The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(44)

Gigi doesn’t inspire me.

She terrifies me.

For a long time, that was okay. It was what I wanted. Learning to be as terrifying as Gigi, as unstoppable, as determined—that was how you made it in life.

But I was wrong.

And I’m still not sure what to do with that.

But now, she’s being Gigi, terrifying me in this exact moment, as a matter of fact, as we’re sitting in the cafeteria after having a breakfast of cold reheated pancakes—trust me, yes, that’s possible—and wilted fruit salad, which, yes, is also possible.

“We’re hosting a meal for the townspeople of Tickled Pink,” Gigi announces.

“Mother, I don’t think anyone here wants to dine with us after what we did at the last community function,” my father says.

“And who would we hire to cater it?” My mother shudders as she flips her next tarot card. “That woman who runs the café? I didn’t know it was possible to damage coffee beans the way she does. Look. The Sun is upside down. If we hire that woman, everyone will hate us for the damage to their taste buds. Plus, she does not know how to cook anything vegan. Tavi needs to watch her figure, but she doesn’t need to starve. There’s a balance.”

“Shut up, Mother,” Carter mutters.

“Don’t disrespect your elders,” my father snaps at him.

I shoot a glance at Tavi, who’s playing with a green screen app on her phone while taking selfies of herself and Pebbles. She’s wearing her sunglasses inside again and pretending she doesn’t hear a thing.

“Anya and Ridhi cook better than we can.” I lift my Pink Gold fortieth-anniversary commemorative refillable coffee tumbler, which I bought with my coffee at Café Nirvana this morning when I signed up for their monthly coffee subscription with my quarterly oil changes, and which I felt honor bound to buy after having my ass—and the Pilot’s—saved by Teague and the tire guy who works in the other half of Café Nirvana’s building. “And this coffee is better than anything any of us have tried to make.”

The actual truth?

This coffee isn’t better than anything we make ourselves. It’s good today.

Either the coffee is as good as Ridhi and Anya want it to be depending on the customer, or Teague Miller isn’t the only thing that’s broken parts of me.

I’m tolerating the coffee here.

No, I’m appreciating the coffee here.

Also, why am I craving fried cheese curds at eight in the morning?

And lumberjack kisses?

It’s not the coffee. It’s me. I’m broken.

“You poor thing,” Mom says. “Estelle, Phoebe needs a week off at that detox spa in Arizona to get her taste back.”

“No one’s having a detox week.” Gigi lifts her nose and digs in her heels again. “We’re hosting a family dinner for the entire town, and it will be delicious.”

“How?” Mom demands. “Who’s catering?”

“We’d do all our own cooking,” I tell my mother.

Her lip curls and her eyes go wide in horror as she reaches for her next card. Is that a new deck? Another one? “Holy sweet Kate Spade. We’re murdering the entire town with food poisoning, aren’t we? Look. Look. This card rarely means literal death, but I think it’s making an exception today. Estelle. Is this your plan? Ride through the pearly gates of heaven once you’ve taken out Tickled Pink? You know that movie was fiction, don’t you? And even if it wasn’t, you can’t rewrite the ending. Or change the fact that Whitney Anastasia was dead the whole time. Oh my sweet Coco Chanel. We’re dead, aren’t we? We’re all dead.”

“Phoebe is correct.” Gigi gives me an approving nod. It’s similar to her disapproving nod but with less displeasure. To get a true approving nod, you have to do something more than easily anticipate the worst possible torture she could inflict on everyone around her. “We’ll be learning to cook so that we can serve our friends and neighbors and show them that we’re no better than they are.”

“I can cook,” Carter mutters.

Tickled Pink Floyd moans.

No, really. It startles us all when the wooooooooo reverberates through the ductwork, followed by mutterings of ungrateful louts and pompous teachers think they don’t need to pick up their own shit either. The noise and mumblings have happened at least twice a day since we moved in, and even though I’m sure it’s old pipes settling and overactive imaginations, it still makes us jump.

Damn ghosts.

Tavi turns her head briefly toward the noise, then wrinkles her nose as she looks back at Gigi. In addition to the sunglasses, she’s hiding out under a massive pink straw hat that she picked up at the Pink Box two days ago while she waited for a hair appointment at the Gold Palace. “Even a questionable small-town salon shampoo is better than cold-water rinses of shampoo, and dry shampoo will only get you so far,” she whispered to me when we ended up in the second-floor girls’ bathroom at the same time to brush our teeth before bed last night.

Gigi tried to replace the water heater herself with Dad’s help yesterday.

It didn’t go so well. And the local plumber is apparently working a big job somewhere outside Tickled Pink and can’t get to us for a while, but we were able to get water back.