A/N: Spoiler warning in case you haven't read the e-book edition of Amy's Summer Falls. (Yes, peeps, if you don't know, it is the same Summer Falls from "The Bells of Saint John!" And chapter eleven is sad.) Don't read if you don't want Summer Falls spoilers!
Soufflé Girl
Ten-year-old Clara Oswald was reading Summer Falls again. It was the eleventh time she'd read the book. Out of every Amelia Williams children's book—when her Gran had passed, she'd inherited the entire collection—Summer Falls was her absolute favorite. "'Kate had made it her business to learn at an early age the secret of omelettes, soufflés and roasts,'" Clara said aloud, reading to Barnabus. Barnabus was her new Siamese fighting fish with deep violet fins, named, of course, after the name The Curator had adopted from Kate Webster.
Suddenly Clara set the old book face down on her bed, still opened so that she wouldn't lose her page. She crouched down beside a bookshelf twice her size and began to run her finger across the various spines until she came to a beige spine that read Dictionary in once black letters that had now faded to an ashy gray. She dropped the heavy tome on the carpeted floor and began to leaf through the pages until she came to the S's, then she slowed her pace, carefully searching until she'd found the one she was searching for: soufflé.
"'A light, fluffy baked dish made with egg yolks and beaten egg whites combined with various other ingredients and served as a main dish or sweetened as a dessert,'" she read. Her eyes flicked to Barnabus, who seemed to be watching her from his two gallon mini tank. "What do you think, Barney?" She chuckled a little, recalling the big purple dinosaur she used to watch on the telly. Her favorite episodes were the ones when Barney had pulled out the Barney Bag and did crafts. She'd always suspected that it was smaller on the outside, like Mary Poppins's carpet bag. She shot Barnabus a wild grin. "What can we make today?"
Clara suddenly pushed the dictionary aside and began to hum as she thumbed through her bookshelf again, this time pulling off a raggedy old cookbook. There was a stain of this or that on almost every page: a hardened circle of batter the color of a manila folder on a page for buttermilk pancakes, a smattering of translucent red misshapes on a page for strawberry pie, a blob of melted chocolate swallowing up a word on the directions of a fudge recipe… After flipping through twice, she finally consulted the index in the back and easily located a soufflé page. She read the ingredients and directions thoroughly, then heaved the cookbook into her arms and nodded to Barnabus on her way out the door.
The kitchen was empty when she got to it and the house was silent. Her mother was at work and her father was tending the garden for the Kings, neighbors across the street who were on holiday for a week. Clara pushed the cookbook onto the counter and then retrieved the foldable foot stool from the pantry so she could pull down the mixing bowls, electric mixer, flour, and crème of tartar—even though the latter was optional—from the top cupboard and the eggs and cheese from the top shelf of the refrigerator. She hadn't baked since her Gran had gone, but she was determined to prove that she could do it. Moreover, that she could do it all by herself.
"I can do it," she said out loud as she shut the fridge and pushed the step stool back over to the mixing bowls. "I can do it! I'm The Girl Who Can." Clara chuckled as she began to butter and flour her biggest baking dish. When that was done she dug through the drawer until she found the cheese grater and scraped off three-fourths of a cup of Parmesan cheese. She consulted her recipe again—had to look up roux in the index—and then began melting butter in a sauce pan over the stove.
Half an hour later, finally finished with mixing her egg whites into her sauce, she poured the mixture into her baking dish and carried it over to the oven, only to realize that she'd forgotten to preheat it. Clara harrumphed and slid the soufflé batter in anyway, deciding to turn the heat up double the prescribed temperature and check on it repeatedly so as to make sure it came out correctly. She didn't want to wait for fear that her dad would get home before the oven was done heating and she wanted to surprise him with what she'd done.
After five minutes Clara pulled the oven door open a crack and peeked inside. Nothing. No change whatsoever. She closed the door with a snort and religiously checked the oven every minute for the next five minutes. "'A watched pot never boils,'" she trilled, repeating a phrase her Gran used to say whenever she got impatient while they were cooking. She assumed that it was probably the same for a soufflé too, so she decided to go back to her room, check on Barnabus, and finish chapter six of Summer Falls. It was only a few more pages, then she'd check the soufflé again.
As it turned out, Clara was just getting to the end of chapter ten when the shrill scream of the smoke alarm interrupted her thoughts. Her heart leapt as she threw her book onto her pillow and ran out the door, following an increasingly thick tentacle of smoke to the kitchen, which was swarming with the wispy body of the beast. It was like Ursula's ghost was attacking her kitchen and she didn't know what to do. The smoke was beginning to prick her eyes and make them water. She pressed her hand to her mouth and began to swish her head back and forth, looking for the fire extinguisher.
"Clara? Clara!"
Clara stopped cold in the increasingly hot and breathless air. She shut her eyes amidst the choking smoke and mentally scolded herself for whatever misstep she'd done to ruin the soufflé and now her father was there to see the mess she'd made.
