What's Cooking? (Goosebumps)

What's Cooking? is a short story written by R.L. Stine and published in "More & More Tales to Give You Goosebumps".

Plot Summary

Best friends Robert Wilson and Diana Stapleton are attending summer school at the old Mill Road Middle School. The school was closed down years ago due to some strange accidents that were connected to a cafeteria worker named Susan Chopman.

Susan worked at the school in 1947, and would always serve a different "surprise" lunch, each more horrible then the last. She gained the nickname Chop Suey because her Chinese Surprise was the worst. One day, her latest lunch surprise was Tomato Surprise, which was tomato soup with chopped-up hot dog pieces in it. The students refused to eat it, thinking that the hot dog pieces looked like fingers, and began taunting her by calling her Chop Suey. This made her go berserk and she started chopping up the lunch tables with her favorite meat cleaver, until she was subdued by the police. Years later, someone stumbled onto an obituary for Susan, saying that she had fallen onto her favorite cleaver while working in a meatpacking plant. Soon after, people found cleaver marks on the school walls, chopped-up rats in the kitchen refrigerators, and a run-away school bus which caused the school to close. Now, if a person says Chop Suey three times in a row while standing on their tip toes, Chop Suey is said to come back from the dead.

When Robert and Diana enter the school (which is now being renovated and would soon re-open as a way to deal with overcrowding), the two get lost and find the cafeteria. Inside the cafeteria kitchen, Diana says "Chop Suey" three times on her tip toes when each the sink faucets suddenly turn on at full blast. Scared at first, they learn that the plumber had just turned the pipes back on. During lunch, Robert is disgusted to learn that someone replaced his peanut butter and jelly sandwich for one containing raw liver, and after that, Diana finds her backpack chopped to shreds.

The next day, Diana is horrified to learn that the cafeteria worker is named Aunt Sue, and that she is serving Tomato Surprise. Robert is trying to convince Diana that it is not Chop Suey, but at the end of the day, Aunt Sue attacks the two with a meat cleaver for not eating the Tomato Surprise. Thus revealing that Aunt Sue is indeed Chop Suey back from the dead, she intends to turn the two into tomorrow's Meat Surprise, until Diana thinks up the idea of saying Chop Suey backwards three times each. After saying "Suey Chop, Suey Chop, Suey Chop", Chop Suey disappears.

When Robert gets home, his mother tells him that she ordered Chinese food for dinner. When asked what she ordered, she says that she ordered what his dad always wants, and says "Chop Suey" three times while reaching for a bowl. At that moment, the doorbell ominously rings, and Robert's mom asks him to get it.

References

The motif of saying "Chop Suey" three times as a way to summon her is simmilar to the urban legend of "Bloody Mary" as well as the film Candy Man