Seven
HOLY SHIT,” TOM SAYS IN DELIBERATE SYLLABLES.
The cake is exceptional. The cream-white frosting looks stone smooth, nearly reflective, with no hint of knife swirls or disproportionate distribution. It’s flawless. Up one side, white roses splay out their petals in dewy displays. Gold designs in burnished foil entwine with them, imitating the intricate interplay of climbing stems.
It is the perfect cake.
Deonte puts on no false modesty. He grins widely, his round shoulders swelling, his posture straightening up two inches taller, which puts the edge of his close-cropped hair nearly level with the top of the van doors.
“I thought we were driving a bomb,” Tom elaborates. “But this is the bomb!”
Nobody laughs. Not one of us utters the slightest expression of mirth.
“I’ll workshop it,” Tom promises contritely.
“It’s incredible,” I tell Deonte honestly. I knew his work would be. Deonte’s role in the heist started to form in my head when I found the baking TikTok he’d started. First, he’d displayed his own designs, sculpting with frosting the way others do with clay or canvas. He’d gotten online hype with some of those “is it cake?” videos, crafting—of course—lifelike pebbled “footballs” with spongy chocolate inside.
Then, though, he’d gone semi-viral with a video where he’d re-created the cake from Harry and Meghan’s wedding.
From there, incorporating him into The Plan was too easy.
For months, I didn’t know if I could get him. I’d planned other, harder solutions to the problems I knew Deonte would knock out easily, not knowing if I’d have leverage to work him into my crew.
Until the cruel fortunes of the internet delivered him to me. Several colleges had recruited Deonte for football, I knew, but he’d declined. Instead, hoping to leverage his minor online stardom, he’d set up a Kickstarter for the funds he needed to open his own bakery in Providence.
It hadn’t worked. He’d wound up significantly short of his goal. Tens of thousands of dollars.
I found the vlog he started in connection with the Kickstarter. I went through his videos, every single one. I learned why he wanted to open his bakery. I watched the time-lapse destruction of his dream on my narrow laptop screen. I felt the riddle of how I could recruit him resolve itself with neat clarity. Most important, I found what unified me with Deonte Jones. I don’t need him to want revenge the way I do.
I just need him to be desperate the way I am.
One week later, I met up with Deonte in the East Coventry school library. Inconspicuously, as if we were studying. If you could come into one million dollars without getting caught, I’d said, do you think you could open your bakery?
By the end of the meeting, I was the first-ever heist leader whose crew included a baker.
Well, probably the first.
With the masterpiece in front of us now, what I love in Deonte’s remarkable work isn’t the cake’s beauty. If beauty were what I wanted, I could be home watching The Great British Bake Off under my French art posters. I wouldn’t be here with The Plan in motion in my head.
No, the wonder of Deonte’s pièce (of cake) de résistance for me is its precision. This cake isn’t only the Gucci bag of cakes, the Rolls-Royce of cakes, the Rolex of cakes, though it is those things.
This cake is the exact replica of the one Maureen showed me in her phone’s camera roll.
She commissioned the cakes specially from the fanciest bakery in Providence. In hour three of the bridal shower, she spared me no detail. See the gold leaf? Swipe. It’s real gold. This cake costs what my dress does. Ha! Well, okay, not quite. Swipe. See the roses? Sixteen. Because we met on the sixteenth of January.
Maureen of course neglected to point out this was this January. They’ve been together for, like, nine months. Maureen had been one of the TAs in the NYU journalism class where my dad had guest lectured on the media market. He’d been hunting for prospective employees, technically, but really, he’d been hunting for prospective Maureens. It turns out it’s very easy for the iconoclastic number-one podcaster in the world to drop the name of the bar he plans to hit later that evening, then wait for eager grad students to show up.
On the patio with my orange juice in hand, I was delighted to indulge Maureen’s explanation of every detail of the cake—which I promptly reported to Deonte. I even got Maureen to send me photos of the prototype cakes on the pretense of showing them to my mom. I knew it would thrill Maureen. With patient effort, Deonte developed the creation before us, which will fit right in with the ten cakes that Maureen’s ordered for this four-hundred-person occasion.
While we watch, Deonte unboxes the three smaller cardboard containers belted into the back of the van. More marble-smooth frosting. More voluptuous roses. From the side of the van, he pulls the collapsible rolling cart I found on a restaurant-supply website, which he shakes into its intended form on the grass, then he carefully starts stacking the final cake layers.
Everyone watches with the hushed focus of those observing precarious skill, until, of course, it is Tom who speaks up. “Hold on,” he says. “What does this have to do with—”
He pauses. Sucks in his breath.
When Deonte fixes the fifth layer of his creation into place, Tom literally leans forward, looking awed. I get flashbacks of his overwhelmed Macbeth in Berkshire’s winter play.
“The phones are in the cake,” he utters with near-religious intensity.
Deonte says nothing. One by one, the other members of the group turn from watching Deonte, who does not pause in his delicate completion of the cake, to me.
Wow, honestly, nobody told me how fun this revealing-the-phases-of-The-Plan part would be.
Of course, I pretend I’m not cat-on-the-windowsill pleased with myself. I keep to my demeanor from the drive—cool, collected, in charge. “Like I said, everything passes the metal detectors. Everything,” I explain, “except the cakes. Too big. Too much gold.”
The impenetrable functionality of this occurred to me the more I considered Deonte’s skills, watching his TikTok, lying flat on my bed with one foot perched on my elevated knee, where I do some of my best thinking. Nobody—nobody—messes with the cake. Imagine some Millennium Security guard nicking one of those rose petals waving his detector wand near the frosting. I’m not sure who’d be hospitalized, Maureen or the guard.
“When I realized I knew one of the best bakers in the state, possibly the country”—I shoot Deonte the smile I’d hidden—“well, the plan for the phones was obvious. Now.” I turn to my crew. “Any questions?”
In the van, the group faces me. The tuxedoed, bearded security impersonator. The baker ready with his creation. The debonair young gentleman. The black-clad infiltrator with her laptop. Watching them, I get the funniest, greatest feeling. Like they’re not four individuals. Pawn. Rook. Knight. Queen.
They’re one crew.
“Very well,” I say. “It’s time.”