"Clara!" her father's voice shouted, closer now and terrified behind the smoke haze.
"I don't know where the fire extinguisher is!" she hollered back, coughing immediately after as the smoke bulldozed into her throat.
Suddenly her father's arms engulfed her, lifted her off the ground, and carried her into the glaring sunlight of the midday afternoon. "Wh - what hap-pened?" he coughed.
"I tried to make a soufflé," Clara explained, her eyes tearing, but from the smoke, not from shame or guilt. "Dad, I've ruined it!"
Her father pressed his fingers to her lips. "You run over to the Kings' and stay there," he said, urgently shoving her their house key. "Call the fire department!"
Before she could protest, he shoved her towards the street and she began to run. Only when she got inside did she look back and remember Barnabus. If her father wanted her to contact the fire department, things were much worse than she thought. She remembered the heat and then thought of the water in Barnabus's tank evaporating. Terrified, she ran back to house and braved the smoke tendrils until she got to the kitchen, where she could hear a noise like the air fizzling out at the end of twenty whip cream cans all at the same time. In the slightly fading smoke she saw what looked like mounds of whip cream covering the oven like a poorly crafted wedding cake and her dad standing in front of it, armed with the fire extinguisher. There in the middle of the foamy mess was her soufflé, a burnt and melted crater in the center of the baking dish. Clara's heart sank.
Her dad sprayed the oven again for good measure and then sat the extinguisher on the floor. As he turned, waving his hand at the smoke, he saw Clara staring at him. Or rather, past him. "Clara!" he gasped. "I told you to go to the Kings'!"
Clara sniffed at her failed soufflé. "I came back for Barnabus," she responded.
Her father's face softened. Clara had begged for years for a pet, but after the way she'd cried over the death of the grey cat the first time his mother had read her Summer Falls, he and his wife couldn't bear the thought of her dealing with the death of a real one. It had only been in the last month that they'd finally caved to her request for a fish and only then because of the tears she'd shed when she saw how another betta in the pet store had died in the dirty cup he'd been living in. Barnabus had been the last living betta left on the shelf and they couldn't say no. Her father moved across the kitchen and knelt down to his daughter's height, hugging her. "You need to learn to listen when your mother and I warn you not to do things, Clara."
Clara wrapped her arms around her father's neck and coughed again against the ebbing smoke. "I'm sorry."
"I know." He patted her back and kissed her forehead, then rose to his feet. "Why don't you go check on Barnabus and then come back down here to help me clean up this mess before your mum gets home?"
Clara's eyes glinted. "You mean, you're not going to tell her?"
"Tell her?" her father echoed. "I'll get more toasted than that soufflé over there! Noooo, so long as you promise never to try something like this again, this stays between you and me."
"And Barnabus. He knows too."
"And Barnabus," her father agreed.
Clara nodded.
"Okay then. Go, go! And bring some air freshener spray down from the bathroom while you're at it!"
Four hours later the kitchen was spotless and the house smelt like orange air freshener with a cheese soufflé undercurrent. Clara and her father were at the kitchen table, busily looking through Gran's cookbook, her father's late mother, as they stuffed their mouths with warm wads of soufflé and chased them down with icy milk.
"What's this then?" Clara's mother's voice asked from the entry to the kitchen. She sniffed the air. "And what burned?"
As her father's cheeks went red, Clara just smiled. "We made soufflés," she announced proudly. "Like Kate!" She wrung her fingers together and put on a mask of exaggerated guiltiness. "But the first one burnt…did Barnabus tell you?"
Her mother smiled. "Ah," she said. "So that explains the over abundance of air freshener."
Her father sent her a grateful look when his wife turned her back to set her purse down. He quickly cut out a chunk of soufflé and handed it to her on a tea plate. "We were just going over my mum's cookbook. Care to join?"
Clara rolled her eyes as her parents kissed across the table. "Ewe, stop that! It's gross."
Her mother winked. "You might not feel that way when you're older."
The phone rang and Clara rolled her eyes again as she walked over to answer it. "Hello?" Her eyes sparkled and she covered the mouthpiece. "It's Nina!" She pulled her hand again and spoke into the receiver. "Hold on, I'm gonna go upstairs." She set the phone down and grabbed her plate of soufflé from the table. "Can you hang that up when I pick up the other phone?" She didn't wait for her parents' answer before she ran upstairs to her room. She dropped onto the bed and picked up the receiver beside Barnabus's tank. "Still there?"
"Still here," Nina's voice confirmed.
Clara waited until she heard the click of the phone downstairs being set back into its cradle. She set Summer Falls into her lap. "Hey, you'll never guess what I can do!" she grinned.
"What?" Nina asked, her voice permeating anticipation.
Clara winked at Barnabus. "Have you ever heard of a soufflé?"