But it was totally a lie, especially the part where I was acting cheerful and casual about the whole thing. Because whether I looked it or not, something inside me was definitely, definitely different.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I didn’t see Tess for the rest of the day, which was kind of a relief. I could almost forget we’d listened to the song at all. By the time I got out of my last-period European history class, the hot lava of panic inside my chest had cooled into attractive stalactites of repression. An afternoon spent baking would probably prove even more therapeutic. If I were the kind of person who knew how to bake, anyway. But I did know someone who did. And I definitely owed him a favor.
Outside, it was surprisingly warm for almost November. The leaves on the ground were still cheerful shades of gold and red and not yet the depressing brown gunk that would inevitably get stuck on my shoes. I was a few minutes early, since Mr. Ross could never remember that class ended at three fifteen and not three on the dot, but a few kids were already starting to trickle toward freedom, and so I hung out by the Donut, waiting until I saw a form that was unmistakably Zach the Anarchist–shaped heading out of the science building.
“Hey,” I called, waving my hand so Zach would see me. “Zach!”
Zach waved back, and a few shuffling steps later he stopped right in front of the Donut.
“Uh, hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“You tell me,” I said. “What . . . is up?”
I braced myself for something really bad, something really upset about the dumb thing I’d said after the meeting, but it never came. Zach just shrugged.
“Great!” I said. “Because, um, I was wondering if you maybe needed help. With the cookies.”
“From you?” Zach lifted an eyebrow. “Weren’t you saying you don’t know how to bake?”
“Well . . .” I looked at my shoes. “Yeah.”
That was the other part of the problem. Besides my residual guilt over the Mia thing, I hadn’t actually signed up to provide anything for the sale tomorrow. Baking with Zach would be a two-birds, one-stone kind of situation.
Zach sighed. “Tell you what. How about you help me with my Latin? If you want to,” he added. “I could just . . . use it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh, sure.” So maybe three birds, one stone. Zach just stood there.
“So . . . my place, then,” he said, after a minute.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I guess. It makes the most sense. If that’s okay.”
“As long as it’s okay with you.”
“Yeah, totally.” I nodded, probably a few times too many. If I’d still had my freshman-year crush on Zach the Anarchist, this would have been when I started panicking. But I didn’t, and besides, there were more important things at stake, like baked goods and accurate analysis of classical literature. “Let me just text my dad.”
We headed to where Zach’s Volvo was waiting like a noble steed. Zach the Anarchist was the only one of the Acronymphomaniacs who had a car, but he was also the only one who needed it. Most Wister Prep students were sourced from in and around the actual suburb of Wister, but the Wests had decided to ship their son all the way out here from downtown Philadelphia for high school, just like they had done with his older sister before him. Fortunately for him, he got his license midway through sophomore year and was saved from the inconvenience of the suburban trains, which treated arrival times as a fun suggestion instead of a schedule to be adhered to.
We sped down Kelly Drive by the river, the foliage-fringed scenery of the Schuylkill whipping past and the art museum rising grandly in the distance like a temple, to the little side street where Zach lived. His family had this cool old row house with green shutters and an authentically old-fashioned plaque on the front from Benjamin Franklin’s fire company from back in the days of revolution and liberty and yellow fever. It was all charming, like it could have belonged to Betsy Ross once upon a time. Less charming was the fact that the little brick driveway was barely big enough for a carriage, let alone a Volvo, and that Zach had pulled in about six inches from the wall on my side.
I sucked it in and maneuvered my way out of the car while Zach went around and unlocked the gate. The Wests are one of those families who never use the front door, except maybe for special occasions, but coming in through their kitchen is practically just as imposing: all stainless steel and pots and pans hanging around. Zach’s mom Trish was a federal prosecutor, and I was pretty sure his mom Pat did something at one of the drug companies, so there was definitely money. Which made it kind of ironic that their son ended up so antimaterialistic. Or maybe kind of inevitable.
A squat, brown form whammed itself into my shins as I came up the back steps.
“Watch it!” Zach called from inside the kitchen.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I meant the dog.”
I ignored him and bent down to give an ear scratch hello.
“Hey, Bacon! Aren’t you a little nugget of energy today?”
Bacon wiggled his butt appreciatively, his tongue lolling out of his mouth like he’d forgotten it was there. Allegedly, Zach’s dog was a mix of Boston terrier and boxer, but from his curled-up tail and the way he snorted, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a little of his namesake in him.
Zach came back from the depths of inside and scooped Bacon up like a sack of potatoes.
“Not that bacon comes in nuggets,” I said. “That would be gross.”
“All bacon is gross,” Zach said. He nodded inside, and I followed, setting my bag by the shoe rack inside the door.
“Hey, wait a second,” I said. “I never thought of that. Why did you name your dog after a meat product?”
“I didn’t,” Zach said, plopping Bacon back down on top of his stocking feet. “‘Knowledge is power.’”
“I mean, I guess,” I said.
“No. I mean yeah. Francis Bacon. Philosopher. That’s who he’s named for.” Zach shrugged. “That, and I guess it was kind of a statement. Like, I would just as soon eat actual bacon as I would eat this guy.”
