My New Crush Gave to Me

by Shani Petroff

  “Do you need water, or—?”

  I couldn’t answer. I turned back to the toilet and threw up.

  When I woke up the next time, I was on the couch. Morgan was on the love seat kitty-corner from me. And J.D. was in the recliner. There was a blanket over me. He must have tucked me in.

  My head was still spinning, I felt like crap, and I could barely see straight, but I closed my eyes and smiled. Morgan had been right about J.D. all along. He really was a good person. It was the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep.

  Twenty-Nine

  My head was throbbing when I woke up the next morning, and the light shining through the window hurt my eyes.

  I rubbed my temples, trying to put together the pieces of the night before. Little snippets came flashing back. Trying to dance with Teo and forcing him to dip me a dozen times, making snow angels outside and … oh no, no, no, no, no, no—did I throw up on J.D.? He had been nice about it. He tucked me in. Still …

  How could I let myself get so out of control?

  Where was everybody? I got up, and a shooting pain pulsed through my head. I was never drinking again. Not that this time was by choice.

  I followed the voices coming from the kitchen.

  “She rises,” J.D. said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten,” Morgan said. “Do you want something to eat?”

  My mouth twisted at the thought. The last thing I wanted was food.

  “I am so sorry about last night, I don’t—”

  “Stop,” J.D. said. “It wasn’t your fault. Teo did this. He shouldn’t have brought the alcohol to begin with.”

  “So what do you remember?” Morgan asked. “Taking the wrong cup and getting totally wasted?”

  I nodded.

  “And how about when Teo got up to go to the bathroom, and you wandered outside?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately, I remember that, too.… I’m so sorry. For everything.” What could I say? It was bad enough Morgan saw me like that, but I didn’t even want to look at J.D. How embarrassing! I puked on his shoes. At least I was fairly sure I did, and then he got me back in the house, held my hair as I threw up all night, and I think he even slept in the bathtub to make sure I was okay.

  “I told you, it’s not your fault,” J.D. said.

  “Don’t be mad at Teo. I was the one who took the wrong cup.”

  Instead of responding, he just gave me an ibuprofen and a glass of water. “Take this,” he said.

  I looked at the pill and did as advised. Anything to get rid of the banging inside my head. It was a good thing I still had tomorrow to do my homework; there was no way I’d be able to think straight today. “Thank you. Where is everybody else?” Then something came back to me. “Wait, did Ira take my car?”

  “Yep. He drove Heather home, moved your car, then got his and went home so his parents wouldn’t flip out.”

  “Where’s my car?”

  “Down the street,” she said. “In the back parking lot of Sandbrook Elementary. I couldn’t risk my parents seeing it around here. They thought I was with you.”

  “Hey,” Teo said, joining us.

  I jumped up. “Teo, I am so embarrassed.”

  “No, I should be. I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my fault you got drunk and wandered outside. I was just gone for a minute. I wanted to help bring you back in, but…”

  His voice trailed off, and Morgan filled in the rest. “I told him he’d done enough.”

  That seemed like something she’d say.

  Morgan stood up. “As much fun as the past fourteen hours have been, I’ve got to go. I have to make ten dozen cookies for the elementary school PTA parent helpers.”

  “That’s kind of a disappointing gift,” Teo said, grabbing an apple from the fridge. “What? They each get one cookie?” Why was he egging her on? Especially after what just happened. I needed my best friend to like my hopefully-someday-future boyfriend.

  “No,” Morgan said, her voice straining to stay calm. “They each get their own dozen.”

  “That makes no sense,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. My head hurt too much to try and sort out what he was saying.

  He leaned back against the fridge. “There has to be more than ten parent helpers. There are three elementary schools in town.”

  Morgan’s face turned ashen. “He’s right. Each grade has three classes, each class has one or two primary parent helpers. And multiply that by three. That’s about a hundred.” She turned to me. “Please tell me it’s just for the PTA heads or something.”

  I reached for my pocket. “Do any of you guys happen to have my phone?” Morgan handed it to me. I punched up my albums. I had taken a picture of the order. I always did that as an extra precaution. I breathed a sigh of relief. “It says ten, see?” I held the phone out to them.

  Morgan fell back into her chair. “No, it doesn’t, Charlie. That says a hundred and ten.”

  “No,” I said, turning the screen back to me. I did not make mistakes like that. But I had. The second 1 on the order was so close to the first that I just thought Ms. Tashy had traced over it to make sure it was visible. How could I have done this? My mom was a doctor; I was used to messy writing. I had screwed up royally.

  Talk about sobering up quickly. Fear and adrenaline rushed through my body. “Are we going to be okay?” I asked Morgan.

  “No,” she said. “They have to be delivered Monday morning, and I have to have everything done by tonight. Tomorrow is out. The afternoon is the Hebrew School Hanukkah party, and I’m making the doughnuts, cupcakes, and cookies fresh in the morning. Plus, my parents are having our annual latke night that evening. They’ll need the kitchen. I’m going to be booted.”

  “We can just work all night tonight,” I assured her.

  “Like my parents will let that happen. If I’m in there too late, they’ll make me stop.”

  “How long will it take to get everything done?”

