he agreed to keep an eye on things between them.

All the while this was going on, Amy's behavior towards Natasha had gotten more defiant in front of others, and she no longer even pretended at being cordial, let alone friendly. Natasha took the high road, holding her head up and focusing on her work performance. Things finally came to an ugly head on the evening she debuted her favorite bread pudding recipe for the specials. Stomach cramps turned into groans, which turned into races to the bathroom, which turned into vomiting right there in the dining room itself. All of the victims had one thing in common-they had eaten Natasha's bread pudding special. The bread pudding had tested positive for ipecac. Amy mysteriously never showed up for work at that restaurant again. Turns out Amy had a crush on the head chef who, in turn, had a crush on Natasha! Natasha went on to gain valuable experience in that first restaurant before moving on.

One quiet evening during her shift, the bus boy whispered in Natasha's ear that some man was about to propose to his girlfriend and she would never guess who the girlfriend is. She is that psycho chick from the restaurant we used to work at, he informed her. AMY! He plopped a ring into her hand and told her to put it in the dessert the couple had just ordered. What did they order? Chocolate cake! On her break, Natasha took a detour to the first aid kit and just outside of the back door to the kitchen. She returned immediately to prepare the dessert for the romantic couple. A bit later she heard a commotion in the dining room. Turns out the groom- to-be came down with a severe case of the runs before he could even propose, and the bride-to-be found a rock in her piece of cake. "How did that chocolate cake turn out for you folks this evening?" asked the pastry chef as she looked the horrified bride right in the eye.