You Should See Me in a Crown(21)
She flips her hair, and her face resets to something more prom-queenly.
“Babe, come over here real quick!” Derek calls for her, and she straightens her apron before turning on her heel to walk to him.
I’m reeling after she leaves, but I do my best to settle my face into something like indifference. Because I know how to do that. I know how to make it look like I don’t care.
I manage to slide my baking dish into my oven, despite the fact that my hands are shaking a little bit.
“Don’t worry, Rachel’s bark is worse than her bite.” I look to my left, and Quinn smiles at me. It’s bright and expensive-white, like her dentist father has personally cleaned her teeth every day of her life. She looks aloof, like none of this could possibly bother her. And maybe she is as oblivious as she seems to be. As oblivious as I imagine you’d have to be to be friends with Rachel Collins. “And you shouldn’t frown like that. It’ll give you lines.”
She’s wrong: Rachel’s bark and her bite suck in equal measure, but I nod once like I agree.
“Your skin is so supple. I’m jealous—you won’t even need Botox when you turn thirty, or anything.” She’s still trying to talk to me, but I’m distracted by a commotion behind her. Rachel is standing there, whispering fiercely to Derek and rubbing placating patterns into his back.
Lucas White, the cocaptain of the tennis team, is off to my right, and Derek is two ovens to my left. They keep mumbling insults to each other under their breath. “You wouldn’t last a day on the court” is being met with “You couldn’t make it five minutes without passing out on our court” over my head, and I can imagine a million better things I could be doing right now that don’t involve being stuck on SportsCenter Jr.
But from the second row of ovens, I have a direct line of vision to Mack, who is currently mixing up some cheesecake batter right in front of me. And that’s my saving grace. Every once in a while, when Derek and Lucas say something particularly ridiculous, she’ll turn around to shoot me a knowing smile, like we’re sharing a joke no one else in the room is in on.
It’s weird. We’ve only ever really hung out in the confines of the band room, but I like having her around. She’s late to every single class, which is annoying, but she always shows up with a smile and an apology. She’s also an incredible drummer. She learned my arrangement in less than a week and—no shade to Kevin—is the best percussionist our band has ever seen. It’s something magical.
Robbie and G always say that I have a serious problem with falling hard for talent almost as hard as I fall for people (see: my intense, lifelong crush on Kittredge’s colead singer, Teela Conrad), but that’s not what this is. Definitely not. Not at all.
“Hey, can you taste-test this for me?” Mack comes over, plastic spoon full of cheesecake batter in hand. She wiggles her eyebrows. Little does she know this offer is already light-years ahead of the last time someone tried to trade samples of our work (and, like, our DNA). I don’t need convincing. “Please? I solemnly swear that I’m up to only good things and am not asking you because I think I may have dropped a piece of an eggshell in here and need someone to help me spot it before I offer this dish up to the masses.”
“Wow, you sure know how to make a girl feel confident in your baking abilities.” I lean in to take a bite and try not to think about the fact that I might seriously be blushing because I am practically being fed by this girl right now. Like full-on, one hand under my chin and the other spooning what is actually a ridiculously tasty bite of cheesecake batter into my mouth.
It’s shockingly easy to let myself give in to the moment.
“You like it?”
“I more than like it. I’m fully expecting a VIP cheesecake just for me by the time this is over.”
She beams. “That can be arranged.”
Madame Simoné claps her hands twice at the front of the room to get our attention, and I’m more than a little bummed when Mack turns back around to face her. She announces before she steps out of the room that one of the reporters from the Campbell Caller needs to ask her a few questions for their annual prom cover story.
The door has barely shut behind her when I hear, “No way, babe. I’m tired of him.”
My reflexes are pretty bad—I mean I’ve never played a sport or a video game in my life—but I duck out of the way just as a glob of cookie dough goes flying by my head. Lucas isn’t quick enough though. It hits him square in his temple and just, like, sticks there.
Seriously, it doesn’t even slide down his face. And if I wasn’t so alarmed by what was happening in front of me, I might have been impressed by the density and viscosity of the dough.
“That’s for last night!” Derek shouts over my head. “That’s the last time you and your guys try and take over the weight room while we’re conditioning.”
The basketball team and the tennis team have some sort of beef, according to Britt. I don’t get it, but something tells me this has everything to do with that.
“You sentient belly button crust!” Lucas reaches up and wipes the dough off his face slowly, sort of like he can’t believe what’s happened. “You’re dead.”
I have the good sense to take a step back and out of the way when he reaches for his own bowl, a mixture of what I think is supposed to eventually become chocolate cake.