  She started throwing out some numbers. “Twelve cookies to a tray, two shelves, a ten-minute cook time. If we get one tray in immediately after we take one out, and decorate the gingerbread men and box everything up while two batches are baking, we’re still looking at more than nine hours—and that’s not including the initial prep or getting all the ingredients, extra ribbon, and boxes. We’re dead.”

  “Can’t you just cut down on the number of cookies in each box?” Teo asked.

  “No,” she answered. “We told them it would be a dozen. Six chocolate chip, five peanut butter blossoms, and one gingerbread man.”

  “Cut the price in half; I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Teo said. “It’s better than not giving them anything.”

  “That will make us look horrible.” I understood that not delivering was even worse, but I didn’t want to do a mediocre job. And we couldn’t afford to mess this up. We already were pretty much foregoing any profit. We cut the PTA a really awesome deal because we thought it would be a way in the door. No wonder they ordered so many. We weren’t that much more than a box of Chips Ahoy! but homemade, and in a much prettier package.

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” I said.

  “You have a hangover, and you can barely bake on a good day.”

  Ouch. But it was true.

  “I’m sure Ira will help,” I told her.

  “I will, too,” J.D. said. “And we can use the oven here. It will cut the time in half.”

  A little bit of color returned to her cheeks. “Maybe this can work.”

  “It has to,” I said.

  “I’d help you guys if I could,” Teo added, “but I’m due at the hospital in a half hour. And then I have to meet Reggie. I promised him the other day. And finish my history paper.”

  I couldn’t be mad at him for volunteering. Or, truth be told, even for meeting his friend or doing his paper. He had plans; he shouldn’t have had to cancel them because of something I did. Besides, this was my mess to clean up, not his.<
br />
  “You can get this done,” he said, moving toward me and squeezing my shoulder. “I have faith in you. I’m sorry, but I do have to get out of here. I don’t want to be late.”

  I loved that he was a planner, super motivated, scheduled, and constantly busy, but as I watched him walk off, a small part of me kind of wished he wasn’t.

  Thirty

  I always thought I was the organized one, but Morgan had the cookie-making assembly line down to an exact science. While Ira was out picking up the extra supplies, under Morgan’s strict tutelage, we started making dough with the ingredients we already had in her kitchen. Once we had that finished, Morgan sent J.D. and me to his house to use his oven, and instructed one of us to return when we needed more dough, that she would have it ready. J.D. and I were in charge of the peanut butter blossoms, basically peanut butter cookies with a Hershey’s kiss in the center. Once we hit 110 dozen, then we would help with the chocolate chip cookies and the packaging. Morgan didn’t trust me to decorate the gingerbread men. Not that I blamed her. (The gingerbread house my mother and I decorated looked more like a house of horrors.)

  J.D. pulled out trays nine and ten, and I handed him eleven and twelve. We quickly put the chocolate kiss in the middle of each cookie and moved them onto a plate to cool so we could start loading the next batches.

  “I think we can probably fit more than twelve on each tray,” I said as we rolled the dough into little balls.

  “I’m not messing with Morgan’s system,” he said. “She seems to know what she’s doing.”

  “True.” I didn’t know what to say after that. We had only made small talk since we started baking, skirting the real issue—what he had done for me. Yet for some reason it felt odd bringing it up. I just felt awkward around him. He had seen, heard, smelled, way too much. We went back to silence.

  After a couple more batches, J.D. held up a little round ball of dough. “This is your brain,” he said, putting on an extra-deep voice. Then he squashed it. “This is your brain on alcohol.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s an old PSA that I saw online, only they used an egg, and I think it was drugs not alcohol.”

  “My head does kind of feel like that,” I agreed.

  “Okay.” He dropped the dough back into the bowl. “That was supposed to lighten the mood. I’m used to angry Charlie, thinks-she’s-always-right Charlie, funny Charlie, Christmas-loving Charlie, and any of those Charlies I have an idea how to talk to. Timid-silent Charlie? I don’t know this girl.”

  “It’s just—” I stopped and went to go check on the latest batch of cookies.

  “What?”

  I was still facing the stove. “I was a mess last night. I danced around, I threw myself in the snow, refused to go inside, got sick, and your shoes…” I cringed just thinking about it again.

  “You missed them, if it’s any consolation,” he said.

  It wasn’t.

  The night played back in my head, everything J.D. had done for me. I turned back to face him. “Why did you do all that for me?”

  His face got serious. “You needed help. I didn’t want to see you get hurt. You’re my friend.”

  I felt my eyes tear up. “But I haven’t exactly been the greatest to you.”

  “I think we’ve come a long way, and besides,” he said, leaning into me conspiratorially, “here’s a secret. I never really hated you. Sure, you annoyed me. A lot. But Morgan was always going on and on about how great you were, so I figured there had to be something there.”

  We locked eyes. I didn’t know how to respond to that. He had really been there for me. “Thank you for everything,” I said. He deserved a lot more than that; I just didn’t have the words.

  He nodded. We stayed there holding each other’s gaze a moment longer. He finally broke it. “Um, I should go get some more dough from Morgan,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  When he returned, the mood had lightened.

