I fumed as I sat at my table, only halfway listening as the teacher—Mrs. Hornsby—instructed us in today’s assignment, which turned out to be making chocolate chip cookies. I was going to go get this changed, I vowed to myself. I was not going to allow myself to be railroaded into not one but two bad classes that I would have to put up with all year long!
Then I heard whispering coming from the front of the room and my name—Latimer—spoken in a distinctly unfriendly tone. Looking up, I saw three familiar faces and my heart sank down to my shoes.
Nancy Rattcliff and the two other girls who made up the “Weird Sisters” were sitting at the front of the class, looking back at me. Nancy had a malevolent gleam in her dark eyes.
Inwardly, I groaned. How could I have missed them before? It must have been because I was focused on the teacher while she was dressing me down for being tardy. But honestly, how bad could my luck get? First I had been put into the very last class I wanted and then it turned out to contain a girl who had for some reason decided I was her mortal enemy.
Now I had twice as many reasons to want to get out of Home Ec. I thought about raising my hand and asking to be excused so I could go straight back to the office and get the school secretary to change my schedule. But then I remembered I was already on the hook to clean the entire class’s mixing bowls and baking pans. And Mrs. Hornsby was definitely a hard-ass—there was no way she was going to let me go anywhere until I had completed my punishment.
With a sigh, I decided to keep my head down and hope I could just get through class without too much trouble. After all, I was seated at a table in the very back of the room and Nancy and her cohorts were at the very front. It shouldn’t be hard to avoid them and keep my nose clean until the end of class—right?
Wrong. Oh, so very, very wrong.
15
I had made chocolate chip cookies from scratch before—many times with my mom. In fact, one of the reasons I felt like I didn’t need Home Ec was the fact that she had helped me become a fairly decent cook—it was one of the things we did together—one of the things I missed about her so badly.
It had been several years now, since I had baked any cookies—doing it by myself reminded me of her too much and made me sad. But it should be like riding a bicycle, right? One of those things you never forget?
Wrong.
I measured the ingredients, whipped the butter and eggs and sugar and vanilla together, added the flour and the baking soda after carefully sifting them, and lastly, the chocolate chips. I won’t say I didn’t steal a few—after the day I’d been having, I needed a chocolate boost. I tasted the cookie dough too—strictly for quality control purposes, of course. It was just the way I remembered it being when I cooked with my mom—sweet and buttery and just a little bit salty which only added to the delicious flavor as a whole.
It was really good. Well, at least I hadn’t lost my touch. My mom would have been proud.
Just as I had my cookie dough all ready to go, one of Nancy’s Weird Sisters walked up to me. I didn’t know their names but I thought of them as Weird Sister One and Weird Sister Two.
This was WS One and she had long blonde hair and cat-green eyes which she cut at me as she walked right by my table.
Instinctively, I put a hand over the bowl of cookie dough and straightened up, ready for an attack. But WS One only muttered something under her breath and flipped her hair in my direction before sauntering back to Nancy and WS Two, who had curly brown hair and brown eyes to match.
I watched her go and saw the three of them giggling together, casting glances over their shoulders at me from time to time, making it clear I was the butt of their joke.
I straightened my shoulders and lifted my chin. Why should I care what they thought? After all, Nancy was the one who’d had to eat floor-food for lunch—not me. I refused to let her stupid giggling intimidate me.
Keeping my spine straight, I bent to my task of putting rounded tablespoons of cookie dough onto my baking sheet. I made certain they had enough room between them to spread when they baked and then chose an oven at random, making certain it was preheated to the right temperature, just like the recipe we were following specified.