Chapter 15
lilah
“This was a horrible idea,” Tino said for the twentieth time. Given that we’d only been in the dorm kitchen for fifteen minutes, it was getting a little irritating.
“Will you quit saying that?” I asked. I scooped up some batter, using a coffee mug as the ladle because I had no idea where the actual ladles were, and dumped it unceremoniously onto the pan. It sizzled loudly and Tino’s mouth twisted. I glared at him. “I don’t need your judgement.”
Really, if there was anyone who should be judged in this situation, it was him—half his face was covered in flour, both his apron and shirt underneath had batter smeared all over, and his hair was sticking up in every direction and looking remarkably burnt.
It should have been the worst look I’d ever seen on him but every time I glanced in his direction, it almost hurt to look away.
He only looked that ridiculous because he wanted us to make crepes.
I pointed out that we’d had waffles for breakfast yesterday and again today and crepes were too similar, to which he rolled his eyes, insisted they weren’t that similar, and even if they were he couldn’t control his cravings.
It was all said in a huff that made him sound about five years old and I’d given in immediately.
Then, of course, as soon as the batter was finished, he had second thoughts.
“We’re going to burn this place down,” he said, staring at the pan. I didn’t have a good grasp on the difference between pancakes and crepes other than that the latter was bigger so I picked up the pan and tilted it every which way to get the batter to spread and take up all the available space.
“You have no faith in me at all.” I eyed the crepe, not sure when I was supposed to flip it over.
Come to think of it, were you supposed to flip crepes with a spatula like you did with pancakes or were you supposed to just use the pan like those fancy chefs did? I wasn’t sure I was able to do either.
“How much do you know about making crepes?” I asked Tino, having a feeling I already knew the answer. He thought about it for much longer than I thought was necessary.
“Well, I watched baking shows, like, every day with my mom when I was growing up and they sometimes made crepes.”
I blinked at him in surprise, the words not computing in my brain. “You watched baking shows?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Because it is surprising! Because…” I had a list of reasons, starting with the fact that he was him and ending with the fact that I thought his childhood was filled only with him playing hockey in the backyard while his brothers sang inside, but I faltered before saying it.
It was only now as I was thinking it that I realized I’d never thought about what Tino was like before he arrived at Hartwell.
That he’d had a childhood filled with more than just hockey and being the black sheep of his family.
I opened my mouth to ask more about what else he did with his family as a kid, but my attention was stolen by the smoke. It was drifting up from the pan, looking much thicker than I thought it should.
“Tino,” I said slowly, because he had now established himself as the expert here, “is it supposed to look like that?”
Tino peered at the pan with a look on his face that told me all I needed to know. The crepe was definitely burnt on one side and I still didn’t know how to flip it. I grabbed his arm and yanked him so he was standing in front of the burner instead of me then started flitting around the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Tino asked, panic laced in his voice.
“We need to flip it!” I said. The dorm kitchen was tiny—two burners, one oven that never turned to the right temperature, and a couple drawers of cooking and baking supplies.
I opened the top drawer and started digging through it, past the cheap cutlery piles of unnecessary napkins, certain there must be a spatula in here somewhere.
“Why didn’t you grab it before we started?” Tino asked.
“Why didn’t you?” I snapped back. “I thought you were such an experienced baker.”
“I said I watched TV, not that I ran a restaurant!”
My hand finally connected with something wooden and I breathed a sigh of relief as I pulled on it and realized it was the handle of a long spatula.
I ran back over to Tino and shoved it into his hand.
He looked at it like he’d never seen a spatula before in his life, but after a moment, he took it and managed to flip the crepe over—revealing the almost-black other side of it.
“Oops,” I said. Tino squinted at it, looking slightly pained. I was sure this wasn’t what he’d meant when he said he wanted crepes. I bumped my shoulder into his and said, “Well, look on the bright side. The first one is always the worst, right? And now we can’t go anywhere but up.”
“Absolutely,” he said, bobbing his head. “This one is just our practice. In fact…” He grabbed a plate and tipped the pan over it, letting the half-burnt, half-mushy crepe fall onto it. “Let’s just get rid of the smoke and start again.”
