maybe? My thoughts are confirmed when she opens the box and pulls out four little bottles with white caps. Red, yellow, green, and blue.
“Can you grab a stick of butter and the milk from the fridge?” she asks.
Her hands tear at the bag of powdered sugar and she opens the drawer in front of her. She pulls out measuring cups and I find it funny that I live here and didn’t even know half of this stuff was in here.
“Yes, ma’am,” I tell her, and she turns around, her lips forming a devilish smile . . . and I’m too innocent for her to be looking at me like this.
Chapter Twenty-seven
TURNS OUT I’M AN AWFUL baker. Awful as in I can’t even decorate a plain sheet cake without making a mess.
“Just one or two drops this time,” Nora reminds me, as if I didn’t learn my lesson thirty seconds ago when she shrieked and shouted at me for dumping half the bottle of food coloring into the first bowl of icing.
How was I supposed to know that this little bottle held enough power to turn Ellen’s mouth red for a week?
“We need more sugar,” Nora says, and I grab the bag from the counter next to me.
The powdered sugar moves to one side and I realize that she cut the end open. I try to grab it before it spills out, and fail. The sugar dumps out of one end and onto the counter and the floor. A cloud of white dust puffs up in my face and Nora waves her hand around as the sugar cloud covers her.
“Oh my God!” she shrieks, humor evident in her voice.
I sit the plastic bag on the counter and look at the mess I made. As if it’s mocking me, the bag falls to the floor and the last bit of sugar puffs out. My sweatshirt is so covered in white that the seahawk printed on the front is barely visible. When Nora smiles, her eyes crinkle at the corners and I sort of like it.
“Sorry! I didn’t know it was open.” I wipe my hand across the counter, and while I like the way the soft sugar feels against my skin, I should never, ever, try to bake anything again. Noted.
Nora’s black tank top is covered in blotches of powdered sugar. Along with her arms, her hands, her cheeks, and her dark hair.
“It’s okay.” Her smile is contagious and I’m not even embarrassed at the mess I made. It feels weird that she’s not mad about it, and I don’t know why. She’s just smiling, looking from the mess to me, and shaking her head with her lips pressed into a smile.
Nora moves the mixing bowl out of the way and grabs a roll of paper towels. She turns the water on in the sink and uses her hands to push as much powder into the basin as possible.
“During my first semester at culinary school, I forgot to put the guard on a forty-quart mixer. A ten-pound bag of confectioners’ sugar went everywhere. Needless to say, I had to stay an extra three hours to clean and redo my assignment, and my teacher was such a prick he wouldn’t let anyone help me.” Her hands are moving quickly to clean the mess I made and I should probably be helping her.
“Did you pass the class? I mean, after you redid the entire thing?” I ask her.
“Nope. Like I said, my instructor was a real prick.”
I look at her and she lifts her sugary hand to scratch her face. She wipes at her cheek, smearing white on her tanned skin.
I grab a paper towel and start to help her. “That’s why I want to be a teacher.”
She tosses the empty sugar bag into the trash. “To be a prick?”
I laugh and shake my head. “No. To be the opposite. I had this teacher in tenth grade, Mr. Haponek, who went above and beyond his job. He was everything a teacher was supposed to be, but the older I got, the less my teachers cared about their jobs, and when I looked around my school, I saw so many kids who needed that one good teacher. It makes a difference, you know?”
“What was your high school like?” Nora asks.
Terrible.
A shithole.
“It was okay,” I say.