Bacon made a snuffly sound of gratitude and started licking the floor. I laughed.
“So . . . ,” Zach said.
“So?”
I looked up to find him with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little like he wasn’t sure what to do, which wasn’t really fair, considering he was the one who knew how to bake stuff. He also had this one piece of hair in the front of his forehead that was sticking off to one side, which made him look extra quizzical, and I had this weird impulse to smooth it down for him.
“So what do you want to do?” he finished.
I blinked, suddenly aware of how big Zach’s kitchen seemed without the other Acronymphomaniacs there, making a racket and looking around for snacks. The gleaming stainless steel of the counters and stove seemed shinily infinite, like they could reflect into anything. I thought about what it must be like to come home to this kitchen at night with Bacon on the leash, all sleekness and shadows like a polished cave.
Also, we were alone, if that kind of thing mattered. Not that being alone with Zach the Anarchist was really like being alone with a boy in the parental-advisory sense of the phrase, but still. I quickly shrugged off the feeling.
“You’re in charge of the baking here,” I said. “I’m just in charge of the Latin.”
“Yeah,” Zach said, and then again: “Yeah.”
He wasn’t moving, so I did. I swung around the kitchen island, peering into the fruit bowl by the sink and sweeping a gaze over the magnets on the fridge.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “What kind of cookies can you make?”
Zach kind of sprang back to life, like he’d been stalling before.
“Pretty much any.” He started ticking things off, one long finger at a time. “Snickerdoodles, oatmeal raisin, shortbread, sandwich, blondies, brownies—”
“Okay, okay.” I cut him off, even though I was half tempted to see how far he coul
d go without running out of ideas. “So what kind of cookies do you like?”
“Pretty much any,” Zach said again. “What about you?”
“Anything but strawberry,” I said.
“That doesn’t narrow it down much,” Zach said, and then smiled. “Also, no one puts strawberries in cookies, anyway.”
“They’d better not,” I said, apparently kind of aggressively, because Zach looked startled and held up a hand. He really did have nice hands, which was an extremely weird thing to think. What was my problem?
“Not on my watch,” he said. “Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Boy Scout?” I couldn’t picture Zach the Anarchist in shorts, let alone a neckerchief or a sash with little badges sewn on.
Zach narrowed his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t want Zach to think I was impugning the dignity of his troop or anything. “Never mind. Anyway, it’s probably less important what we want and more important what our customers want.”
“Spoken like a true capitalist,” Zach said. There was a pause, in which I was probably supposed to dramatically reveal my crowd-pleasing cookie idea. I still had to think.
“And our customers want what?” Zach asked.
I pictured Alison and Chihiro proffering something crumbly and vegan.
“Butter,” I said finally. “And actual chocolate.”
“So, like . . . chocolate chip cookies?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Now you’re talking.”
Zach nodded. “All right if I put on music?”
“Sure,” I said, and I pulled out my Latin notebook as Zach plugged his phone into the countertop stereo and started rummaging around for baking stuff.
“Okay.” I gave my book an emphatic thump that I immediately regretted as extremely weird. What kind of person gives homework affectionate smacks?
“Okay what?” Zach put down a sack of organic unbleached flour. The music he had chosen was, of course, very angry and very loud, like someone had found a way to get a melody out of a jackhammer.
“Okay,” I said a second time, a little louder. “Catullus Eighty-Seven. Let’s see what you’ve got. Before you get flour everywhere.”
After digging in his backpack, Zach flipped open his own notebook, which was already fraying away from the coiled metal spine, and read.
“No can woman such himself to say loved truly so much from me Lesbia loved my is.” His mouth had this twisty way of moving when he read, like he was pronouncing everything extra-carefully, which I’d never really seen up close.
“That’s . . . no.” I took a long pause. “Did you just translate all the words directly from the dictionary?”
Zach pressed his lips together. “It’s pretty close.”
“Dude, you write that down on Dr. Frobisher’s test and she’ll flunk you so hard. She’ll flunk you and tell your English teacher to flunk you, too, for being so bad at words.”
“I word really good, okay?”
I pushed my notebook around so he could see it. “Figure out the subject of the sentence first.”
“Nulla.”
“Are you just saying that because it’s the first word in the sentence, or because you can tell from its grammatical form?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”
After twenty minutes of underlining, arrow-drawing, and dictionary-flipping, we had more or less wrangled meaning out of Catullus’s poetry.
Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea est:
Nulla fides ullo fuit umquam foedere tanta
Quanta in amore tuo ex parte reperta mea est.
No woman can say that she was loved
Truly, as much as by me Lesbia was loved.
No ugly faith was there at any time with so much trust
As much as was found in my love for you.
Zach also contributed some doodles.
“So he’s telling her he loves her more than any other woman.” I wrote faithfulness and being in love a lot in the Themes section of our worksheet. “And that’s why he trusts her.”
“Sure.” Zach had given up drawing on his homework and had moved on to spooning flour into a bowl on a metal scale. “Something like that.”
He clamped the lid back on the flour tub and started measuring the sugar the same way, one spoonful at a time. Apparently, the secret to baking is just being really, really obsessive about everything.