I grabbed the first thing I could find—some baking magazine—and started waving it desperately over the pan.
Tino, on the other hand, leaned back against the counter, watching me with that infuriating half-smile that made it impossible to focus.
The one that always made me feel like he was keeping some private joke to himself.
“You could at least pretend to be helpful,” I told him.
“I’m moral support,” he said, handing over the coffee mug for me to scoop more batter out. “Vital role.”
“You’re useless,” I said as I poured some more batter on the pan, then tipped it around again to make it the size of a crepe.
“I’m very useful. I got us chocolate chips.”
“Like I said in the store,” I said with forced patience, “we don’t need chocolate chips for crepes. What we did need, however, was butter.”
“That was the store’s fault! They put it in the wrong aisle.”
“It was in the dairy aisle.”
“I haven’t memorized the grocery store layout, Lilah.”
“Oh I know. You got lost between two aisles that were right next to each other.”
“I told you I had to go the long way around so that lady didn’t hit me with her cart again!”
I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing and within moments, Tino was laughing alongside me.
I laughed so hard that I forgot what I was even laughing about, so hard that my abs hurt and I was leaning on Tino for support because I felt like I might fall over.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like this and I couldn’t believe that it was Tino of all people who was causing me to.
I guess Tino wasn’t the strongest support for me to be leaning on, though, because one moment I was standing and the next I was falling—still leaning on him but falling into the counter and then the bowl of batter was tipping and spilling everywhere.
I shrieked and managed to jump out of the way but Tino wasn’t so lucky.
The batter spilled, getting over his shirt even more than it had been before, and even worse, making the floor a slip-and-slide.
One moment he was standing and the next he was sliding and falling on his butt in the middle of the puddle.
We were both silent for a long moment as we stared at each other in shock.
And then I burst out laughing again.
I couldn’t help it. He looked so ridiculous sitting there, covered in batter and every ingredient we had, his hair and eyes wild.
I laughed even harder than before, so hard that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and every time that I stopped laughing, I saw his face again and the cycle would repeat.
I barely noticed him get up and didn’t register him saying, “Oh, that’s war!
” until the bag of flour was being tipped over me.
That sobered me up real quick. I wiped the powder out of my eyes and stared at Tino in shock. “You did not just—”
He was already laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “You look like a ghost!”
“Tino!”
“Like, a really angry ghost.”
I took a slow step toward him. “You have three seconds to run.”
“Oh come on, you wouldn’t—”
I lunged for the bag.
Flour exploded everywhere—the counter, the floor, both of us—like a blizzard.
It stuck to every surface of the room, which had already been covered by the batter and some failed cracked eggs.
I continued to chase Tino, wanting to get revenge for all the flour that I was going to have to wash out of my hair later, and we were coughing and laughing, slipping on the drenched tile, trying and failing to regain balance.
And then, the cherry on top of the cake, the smoke alarm went off.
The shrill, ear-splitting BEEP-BEEP-BEEP echoed through the kitchen as we blinked at each other then both turned our gazes to the second crepe. In all the disasters, we’d completely forgotten about it, left there to burn and send smoke up in the air.
“Fan the alarm!” Tino yelled over the beeping as he went to turn off the burner.
I spun around in a circle, looking for anything I could use to fan it but coming up short.
Everything in the room was covered in batter or flour or was hard to see in the smoke, and the constant beeping was not making it easy to think. “Lilah! Quickly!”
“What am I supposed to fan it with, my hands?” I snapped.
“Yes!”
I groaned, but stomped over to the smoke alarm and did what I could to wave my hands under it. The ceilings were high in here and I couldn’t even hope to reach it, so it was more like I was hopping in place, flailing my arms around like an idiot.
“I just want it on the record that I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” Tino dumped the crepe onto the plate with the other one then dropped the pan into the sink and turned on the cold water. I cringed as I watched the steam rise from it.
“Currently? I really might.”
He grinned through the chaos, hair dusted white, eyes bright with the kind of joy that came from absolute disaster. “You can’t hate me when I look this good.”