Wicked Sweet Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrugs as if the end result of his talk doesn’t matter.
    “In Vancouver, right?” I force myself to keep my voice steady, keep eye contact.
    Mom lasts exactly three heartbeats before she drains her glass.
    Dad 3 goes on about how he’s going to do the electrical and the plumbing on some house for his brother. “He’s flipping it. You know what that is, don’t you?” His energy increases as he talks about his freedom. “You buy low, fix it up, and sell high.” He doesn’t realize how
ironic his words are, how he’s not impressing me, how anything worthwhile he’s done in the past two years is shit now, how when Chantal asks me about Dad 3, I’ll tell her the asshole left.
    I walk past the couch, up the six stairs that lead to our bedrooms.
    “Jillian,” he calls. “Jillian.”
    “Let her go,” my mom says. “I told you she wouldn’t understand.”
    I undress and pull my old T-shirt over my head, all thoughts of the past few hours gone. I climb into bed and squish my body against the wall. I know Mom will be camping out on the other half of my bed tonight.

Chantal
    Chocolate Chip Hope .
    T he world is full of words.
    “These wonders are quite good at mopping up tears,” Nigella says as she melts the chocolate for her chocolate chocolate chip cookies.
    I watched an hour of her videos before I decided to make them. I wrote out the list of ingredients and biked to the grocery store. The money came from my savings account—money my parents award me for great grades. I’ve been saving for a long time, waiting for a reason to spend it. My mother would choke on her coffee if she knew I was spending her reward money on fat and sugar. Muffins are the only thing I’ve ever baked with my mother, and only for school bake sales or to give away at Christmas. But I can do this on my own. I’m good at following directions.
    We don’t have a mixer—my mother says doing it by hand burns more calories—so I cream the butter with the brown sugar and white sugar the way my mother taught me, with a wooden spoon. I measure out flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt into a bowl. I add vanilla, then the melted chocolate into the butter mixture. An egg and the flour mixture landslide on top of the creamed butter and I stir with the wooden spoon. The surprise ingredient is two packages of chocolate chips. Thankfully, my mother is working. Probably until late.
    I drop the batter onto the cookie sheet and eighteen minutes later, I have my first batch of what Nigella calls “top-class comfort.”
     
     
    I hope the cookies will be the words I don’t know how to say to Jillian. This is what I think as I pedal my bike to her house the next day with a shoebox of Totally Chocolate Chip Cookies in my bike basket. One taste will make her cry with gratitude, Nigella assures.
    I’m hoping the pound of chocolate chips, a molten lake of chocolate, butter, and sugar will prove I’m a loyal friend and will say, I’m sorry I’m unchangeable and a lifelong nerd. Even if the guys are a mistake, my friendship with Jillian is more important. At about twenty chocolate chips per cookie, it cost me three A’s to make them, but Nigella says she doesn’t put a price on alleviating human suffering. I can’t, either.

Jillian
    Friday .
    I ’ve picked up the phone to call Chantal a dozen times. I know she’d have good advice, but I don’t want her to know. It’s happening. Again. My mother is sending away another guy.
    I imagine her telling her parents at the dinner table, after they’ve talked through their workday and asked Chantal about the last day of school. When Chantal says, “Jillian’s Dad Three took off,” her mother would say, “Poor Jillian. Not again.” I know her mom mostly likes me, but she also sees me as a charity case. When Chantal and I were the same size, she’d buy extra jeans and shirts and claim that she couldn’t take them back.
    We don’t have dinner conversations at our house. At our house eating happens