“Something like that,” I mimicked. “Says the guy measuring sugar to the ounce.”
Zach shrugged, his T-shirt tightening over his shoulders.
“I’m just saying,” I went on. “It’s not like you lack the analytical capacity for translation. It’s just that you don’t use it.”
“You mess up ratios, the cookies taste bad. You mess up Latin”—Zach ducked to where a little thermometer was clipped inside the oven—“and Catullus is still dead.”
I wrinkled my nose. He sort of had a point, but I didn’t want to agree with him.
“Anyway, it’s not about how he loves her.” Zach stood up. “Not exactly.”
“What?” My nose stayed wrinkled.
“No woman can say that she was loved more than Lesbia.” Zach got a stick of butter from the fridge. “She’s only the best because she’s above the other girls?”
“I guess.” I added bragging to Themes, and then, after consideration, put a question mark to the end of being in love a lot.
“And he doesn’t even address Lesbia until the end, with that tuo,” Zach went on. “Like none of his poems are actually to her. They’re about her. It’s kind of creepy.”
“It’s not creepy,” I said. “What about all that kissing he wanted to do to her?”
Zach stared at me, mid-unwrap on the stick of butter, and my face went instantly hot.
“Um,” I said. Brilliant. “Is there a reason that pan is on the stove? It’s just . . . it’s hot in here.” I fanned myself theatrically and tried to look at a part of Zach’s face that was not his mouth.
Instead of answering, Zach dropped the butter into the saucepan.
“So you’re just melting it,” I said. “Why not use the microwave?”
“I am not just melting it,” Zach said. He jiggled the handle and sent the yellow stick sliding around in a little snail’s trail of butteriness. “I’m toasting the milk solids so that it gets a caramelized flavor.”
“But you have to melt it first,” I pointed out.
Zach gave a barely perceptible eye roll.
“Yeah, if you want to get technical.”
“You measured flour to an eighth of an ounce! How is that not ‘getting technical’?”
The corner of Zach’s mouth went up, but he didn’t fully smile.
“You know what I mean.”
He stirred the now-puddled contents of the pan with a rubber spatula shaped like a guitar. I shut my Catullus book and squirmed on my tall stool, suddenly antsy.
“Can I melt the butter?” I asked.
“Brown.”
I groaned. “Can I brown the butter?”
“You can burn it, probably.”
“Ugh.” I threw up my hands and retreated to the bag of chocolate bits. They were the good kind, dark and cocoa-y little chunks from a fancy downtown supermarket. Zach flicked a gaze back at me just as I bit into one, and I crossed my arms.
“Quality control,” I said.
Zach turned back to the stove and snapped off the burner. The kitchen smelled really good, like a whiff of vanilla extract, and despite my utter disinclination toward anything culinary, it felt much more relaxed and natural now that we were making something.
“Hot, coming through.” Zach nudged me out of the way and scraped the mahogany-colored butter into the bowl of sugar, then reached across the counter for a wooden spoon and handed it to me.
“Here. You can be the muscle.”
“Participatio
n at last,” I said. I took the spoon and stirred the butter and sugar, which began to feel like stirring concrete after about three turns. Across the room, Bacon stretched out of his doggie bed and took an enviably long yawn.
“You all right?” Zach looked up from weighing out a portion of chocolate chips. His face was neutral, but I could tell he was making fun of me. Only this time, I didn’t mind so much.
“I’m fine,” I gritted out. Every turn of the spoon nearly wrenched the bowl from my hands. “Has this always been so hard?”
“How can you not know how to bake?” Zach said. “Aren’t your parents super creative?”
“I mean, I guess,” I said, leaning into the dough to get it to budge. “My mom is, anyway. But she’s so busy making frames and stuff all day that she doesn’t really have time to cook.”
“What about your dad?”
“He’s making a yurt,” I said.
“A yurt,” Zach said.
“Yeah. The traditional dwelling of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia.”
“I know what a yurt is,” Zach said. “That’s pretty cool.”
“It is?” I shoved the spoon back and forth in the bowl.
Zach shrugged.
“Well, right now it’s just a heap of boards in the backyard,” I said.
“Here.” Zach pushed the carton of eggs at me. “Two.”
Relieved, I dropped the spoon and plucked an egg out of the carton. I had put one hand on the bowl to steady it when Zach leaped up behind me.
“No,” he said, and I froze.
His hand was on mine, his long fingers reaching around my wrist. Warm.
“Um,” Zach said, and dropped my hand just as quickly as he had taken it. “I mean, don’t hit the egg on the bowl. Could get shell in the dough.”
“Right,” I said, my heart plodding into the front of my chest. “Maybe you should just . . .”
I jumped away from the bowl like it was electrified and held out the egg. Zach took it, barely brushing my fingers, and cracked it deftly on the counter. I watched him turn the spoon around, considerably faster than I had, his shoulders moving under his T-shirt, and then repeat with the second egg.
I swallowed. There was a weird vibratey feeling in my stomach, and I couldn’t tell if it was because things were getting extremely weird or because the stereo had an especially robust bass system.
Who's That Girl Page 9
