Rory #2
boxes of Do-si-dos, Samoas, and Thin Mints. And that was it—no canopy, no tablecloth. Not even a napkin decorated their booth.
Rory fought the urge to roll her eyes. She wanted to win, but come on. Shouldn’t the boys at least try?
“Hey! There’s my Lorelai,” Tucker said, sauntering over in his red Woodmont Soccer hoodie and gold athletic shorts.
Gilmore Girls had, in fact, inspired Rory’s name, but while Rory Gilmore’s name was short for Lorelai, Rory was just Rory.
It drove her nuts that she was named after such a popular TV character—she was always getting questions about it—and Tucker calling her Lorelai only twisted the screws tighter.
But he thought it was cute, so she tolerated it.
“Whaddaya think?” Tucker jutted his chin toward the soccer table as he slung his strong arm over her shoulders.
“What happened to the snickerdoodles?” she asked.
“Oh, we ate all the ones you made,” he said, lifting his arms over his head and letting out a yawn, before hugging her to
his side again. “And then we thought about making more but, pfffft. That looked like a lotta work.”
“But you can’t just sell packaged cookies,” Rory said. “That’s against the rules.”
“Is it?” Tucker said, tilting his head adorably.
Honestly, Rory didn’t even know if there were rules. But clearly there should be. This was a bake sale, not a sell-whatever-you’ve-got-in-your-house sale. She’d wasted so much time trying to teach these guys to bake! Time
she could have been at home helping her brother, Owen, with his history project or studying for her bio test or cleaning out
her closet . . .
“Where did you get all of them?” Gwen asked in awe.
“Oh, Jacob bought them off his little sister last spring to help her win the cookie badge, and they’ve just been sitting in
his basement. Those things never go stale, so.” Tucker paused to give them all a winning smile. “Score.”
Jacob Reilly, a fellow junior and one of Tucker’s best friends on the team, had long been known as the class clown of Rory’s year.
It had all started in kindergarten, when he’d smuggled a live frog into the classroom in his lunch box and let it out just when everyone was settling in for snack time.
The chaos had spiraled so out of control that Mrs. Pickett pulled the fire alarm just to get everyone in order, which forced an evacuation of the entire school.
Since then, there had been bubble bath in the town center fountain on Easter, a strategically placed whoopee cushion when the county sheriff came to school to warn them off drugs, and a Christmas parade where Jacob had figured out how to replace the festive music with a particularly screamy Slipknot album.
Rory knew that Jacob was just being Jacob, but somehow, his pranks always seemed to mess with her personally. The day of the
frog incident, she’d spilled chocolate pudding onto her favorite white sweater. She’d been the junior chair of the town Easter
egg hunt the year of the bubble bath explosion, and she’d spent hours painstakingly curating the playlist for the Christmas
parade the season of Slipknot. The whoopee cushion, well . . . that had just been embarrassing. For everybody.
She guessed he couldn’t mess up a bake sale, at least. But as soon as that thought occurred to her, she glanced over to see Jacob whipping off his sweatpants and hoodie to expose—Rory couldn’t quite believe it—a Girl Scout uniform made for a six-foot-tall, broad-chested, very calf-muscly male—and popped a little green beanie onto his head.
Somehow with his reddish-brown hair and bright green eyes, the whole look actually . . . kind of worked.
Of course.
“Okay, is it just me, or is Jacob even hotter dressed as a Girl Scout?” Layla whispered.
Rory refused to answer as he climbed up onto the soccer team’s table—not safe—cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted:
“Girl Scout cookies! Four dollars a box! Get ’em out of season and at a discount!”
Customers swarmed the boys’ table. Rory watched the couple who was about to buy her incredible homemade muffins exchange a
thoughtful glance and then slowly but surely slink away. Within minutes, people were whipping out wads of cash and piling
boxes of cookies into their arms. Some of them even took selfies with Jacob, who was, of course, more than happy to mug for
the cameras.
Stuart and Carlos, the two senior guys on the cheer squad, stood across from Jacob, giant arms folded across their broad chests.
“Dude! You can’t do that!” Stuart shouted, his voice loud and strong like any good cheerleader’s.
Jacob looked around at his teammates rushing to pocket the cash the excited customers were shoving at them. “It definitely
looks like I can.”
“Ugh! I hate him,” Rory said, slipping out from under Tucker’s arm to get back behind her table. “Squad! Go round up some more customers!” she ordered, making her friends scatter.
“All’s fair in love and bake sales!” Tucker called, walking backward toward the cookie mayhem and high-fiving his teammates.
Jacob winked at Rory from atop the table.
This time, when Rory inhaled, all she could smell was her hopes of winning going up in smoke.