  “Now, you know,” he said, “I can probably come up with some great superhero names for you after last night.”

  I covered my face with my arm. “Please no,” I said, but that just nudged him forward.

  “The Eggnog Avenger,” he declared. “She’ll spew holiday spirit at the first sign of trouble.”

  I groaned. “That’s really bad.”

  “How about this one then? The Holiday Hell-raiser—she’ll raise a lot more than trouble.”

  “Stick to the photography,” I told him.

  “You think it’s so easy, you try it.”

  “My brain is still so scrambled, I can’t think straight right now,” I said.

  His face got serious. “Do you want to lie down? I can finish this on my own.”

  My head was throbbing, the backs of my eyes were burning, and I wanted to go back to sleep so bad, but there was no way I was not finishing these cookies.

  “I got this,” I said.

  “You sure?” he asked. “Because it’s really okay if you want to go to bed. I can do it.”

  I shook my head. “No, this is a job for the Buzzed Baker—she can party all night and raise the dough in the morning.”

  “And you thought mine were bad?” he asked, and we both started laughing.

  For someone who prided herself on her attention to detail, I had really been off my game recently. First the PTA order, and now J.D.

  I had been so wrong about him. He truly was an incredible guy.

  Thirty-One

  When we finally finished the cookies, I went home and slept and slept and slept. Sunday morning, I felt so much better. I helped Morgan and Ira deliver and set everything up for the Hebrew School Hanukkah party, and then I rushed back to my house. I had work to do. I had already gotten Morgan a gift, but after yesterday, she deserved more. And I definitely needed something for J.D., too. I finished with their presents right in time to head to Morgan’s.

  “Hey,” she said, opening the door for me. She was all smiles. I could understand why. Her house was filled with energy and delicious smells. Her dad and uncle were in the kitchen frying up some latkes with several hungry takers waiting for the latest batch. Ira and one of Morgan’s cousins were playing a car-racing video game, with her brother backseat driving from behind the couch. And her mom and the rest of the family (grandparents, more uncles, aunts, and cousins) were all laughing, eating, and telling stories. I always loved coming here when her whole—as her grandma called it—mishpachah was there. It was the Yiddish word for family. It was like you could almost feel the love. My mom and I had the love part, too, but we were missing the large crowd. I wasn’t complaining; I wouldn’t trade what I had with my mom for anything, but there was something really nice about seeing a whole big family together.

  After I had more than my fair share of potato pancakes (I was so glad my stomach was better) with huge dollops of applesauce and sour cream, her family lit the Hanukkah menorah and sang songs. I knew a bunch of them and jumped right in. And this time, I wasn’t the only one with a non-Aca-mazing voice. Then it was present time. Morgan’s parents even got me something—a beautiful gold necklace with my birthstone, and Morgan had gotten me the matching earrings. She had similar ones that I was always complimenting.

  I pulled her aside to give her my gift. “You are such an amazing friend,” I said. “Thank you for yesterday, thank you for everything.” I handed her the first gift. I had put it together more than a month ago. She ripped off the paper. “A recipe book!” Then her eyes widened, she flipped through the pages, and tears started rolling down her cheeks. “Charlie, you didn’t!” It wasn’t just any recipe book; it was her recipes. I had used one of those online photo services and created a hardcover book. I typed in all of her recipes and accompanied them with pictures of her food that I stole from her GroupIt page. J.D. had taken a bunch of the photos for her, and they looked pretty professional.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “You’ll make me cry.”

  “It’s just that
this is the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given me.”

  “You deserve it,” I said. I more than meant it. “And there’s this,” I said, smiling. “You earned this, too, especially with everything lately.”

  She opened the envelope I gave her and started laughing. It was a lifetime get-out-of-lateness-free pass.

  “Now don’t take advantage of it,” I told her.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, and pulled me into a big hug. And I knew she wouldn’t. Because I really did have the best friend in the whole world.

  * * *

  My gift giving was far from over. I decided to give Teo his fourth Secret Santa present Monday at school, but my faith in the plan was starting to waver. Maybe I had been imagining all the moments between Teo and me. He never even called or texted to see if I met the cookie deadline or how I was feeling. How hard would a hope you’re doing okay text have been?

  I went straight to my locker when I got to school. As I was storing my books and Teo’s gift, I felt something lightly touch my shoulder, and I quickly turned around.

  It was Teo.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I answered, unsure of what else to say.

  “I was waiting for you to get here,” he said.

  “You were?”

  He kicked a scuff mark on the ground. The always cool, confident Teo looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, I wanted to apologize again. I’m really sorry. I’m really embarrassed. The whole night was my fault.”

  He was embarrassed? I was the one who made a fool of herself. “No it wasn’t.”

  “Yeah it was. If you don’t believe me, ask my cousin.”

  I smiled at him. “He’ll forgive you.”

  “I know. But I’m more worried whether you will.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a little box. “Maybe this will help make up for everything?” He handed it to me. “Open it.”

  I ripped off the wrapping paper and took off the top. There were a bunch of bangles inside.

  “Five golden rings,” he said. “I liked watching you out there singing. You were brave. I like that. This is a little reminder of that night.”